Welcome to my weekly lineup review for Daily Fantasy PGA. Every week I’m going to be breaking down a Lineup or two I used for play on DraftKings and deconstructing it to see where I went right and where I wet wrong. A lot of weeks I’ll be posting lineups that I used for head-to-head play or for double ups and 50/50’s. Other weeks I’ll probably do a gpp or tournament review. I’m hoping that by breaking down my lineups after the fact it will hopefully help readers (and myself) build better PGA lineups in the future. While it’s not always pleasant, deconstructing your choices can be an extremely helpful learning tool and way to ensure you don’t repeat past mistakes.
WGC Cadillac Lineup Review:
I didn’t play any cash games this week but did enter some of the bigger tournaments on DraftKings. Unfortunately, I was off on most of my choices but that won’t stop me from breaking down my thought process. I chose this lineup because out of all the failures I liked this one the best. It was a mix of some decent choices and some pretty terrible ones too.
Higher Priced Plays
I knew from the get go this week you would have to nail your studs as this tournament is almost always won by an elite player (and this year was no different). Instead of going with the trendy, in-form players though I instead chose to use two players who I thought would be largely ignored and offered similar upside to some of the players who had been having success already this season. It’s safe to say this approach backfired in many different ways.
Firstly, neither Henrik Stenson nor Jason Day were as low owned as I had hoped (Day was well over 10%, I was hoping for close to 5%), and second those trendy players I mentioned all had pretty spread out ownership percentages. Adam Scott and Bubba Watson both had ownerships well under 20% giving me almost no advantage to fading them in tournaments. The fact these two went on to finish one-two stung as Scott particularly seemed like a no-brain play this week outside of my perception of his popularity. Neither Day or Stenson could find form this week making my decision extra painful. This was a case of me out thinking myself in a tournament where players who had already performed well on the West-coast earlier in the season have traditionally done well.
Mid-Priced plays:
Rather than going with a complete stars and scrubs approach with this lineup I decided on using two mid-priced players instead as I thought there were potentially as many as five or six plays from this price range who could land a top 15 on this course. This was the good part of this lineup as I went with Harris English and Danny Willet who have both been in great form this year and have the length to perform well at Doral. I though Harris would be semi-popular but not heavily owned as I knew players like Paul Casey and Shane Lowry would draw away ownership. Willet was around 20% but wasn’t as owned as I thought. In retrospect I wished I has used him in all my lineups as I again misjudged his popularity and had him pegged to be as popular as 30% owned. Either way these two had great weeks for their price tags and I wish I had targeted this price range in general a little more all my lineups. A lot of the best plays value-wise came from between 7k and 8k in price.
Low-Priced plays:
Once again we go back to the bad here. I finished off this lineup with Robert Streb and Kristoff Broberg who both turned out to be complete disasters. I’ll start with Streb who was coming in off a nice finish at Honda, and who is a player I thought was pretty under-priced compared to his skill-set. Streb’s pretty long off the tee and had played well earlier this season at the tough Torrey Pines, another long, tough track. Unfortunately, he seemed to be off on the greens from the get go, perhaps setting the tone for his week. He was pretty useless for birdie points as well and didn’t grab me any bonuses. I don’t necessarily regret using him as much as Broberg since he’d played this course before and looked to be in better form than last year coming in. Sometimes plays can be well justified but just don’t work out and that’ how I viewed Streb this week.
Broberg on the hand was a complete mis-caluclation by me. I came so close to putting in KT Kim in this lineup who ended up being a great play compared to his price tag this week. Kim qualified for this event by dominating the Asian tour last year and also had played a season on the PGA tour, giving him the advantage of at least seeing a PGA tour setup before. Broberg on the other hand was making his first trip overseas. In the end I gave a little too much credit to Broberg’s win on the European Tour and failed to recognize how strong a player Kim was (dominating any professional tour takes talent) and it cost me dearly as Broberg was simply BRO-etched this week and completely outmatched by the course.
Results and Review:
This week was a classic case of me out-thinking myself into some bad plays. Sometimes obvious isn’t that bad a thing and while I don’t regret aiming for a few lessor-owned names at the top my judgement of actual ownership percentages was way off. I’ll take this week as a warm-up for the Masters where I again anticipate the quality of field stringing out the ownership percentages amoung the top players, making the number of potential “ownership fades” quite small.
Grade: D
