Ah, the finals. Normally, the playoffs excite most people in the major sports, but if you asked Discord judge THE Kyle? No one is excited for these playoffs. While Kyle huffs and puffs about having smaller events for the playoffs, we get to play DFS with a whopping 30 players in the field this week. This is going to be quite difficult, I’d imagine. But before we get there, we get to recap an exciting week at the BMW Championship, where we got to see Scottie Scheffler win ANOTHER tournament in 2025. No one tell Phil Mickelson how many times he’s won. Anyways, this article will likely be a little bit shorter than most given the amount of players in this tournament, but at least we are getting some decent prize pools on DK.
BMW Championship – Recap
It was an interesting week in DFS at the BMW, where we were faced with a decision on Scottie Scheffler in a pool of 50 players. Despite projected ownership in the mid 20s, Scheffler rose again to about 35-40% across the board, depending on which contests you were playing in. He is at the point where, no matter what the algorithm says (in classic), he’s likely to take on more ownership as people just feel safer picking him for what seems like a guaranteed T3 or better these days. However, I thought the week was quite interesting because of what lineups ended up winning the lotto as well as the Drive The Green. Let’s take a quick look at the lotto winner with some commentary:
- It featured a 10/8/8/7/7/7 lineup that left only $100 on the table and skipped the winner, Scottie Scheffler, in the $13K range. The top three in the lotto actually all skipped Scheffler, which will lead me to some thoughts later on for the upcoming Tour finals at East Lake.
- The lineup featured an ~81% cumulative ownership, below the range I mapped out in my article last week but within the range that I talked about in Discord afterwards as people were asking me questions. In a field as small as last week’s, I’m not sure how helpful a cumulative ownership range was in hindsight, but it’s just important to note either way.
- I would like to note that in the DTG, the winning lineup was 13 points better than the winner in the lotto and included Scottie Scheffler in it. However, it was duped three times. That lineup was obviously not played in the lottery, meaning that it would have been unique had any of those four players played it in the lotto. This is a very interesting debate as we go into this week knowing that the lotto is actually not the largest-field tournament out there.
What’s interesting is that even with only 50 players to choose from, you still did not need to have the optimal lineup to win the lottery. With 30 players this week, that becomes much harder to do and will be an interesting thought exercise going into it. Additionally, it’s important to note that the winning lineup last week had the following final placements — T4, T26, second, seventh, sixth, and third. So, basically five of the top seven and a decent kicker. I’d expect this week to be even better.
Tour Championship at East Lake – Preview
On to the Tour Championship, which will feature a different format this year versus years prior. If you have been following golf for over a year, you know that previous iterations of the Tour Championship would have different starting strokes for each player depending on the amount of FedEx points they had going into it. The player with the most points, for example, would start at -10 to give them an advantage in the tournament to win it all. They have done away with the starting-strokes format this year, making East Lake a straight-up 30-man tournament to win the FedEx Cup. You can argue this isn’t the best, but I appreciate that I don’t have to do the work this year to build a bunch of charts for you all to look at how to get an edge. “Koasting” has never felt so good. Here are the past results of the Tour Championship, removing starting strokes:
- 2024: Scottie Scheffler (-20) def. Collin Morikawa (-22) by four strokes
- 2023: Viktor Hovland (-19) def. Xander Schauffele (-19) by five strokes
- 2022: Rory McIlroy (-17) def. Sungjae Im, Scottie Scheffler by one stroke
- 2021: Patrick Cantlay (-11) def. Jon Rahm (-14) by one stroke
- 2020: Dustin Johnson (-11) def. Xander Schauffele (-13) by three strokes
As you can see, scoring can definitely be had at East Lake, as the golfers have simply gotten better over the years. With scores in the high teens posted over the past three years, I fully expect the winning score this year to be in that -15 to -20 range. Depending on how Scottie’s feeling, it might even be even lower. Based on the scores above, this should be quite an interesting week to see who wins. Thankfully, Scottie won’t be blessed with a four-plus stroke lead on everyone else.
Moving on to the DFS side, one of the main issues of the week will be avoiding duplicates. Sky mentioned in Discord that only about 28% of lineups were truly unique last year, obviously with a different format. With the even format this year, I am going back and forth on how that will impact the unique rate. The starting-stroke format made some players extremely low owned because they were starting with such a huge gap — I expect that this year, more $6K players will be viable but will come up in ownership and even out the spread a bit. This could make it harder to get unique lineups, as you won’t be able to jam a low-owned player at 5-7% and feel good about uniqueness throughout your MME set. It could also mean that spread-out ownership allows for more unique combinations. I’m not really sure how to interpret it, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Either way, as it stands right now, I’ll be using a 115-135% cumulative ownership range given that about 60 of the top 100 optimals are coming in at 140+% projected ownership. However, I will be doing a lot of tweaking this week when it comes to my lineups post-optimization.
With only 30 players competing here, we of course will inherently get fewer options to choose from in each price range. The price range with the biggest reduction week over week? That would be the $6K range, which is going from 16 players last week down to 10 here. The $8K range comes in right there as well, with only FOUR players to choose from in the range versus 10 last week. I’m actually quite bummed that the $7K range barely took a hit, as I would have loved to see Scheffler people get squeezed a bit with the number of combinations available to them. Alas, let’s hope that means people will still feel comfortable playing Scheffler despite the lower amount of possible combinations week over week.
Expected Chalk, How to Play It
This week is really all about the DFS side of things, where we have to judge our lineups from a pure EV lens. Are there lineups that we are okay taking on a dupe or two for the win equity? Or are you going to approach your set in a way that prioritizes uniques if things happen to break your way? Knowing me, I’m going for the latter. And this first entry in this section will be a big way to help that along.
Scottie Scheffler, DK Price: $13,900
ETR Initial Ownership: 37.2%, I think this comes up but not sure given his price
There was much debate at the BMW on Scottie’s projected ownership, and this time the Cody faders won. Scottie moved up into the 35% range on a high-20s projection, which may not seem like a lot, but it is to me. This week, Scottie is already coming in at 37.2% given the reduced player pool and also his general greatness. What I’m worried about the most this week about Scottie is not how he could perform (obviously), but more about the players that you absolutely have to play if you do play him. Scottie shows up in all of ETR’s top 100 lineups at this time, with only a sprinkle of $8K players involved in these lineups. The $7Ks and $6K ranges, as expected, take on a lot of ownership here. While we do see some higher-priced players sprinkled in, it’s really just a combination of various low $8K, $7K, and $6K players with Scottie. On a week where I am going to prioritize uniqueness, I can’t do this.
Jeremyqking1’s take: FULL FADE, NO QUESTIONS ASKED
There was once a time I said I would never FFNQA on Scottie Scheffler. This week is the one unique week where I believe this to be the right strategy. Think about it this way — last week with 50 players, Scottie did not make the winning lineup in the lotto despite a lot of $9K+ players failing (Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay). This week, my guess is you’re going to need ALL SIX of your players in the top 10 to win the lottery. Do you think you can make a lineup with five players all from the $6K and $7K range to do that? I don’t think so. And even if you do, Scottie makes it so combinations with him are limited and likely duped. Why would I want to enter that realm? A tough full fade, but a reasonable one.
Tommy Fleetwood, DK Price: $9,900
ETR Initial Ownership: 26.1%, should be stable here
We’ve talked so much about Tommy Fleetwood’s struggles to win a PGA Tour event over the years that it’s starting to make me sick. It actually reminds me of last year and beyond when everyone would say that Xander Schauffele simply didn’t have that IT factor. We’ve obviously found out that wasn’t true. Tommy has been one of the best pure players in the game, specifically with his ball striking. He has the upside to win despite what the public (and even myself) thinks about him. Do I think he’s going to come down in ownership? No, not at all. But, he definitely will be low owned in Scottie lineups and especially low owned in lineups that have three $9K players as well. Because of my stance on Scheffler this week, this should seem like an easy one to you all.
Jeremyqking1’s take: OVERweight, not embarrassed if this comes up to 45% in my exposures.
Because of the inevitable Scottie impact, Fleetwood’s ownership may come down or, at the very least, his peers around him will. In these cases, we can pair Tommy with another $9K+ player who should see his ownership muted if you were transferring in the game. Either way, I have the feeling that someone up top is going to see the squeeze. Knowing this, it’s time to start making partnerships and really going for that first-place prize.
Flag Plant, Other Contrarian Ideas
Another week, another decent flag plant for me, where Ludvig Aberg came in the top 10. But unfortunately, he missed the podium after a pretty terrible Sunday (seen this before). This week, there aren’t many players to choose from, as ownership is so spread out that even Novak is getting 10%. This leaves me with limited choices, but my thinking behind this was I wanted to be overweight all the players who will likely NOT be featured in Scottie lineups. That leaves the $8K and $9K guys, and if I flag-planted another $9K+ player, the Discord might chop my head off and feed it to the raccoons that Grex weirdly loves. So, here we go again with this one:
Patrick Cantlay, DK Price $8,700
ETR Initial Ownership: 18.9%, should be stuck in this range
Yes, yes, I know I just flag-planted the tortoise a couple of weeks back. But I am here to cash unique checks and pretend I had the easiest path to winning $200K. Cantlay is just in that range where he becomes almost unplayable with Scheffler, so you could either get contrarian with Scottie by playing one player above this $8.7K range, or you can pack up and go home. This flag plant and everything I am doing will ride on the hope that DFS players will just want to be safe with their picks and pretend like Scheffler is a 100% lock to be in the winning lineup going into it. We’ve seen Cantlay perform well on this course that is supposedly made for ball strikers. Pairing Cantlay or even tripling Cantlay is absolutely impossible in Scottie lineups, meaning that we may end up competing in a much smaller, watered-down pool if your combination of high-priced players hits in a big way. Because this is the route I want to take, I likely will be overweight most of the players $8.5K and up besides Scheffler. Cantlay, for example, would likely be doubled up to 40% in my MME set with the hope that a Scottie FFNQA keeps my uniques high and my win probability still reasonable.
Other Contrarian Ideas
We have to talk about leaving money on the table. While Discord gossip king 2.0 AMIM seems to get a kick out of tagging random touts in Discord, he did have a good point just the other day. It’s not a new concept to leave money on the table, especially in a short field. But how many players will actually set their optimizers up correctly to do so? Because of limited options, you should be OPEN to leaving money on the table, and I would not necessarily put a limit on it. You should absolutely be checking your lineups that are leaving more than, let’s say, $5,000 on the table. But, I wouldn’t necessarily change them. Golf is a variable sport, and we’ve seen crazier things happen pretty much every week. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my lineups were in the $40-43K range.
Lastly, I want to talk about finishing points. This week, there’s a hard cap on how many finishing points is the minimum because every player is going to AT LEAST get the 26-30 bonus, which is fairly insignificant but still provides for a slightly lower floor. It also means, however, that the $6K players that Scheffler will be paired with also have a floor amount of points. You’d think that means Scheffler lineups are going to be extremely viable — I have no retorts there. But, we are playing DFS, a game that doesn’t consider the range of outcomes in the final because that’s exactly what one slate is. You are going to NEED six top-10, maybe top-eight players this week to win. While some of these $6K players are almost definitely going to come in the 26-30 range, some may have ceiling performances. How strongly do you feel about a couple of $6K players finishing in the top 10 while also not being duped? Not great!
My strategy this week will be to mix and match everyone BUT Scottie Scheffler in the hope that I find the optimal combination and win this whole thing with a unique. But, I do think there are +EV ways to play Scottie; they are just very hard to find. I’m hoping here that lineups like two $10K players or three $9K players that are literally impossible with Scheffler will come out victorious. I am likely to put a hard cap on the sub-$7K range for the same reasons I called out last week: I want multiple paths to beat Scheffler if I fade. Either my players beat him in direct competition, or he wins this whole thing but has no elite pairings because they are so limited down below. I’ll take my chances on the side with many paths to victory.
Alright, thats actually all I’ve got for this week. It will be nice to have a Saturday night off for once while not doing any writing or analysis. Best of luck to you all in classic, and hopefully I see you on Sunday in Discord for some sweats.
