Large-Field GPP Breakdown: The American Express

Three weeks in a row of a PGA TOUR event. We are blessed that no matter the weather in the colder parts of the country, we still get to see golf in the middle of January. After making a couple of stops in Hawaii for the Sentry TOC and the Sony Open, the PGA Tour moves to California for the west coast swing of the schedule. The past two weeks have been a great way to get back into the swing of things with PGA DFS, although they were not the most successful weeks for me. At the very least, I was able to register this past week, but my results tell me that I should have maybe skipped registering for the week altogether. At the very least, Discord is back to poppin’ off again, as we welcomed the return of some OG #golf Discord members. Maybe this time we won’t get snubbed by the dictator, Adam Levitan, for channel of the year. That’s above my pay grade, though. As always, we’ll recap the week prior before diving into the details of the coming week.

Sony Open – Recap

As I mentioned, the Sony Open was not too kind to me. I’m starting my season off by playing the $5 MME “Drive the Green” tournament given that NFL and NBA are both still going on as well. When we reach the throes of the summer months, I’ll likely make the transition back to the main flagship GPP (probably earlier). Bankroll management, folks — it’s important. Here’s a look at my results from the Sony.

As we all know, golf is a very uncertain game. And I feel like the beginning of the season adds a bit more uncertainty, as you aren’t sure how these players treated their offseason. You also don’t know how it will affect them. Chris Kirk spent the past two months golfing lefty, for god’s sake, and won the Sentry.

Anyway, my week was defined by trying to lean into uncertain spots like Will Zalatoris and getting punished for it. I play in such a way that if I don’t win, I’m usually not showing up very well on the scoreboard. With a sport as variable as PGA DFS, I am okay with that given the fragility of projections across the industry. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup from last week.

• It featured a fairly “balanced” build, with no players above $10K and no players below $7K in the lineup. The lineup was as follows: Henley/An/Davis/Keegan/Bhatia/Nick Taylor.
• The lineup had a cumulative ownership of 78.7%, within our normal cumulative ownership targets of 60-80%, as we often see with these normal, 125+ player cut events.
• I would like to point out that one of the players I mentioned in the “Other Contrarian Ideas’ section of my article, Cameron Davis, appeared in the winning lineup. As I often say, PGA DFS is one of the DFS sports that still gets heavily impacted by recent results. It makes sense when one of the metrics people look at is “recent form”. We can find ways to leverage the field here if there are players that are being overplayed or underplayed because of a couple of recent results. 

AMEX Open – Preview

We now move on to the AMEX Open, which is another long-standing event that has had multiple names in its history. As with a lot of these California courses, the AMEX Open is not really a tough course. The course was famously called a “piece of sh*t putting contest* by last year’s winner and now LIV golfer Jon Rahm, and we see the scores reflect his sentiment below: