Large-Field GPP Breakdown: St. Jude Championship

After a long weekend at the Wyndham that was inexplicably extended by Matt Kuchar, we’ve finally reached the PGA Tour “playoffs”, beginning with the FedEx St. Jude Championship. This week will also be the final week of a true “signature event”, where the best on the PGA Tour will start their journey to a hopeful $20M for winning the Tour Playoffs. While this format has always been quite controversial, we don’t have to deal with that this week, as we get 70 players in a no-cut event. To be quite honest, it didn’t seem like a pretty successful week at the Wyndham overall, except Discord legend jlewis won the $555 signature hole on DK. Congrats to any winners out there! 

Wyndham Classic – Recap

It was quite literally a whirlwind of an event at the Wyndham last week, where Tropical Storm Debby wreaked havoc on North Carolina and postponed the event by a full day. This meant that the PGA Tour played two full rounds on Sunday, with the final hole being played around 8:30 p.m. ET, which is pretty damn late. All logistics aside, it was quite a frustrating week for me, as overweight positions on seemingly every top-priced guy that missed the cut simply won’t make it happen. Shane Lowry in particular sent me to an early grave, missing the cut and not really contending at all. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup from the Sand Trap:

• It featured a fairly normal build, with Sungjae and Rai up top, followed by one player in the $8K range (Clanton) and a few in the $7Ks (Greyserman, Spaun, and Meissner). I would like to point out that this lineup was duplicated, so the top prize was split between two people for a take home of $150K. Here’s where the player predictors are going to say, “just upload the nuts, don’t worry about being unique,” and they’ll have this one-week sample to back themselves up on. While player takes will always be a part of DFS, I feel confident that playing Sungjae and Rai together, for example, did not make you unique enough to get paid off more often than they were played. Instead of Sungjae, you could have played Billy Horschel for 19 points more and $500 less. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but I am trying to illustrate the illusion of salary in Golf DFS and why gaining leverage on the field is really the name of the game. While it looks stupid to have employed a “max-1” rule of Sungjae and Rai or docked their pairings together, I will continue to do similar types of things knowing that in the long run, when I win, I’ll maximize that. 
• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of slightly over ~90%, once again exemplifying my thought that chalk seems to be improving as projection models seem to be getting better across the industry. That being said, it’s not like the overall pricing structure showed a descending points outcome, so it just so happened that the chalk hit this week versus a player like low-owned Shane Lowry, for example.

The one thing that I will say is that post-lock, I felt great about where my exposures came in. I mentioned in Discord that my highest-owned player was actually Lowry, and when the cards flipped at ~11-15% depending on your contest, that seemed like one of the best plays on the slate. We do a lot of prognostication pre-lock about which player is going to perform well at the projected ownerships that we have, but it’s important to remember that there WILL be movement on ownership, especially if you’re playing a mix of small- and large-field tournaments. The change in ownership on individual players absolutely changes if they are “good” or “bad” plays in the long run. This obviously depends on whatever model, etc., that you are using, but maybe one thing I will ask Sky or Cody to do as an exercise is running best lineups based on pre-loaded ownership versus the actual ownership in the large-field contest. That would be quite interesting!

St. Jude Championship – Preview