Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Wyndham Championship

I am not going to lie — it was tough to get the blood flowing to start writing this article for the Wyndham Championship. Right after a great finish at the Olympics with some of the best players in the world, moving to the last regular-season PGA Tour event with probably half the talent of the previous week is sometimes a bit of a downer. However, what really is getting to me is the impending hurricane that is about to hit the Carolinas, directly impacting the Wyndham Championship. I, for one, would be shocked if they played all four days of golf, and it’s very possible that we get a shortened three-day event instead of the full four. While that doesn’t really impact how we approach the tournament, there’s something about shortened events that lose their luster a bit. Either way, DK still has a great set of contests lined up for us to finish off the regular season, so you know I’ll be involved in them while I try and win some $4,444 tickets for the BMW.

Olympics – Recap

To start off, I’ll tip my cap to true Discord villain LegionCommander, who grabbed second in the Sand Trap to take home $100K. The lineup really speaks to how good the ETR projections were last week, with Legion playing a 1v1 off of the ETR optimal to take down a six-figure score. I’m really glad that the ETR Golf content continues to crush — we’ve had many winners this year in all sizes of contests, and even with NFL coming quickly, it’s really great to see a lot of loyal subs in Discord and on Twitter. For me, it was a less successful week as I tried to continue the momentum from the 3M Open. I did have some lineups in the top 100, but overall it was a pretty forgetful event. I am starting to lean into the theory that no-cut, small-field events might be chalkier than our normal events, simply because there are less variables (players) that can outperform the chalk and also four rounds for what should be data-driven projections to shine. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup:

• It actually did NOT feature the winning player, Scottie Scheffler, which is a pretty rare occurrence. However, given Scheffler’s price inflation, we are seeing that be more common these days when he is in the field. Instead, this lineup utilized a Rory-Fleetwood combo up top while generally jamming in low-priced chalk (Perez and Schmid) to survive and take first.
• The lineup only had one player below the $7K range, leaning away from some of these unknown players at the Olympics despite the no-cut environment. It was basically a normal build with Rory as an anchor, who came down in ownership as he typically has these days. Rory will continue to be a good play week after week if this trend keeps up. 
• It featured a 90% cumulative ownership, within my range of 80-100% that I outlined in last week’s Large-Field GPP Breakdown. Before lock, I noticed that it was actually quite hard to get to 80% cumulative ownership with the ownership being spread out. Here is where our experience playing large-field GPPs, especially when there is a smaller field, should come in handy. While the algorithm projected spread-out ownership, we could have known that guys like Schmid, Perez, Scheffler, and Morikawa were going to come up. They did. We have a lot of faith in our ownership projections as a whole, but the best players use their brains to try and figure out where ownership is really going to land based on industry-wide factors. Doing this gives players like robot Grex, Discord gossip king cantfademe, and I guess discord judge THE Kyle a decent edge when playing.

Now that the Olympics are over, we can get back to the PGA Tour, and that means a wide-open event with a cut.

Wyndham Championship – Preview