Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Sony Open

Well, I guess you could say that last week at The Sentry was a bit of a warm-up for us. It certainly was for me, at least, where I flamed out pretty quickly given Xander Schauffele decided that he was still on vacation. No sweat, though. The Sony Open this week presents more of a “normal” challenge for us. We finally get a full-field cut event featuring 150ish players, which we absolutely love to see. I, for one, cannot wait to see what terrible players the Discord is debating about come Wednesday night. There’s just something about these full-field events that just hits different. That being said, it really has been great to see a lot of old subscribers come back to the golf Discord now that the NFL regular season has come to a close. We’re excited to have you all back — it’s going to be a great year!

The Sentry – Recap

As I said, I flamed out pretty quickly in last week’s Sentry contest. My take to be overweight Xander Schauffele and underweight Corey Conners was basically the exact wrong decision, as Xander did terribly at his price and Conners was in the top five pretty much all weekend. During the weekend, I contemplated the idea that maybe in this first event of the year, being under the mega-chalk might be a good thing given the many variables that we have in this tournament — it’s a ridiculous birdie fest, some of these players haven’t played in months, and a lot of them might treat this as a bit of a warm-up for the upcoming season. I believe it was Discord golf guy laxachusetts that surmised that players who don’t have an event coming up might take this one a bit less seriously. Maybe that is true!

Let’s take a look at the winning lineup from the lotto to see where roster construction landed:

• It featured a very unique 10/9/9 build that dropped down into the $6K range twice with Aaron Rai and Jhonattan Vegas! I spoke a little bit about roster construction and how 11/9/9 lineups would be quite interesting with Xander as a start. This user went with Morikawa up top and double-tapped the $9K range to gain leverage on the field.
• The lineup came in at ~80% cumulative ownership, right at the edge of the 80-100% range that I was targeting for the tournament. I did notice, as called out by Discord trading guru and pin god lsahr that lineups pre-tournament were more coming in the 70-90% range versus the 80-100%. I did make an adjustment to allow lineups that were coming in under 80% (I usually do this) to be able to be loaded into my MME set.

That’s enough about The Sentry. One thing I do want to note is that we continue to see different types of builds win these large-field lotto tournaments, where roster construction is used to be able to maximize a mix of leverage on the field with a different build AND projections. 

The Sony Open – Preview