Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Travelers Championship

Hello, all! While we just finished our third major of the year, I have to say that I have been looking forward to this week for a while. And that’s not because I love the Travelers, but it’s because this is the week that Sky will finally do his punishment for losing to me in the Contributor Contest last year. I’ll be on site with Sky, Cody, and a slew of other Discord members come Sunday, and I’m quite excited to hang and hopefully live sweat either R4 or classic. Of course, more to come on the Travelers, but I’ll pause to congratulate all those that had success at the U.S. Open, where we saw a few screenshots on Twitter and in Discord with some Milly sweats as well. It always feels good to see subs have success.

U.S. Open – Recap

My U.S. Open ended up being mostly a wash with some slight losses, as I was able to min-cash two of my tickets in the $4,444 and be anywhere from -10% to -20% in various contests. I definitely am looking at the U.S. Open as a missed opportunity, as the week ended up being quite a good week to be very contrarian. Joaquin Niemann, Shane Lowry, and Sepp Straka were just three of the big-name players to miss the cut. And that’s not even mentioning 35+%-owned Bryson DeChambeau at $11K missing the cut as well. A week like at Oakmont further solidifies my general take on golf, where projections are extremely fragile, even if you have the best ones like we do. There is an edge if you are able to be unafraid and take chances. Let’s take a look at the winning lotto lineup to see if there’s anything we can learn from it:

• The lineup featured a 14/8/7/6/6/6 build, as Scottie Scheffler lineups were able to be unlocked by the immense strength of the $6K ceiling finishes we saw. This was a fairly common build structure for those that decided to start with Scheffler, so no real roster construction edge was realized in this lineup. 
• It finished with a ~74% cumulative ownership, right in the middle of the normal 60-80% target and a little bit higher than my original target of 50-70%.

I’ll add a final note to the U.S. Open before I wrap up this section: It was quite interesting that the carnage of the course brought a lot of variance to the leaderboard. The optimal was something in the $43K range, even though we typically think of these types of contests as ones that reward the most talented players in the world. Just something to note for next year’s U.S. Open, maybe.

Travelers Championship – Preview