Large-Field GPP Breakdown: The Sentry

Happy New Year, golf subs! I hope you all are refreshed from about a month and a half of no PGA DFS, as we are about to embark on nine months of straight grind in the DFS golf streets. I must say that I am glad to see golf back, as this season’s NFL DFS season has not been kind to me. Here’s to hoping that I can make up for some football losses with the weekend-long golf sweat. As we always do, we start off the PGA calendar year with The Sentry, which features ALL of the winners of last year’s PGA Tour events. This year, they’ve added the top 50 in the FedEx Cup rankings from the 2023 season as well, giving us a 59-player field versus past years of ~38-39. Let’s dive into the history of The Sentry, from both a tournament and DFS perspective.

Sentry Tournament of Champions

As I just mentioned, the new wrinkle with The Sentry this year is that they’ve added the top 50 in the FedEx Cup rankings, which means we do have to look at historical results a little bit differently than past events. We have a 59-player field this year, but, historically in this event, we’ve seen 38 or 39 players in the field. The PGA made this change to include The Sentry as a “signature event” in 2024, with an elevated prize pool aimed to benefit the top players on tour with more money and guaranteed paychecks (no cut). The Sentry has been held at the famous Plantation Course at Kapalua, which Tom has outlined thorougly in his weekly Course Preview and Fits article. The thing to note about Kapalua is that it’s a really, really easy golf course. You’ll see that from the historical scores here:

• 2023 – Jon Rahm (-27) def. Collin Morikawa (-25) by two strokes

• 2022 – Cameron Smith (-34) def. Jon Rahm (-33), by one stroke

• 2021 – Harris English (-25) def. Joaquin Niemann (-25), playoff

Yeah, so as you can see, there will be scoring in this event, especially given that the best in the world will be playing here. Given the scoring, you probably know that there will be little challenge for these guys OTT or on APP, and a lot of the tournament will be known as a “putting contest”. As Adam has mentioned on past shows, putting contests don’t actually seem to benefit “good” putters historically, but the choice on how to play this tournament will obviously be entirely up to you. I’m going to be leaning heavily into the DFS side of things, taking into account ownership and rules heavily in my thinking as I approach the classic slate. I’ve traditionally done this in birdie fests and will continue to do so, especially given that we are going to literally see all of the best players outside of the LIV players and Rory McIlroy at this event.

For those of you that are joining the golf scene for the first time, I often try and map out some ownership constraints for you all as you approach large-field GPPs. Traditionally, in larger fields (120+) with a cut, we’ve successfully targeted the 60-80% cumulative ownership range to win GPPs. This ownership range gives you the right amount of projection and uniqueness to win the largest tournaments without having to worry too much about duplicates. However, this week will be a bit different given the smaller field of players, thus increasing the ownership ranges we will be targeting. Because this year at The Sentry is almost double the field of past Sentry tournaments, I didn’t think it was feasible to look at past Sentry DFS results to form my ownership ranges. Instead, I decided on choosing to look at The Masters as a tournament with a similar field size (~70-80) for some guidance. Out of the past five Masters DFS large-field GPPs, we’ve seen the winner have the following characteristics: