Large-Field GPP Breakdown: World Wide Technology Championship

Well, well, well. We are back once again for some PGA DFS. This past week once again was a reminder to me of how bad I am at NFL DFS, so it feels real damn good to be playing a sport that I’m actually good at. Anyways, this will likely be a bit of a shorter article, since we don’t have anything to recap from last week at the very least and there’s obviously some other things going on in the country right about now that I’m paying attention to. However, I would obviously much rather be in Cabo, where the PGA Tour heads to for one of the final fall events of the year at the World Wide Technology Championship (or WWT Championship). Before I move on to the WWT preview, let me inform you that I have a ~$2,000 lead on fellow contributor Sky Hook in the contributor contest. So, if you need some positive in your life, get ready to vote on a costume he has to wear to a PGA Tour event next year, ladies and gentlemen!

WWT – Preview

As I mentioned, we’ll skip the recap this week and head straight over to Los Cabos, where we will see the second edition of the WWT Championship at the Tiger Woods-designed “El Cardonal Golf Course”. Prior to 2023, the WWT was traditionally held at the famous “El Camaleon” Golf Course in Mayakoba, but LIV took the famous golf course from us. This is why we can’t have nice things. In years past, the WWT has been one of my favorite tournaments, but mostly because I felt like the field has been strong. I think Mayakoba was a big draw for a lot of PGA Tour players, where we even had players like Viktor Hovland competing in this random fall event.

Unfortunately, since we are no longer at Mayakoba, we get a much weaker field this year that rivals last year’s inaugural event in Los Cabos. For those of you that hate birdie fests, you may want to take this week off. In 2023, Erik Van Rooyen won here with the finishing score of -27, beating Matt Kuchar and Camilo Villegas by two strokes. Golfers are going to score here. It’s going to be easy. It’s quite surprising that a new, Tiger Woods-designed golf course would play this easy, quite honestly.

Looking at the field, we’re getting a full field with a cut this week, a nice return after a limited field at the Zozo. The golfers in the field, however, are definitely not what we’re used to even in these fall events. If you had $10,400 Max Greyserman on your bingo card in 2024, well, I would advise you to take that money and make a bunch of “NO” bets on golfers that you don’t think will win this tournament. Given the lack of difficulty of the course and the lack of talent in the field, I will not be afraid to be a little bit more contrarian this week with my ownership rules. I expect to be targeting somewhere from 50-75% ownership in my lineups this week, hoping that the combination of the two causes some chaos and benefits my lineups. 

At an overall glance, it looks like ownership is really spread out this week, probably due to the perceived lack of strength at the top of the pricing structure. Current projections have no one above 20% ownership. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time we’ve projected something like that in a long time, if ever. One or two players will inevitably steam up to cross that 20% threshold, and it will be our job to try and predict who those players will be. These will be the most important decisions on the slate this week given the limited points of leverage that are out there. Let’s see if we can identify them. 

Expected Chalk, How to Play It