COLONIAL BETS
Very light card for me this week, peppering the mid range and hoping for some luck.
Daniel Berger — Small greens on a Par 70 with short Par 4s? That’s Berger’s jam. He won this event in its strongest field ever in 2020, the first event out of the COVID break, and is setting up well for another victory. In Fort Worth. He’s fresh off a disappointing effort at Southern Hills (in the bad wave), but no one should be too concerned about that, Colonial is a much better fit for Berger’s game.
Kevin Na — With a win and three first round leads at Colonial in his career, Na’s gained 4.77 SG: Approach over his past three starts and hasn’t gone absolutely nuclear on the greens in a while. With Bentgrass being his most productive surface, and at a course where distance is mitigated, he’s the perfect player to add another plaid jacket to his closet.
Abe Ancer — The driving has been fine, the approaches have been inconsistent but not devastating, but the chipping, wow. Much is made about Viktor Hovland’s around the green woes, but Ancer has legitimately chipped himself out of almost every event this year. Then, at the most difficult course of the season, Ancer finally looks like himself again at Southern Hills. Go figure. He gained over eight strokes ball striking and lost minimally around the greens. Since SG: ATG is devalued at Colonial, it’s a perfect storm for Ancer.
Justin Rose — I’m a sucker. What can I say
COLONIAL CONTENT
DraftKings Picks w/ Tambo
Bets + Picks w/ Fienberg
DraftKings Strategy Show
TIDBITS!!!
GALAXY BRAIN: Skill Set Stack
You hear me bring it up on a weekly basis as a potential strategy to use and this week, I think it makes as much sense as ever. Yes, any skill set CAN win at this event … and that’s why I think gambling on a specific set of skills this week is a leverage play in GPP’s. In tournaments like this that don’t skew any one direction, people are more likely to play the guys they like more than follow the modeling and that’s where Fantasy National can be a difference-maker.
Colonial CC is a course with thin fairways and small greens. It’s got reasonable length for a Par 70, but that distance is concentrated on a handful of holes, so I’m not overreacting. Fantasy National allows you to sort stats by courses that have average-to-difficult fairways to hit and that’s the first step I’m taking. And then there’s dealing with the small greens. If you listed to the podcast with Brandon Gdula, you learned that short putting is statistically more predictive than overall putting numbers that include bombs. Makes sense and on small greens, those short putts are going be pretty common.
There you go. Two simple concepts that should track for this specific course. From here, I fired up Fantasy National to rank this field, over their past 36 rounds, when playing on courses with average-to-difficult fairways. Here are the players that ranked top-40 in this field in both SG:OTT (fairways are most important, but I still want to put some value in length: a long missed fairway can still work on the short Par 4’s) and P:5-10:
- Abe Ancer ($9300)
- Tom Hoge ($7600)
- Aaron Rai ($7200)
- Jason Kokrak ($8200)
- Troy Merritt ($7300)
- J.T. Poston ($6600)
For right now, the Bryson health issue is enough for me to fade if we are talking anything but mass multi entry. So let’s cross him off. In the past, around the green game hasn’t been all that tied to success at this event and looking at the stats, that makes Troy Merritt a tough sell. I mean, the man was the best in the field in SG:ARG last week … and it got him all the way up to T-41. Without that, are we really ready to put money on him (-7.8 SG:APP over his past three events)?
Plug the other five into a skill set stack and you’ll have a nice chunk of change left … if you know me at all, there’s only one place for that money to go.
DraftKings Ownership
I’m coming out with this eariler than normal, so you may want to keep up in real time with ownership at Fantasy National the closer we get to lock.
TOOLS: 20% Off Fantasy National Tools & Stats
Jordan Spieth
Kevin Na
Collin Morikawa
Chris Kirk
Tom Hoge
Brian Harman
Abtaham Ancer
Justin Thomas
Good Luck
— PM