Large-Field GPP Breakdown: U.S. Open

We have reached the third major of the year, the U.S. Open! While the prize pools and contests have been pretty damn good all year round, the majors always bring a bit of excitement to the table and a ton of great contests, including a couple of Milly Makers in both low-stakes ($15) and high-stakes ($3,333). I know that it is going to be a great week, and we already have a ton of “golf touts” talking/debating/going insane about how the course will play, how tough it is going to be, and trying to decipher who’s going to be popping in their fake models. Instead of picking players, I’m here to give you some advice on how to play the DFS side of things, which really is the only thing that we can control. Before I move to the U.S. Open festivities, I have to talk about the Memorial, which, unfortunately, was not as kind to me as previous trips to Jack’s Place have been. I blame the LIV Golf Tour. Anyways, congrats to all those that made the final of the FGWC in Detroit in three weeks for the Rocket Mortgage Classic, including Discord WiFi pirate jfreshpicks, Discord gossip king cantfademe, Discord raccoon enthusiast Grex123, and, of course, the infamous jeremyqking1 hater MazeorBowie. I will be rooting for all of you in a few weeks’ time!

Memorial – Recap

As I mentioned, Jack’s Place was not very nice to me and my lineups. I took a pretty hard stand against certain types of lineup starts, specifically the Scheffler/Morikawa pairing that ended up coming in first and second in the tournament. While I had exposure to both players, I almost never played them together, instead opting for more unique combinations like Scheffler/Aberg, Scheffler/Hovland, and others along those lines. I played Morikawa with multiple other $9K players, usually at least two  — if you look at the ownership of those types of stacks, you will see why. The Scheffler/Morikawa duo came in at ~5% ownership, which is a pretty decent amount for a pairing that takes up a bulk of your salary. For context, other pairings came in at half that ownership, usually hovering in the 2-3% range. My goal weekly is to create lineups that follow general roster construction rules and uniqueness that give me a chance at shooting up leaderboards quickly. I believe I did that; the results just didn’t happen to fall in my favor. Here are some characteristics of the winning lineup in the Summer Sand Trap:

• The lineup featured the dreaded Scheffler/Morikawa duo, and even had Sepp Straka in the lineup as well. It ended up being a 12/9/7/7/6/6 build. I can literally hear Discord mathematician harry_stamper raging in at his laptop screen. There was absolutely zero chance I would have played a lineup like this. I did see in the chat some talk about playing chalk and just getting unique construction elsewhere. Of course, this can be done — by utilizing cumulative ownership or product ownership rules, or boosting other low-owned players into lineups with chalky combinations. We can still make sure we’re creating +EV lineups by playing chalk together. I believe it was Discord bad guy and Canadian unclejeffe that said I would be upset if people did this. I would NOT be! I’m open to playing chalk together if I think it’s the right combination, such as playing a heavy stars-and-scrubs build with Scheffler and Morikawa a few weeks back, when they were the two highest-priced players on the slate.
• It featured a cumulative ownership of 91%, just outside the signature event range of 70-90% that I proposed in this article. Scottie Scheffler‘s ownership did come up a few points above where we had projected, so at time of running optimizers, the winning lineup definitely had the chance to pop in.

That’s enough of Muirfield Village for me. Let’s travel to Pinehurst No. 2, the site of this year’s U.S. Open.

U.S. Open – Preview