THE PLAYERS DFS Strategy, Play/Fade, Previous Year Info
$5,000 GIVEAWAY
Want to win one of five $1,000 giveaway prizes. GET IN THE DRAW!!!!!
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Use code “MAYO” at underdog for a deposit match up to $100
Now, after you do that (or have an existing Underdog account), full out this 15 second survey, But filling out this survey it puts in a draw for ONE OF FIVE $1,000 Underdog Credit giveaways. And will make you eligible for the PME contests on Underdog once they start rolling out.
TAKE 15 Seconds and Fill Out Survey to get into Draw for $1000 Underdog Credits: https://forms.gle/f6bW4KAA4NWTxCfc6
15 seconds for a chance at $1000. That’s +EV. That is better than any bet I’ll ever give out.
PLAYERS COVERAGE HOT LINKS
WATCH: Players Championship Picks, Bets, One and Done
READ: Picks, Preview, Weather, Tee Times
WATCH: PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP Picks, Research, Guess The Odds | New Caddie/Player, Scouting Sawgrass
READ: THE PLAYERS Research, Preview, MODEL POWER RANKINGS
PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP DFS STRATEGY
There are millions of dollars for grabs this week on the DFS PGA Streets. Far and away the most we’ve seen this year, and the most we’re going to get until The Masters. Since you’ll be partaking in the mayhem, it’s always smart to reinforce some of the rules THE PLAYERS has taught us since moving to March from May in 2019.
It’s apt this tournament is held just outside of Jacksonville, as these leaderboards scream FLORIDA MAN. They’re insane. Potentially on bath salts too! With water in play on every hole and 92 bunkers scattered across the course, there’s a higher degree of variance at TPC Sawgrass than at almost any course. PGA National is really its only rival. Maybe TPC Twin Cities or TPC Southwind. You get the point. It’s likely the primary reason there has never been back-to-back winners in tournament history.
That’s not even factoring in the wind gusts or the lack of defined skill sets required to contend. A lot of courses are so long that a lack of distance off the tee ups the difficulty level for short smackers like the US Open. Not TPC Sawgrass. Yes, distance is always advantageous on the Par 5s and the longer Par 4s … if you’re not in the water. Even then, we witnessed the game’s most prolific bomber — at the time — Bryson DeChambeau, nickel and dime his way off the tee in 2021, taking a course management strategy with irons off the tee to ensure he found the short grass. Since distance plays less of a factor at Sawgrass than most PGA TOUR courses, the entire field actually has an opportunity to contend.
Fortunately, immaculate iron play is what will eventually win out in the end, which is why the former winner list tends to be a who’s who of the golfer who have mattered over the years. It rarely just becomes a putting contest. All that variance does lead to some tragic results for some big names.
2023: The two highest priced players missed the cut, but the next 11 players in pricing all saw the weekend, with only Justin Thomas and Will Zalatoris finishing outside the Top 20.
2022: Four of the Top 11 in DK pricing missed the cut, but on the bright side, three of those top 11 reached at least 94 DK points (including 121 from tournament winner, $9,400 Cam Smith)
2021: Paying up worked … or it completely killed you. JT and Bryson were top-6 on the pricing board and top-3 in DK points. Great. But … 6 of the other 9 golfers priced over $9,000 failed to play the weekend.
2019: McIlroy won as the 3rd most expensive golfer in a true stars and scrubs tournament: 3 of the top-8 DK scorers cost 5 figures while four of them cost no more than $7,100.
2018: All 7 golfers that scored north of 100 DK points were priced $7,3000 or cheaper (just 2 of the top-6 in pricing finished better than 20th in DK points)
2017: Each of the top-5 in DK scoring were priced $7,500 or cheaper (four of them were sub-$7,000)
Point is: Embrace discomfort in your DFS lineups this week.
BEST BETS SHOW
Time for a pause, to let you know about the Players BEST BETS SHOW. Me, Ben Coley, and Byron Lindeque got together to give out our GOLD, SILVER & BRONZE bets for the week outside of the outright betting market. It was a fun one.
WATCH: Best Bets, Odds | Golf Outright Bets, Placement Markets
In case you don’t have ALLLLL the time to watch and listen to everything, here’s the gist.
GOLD
MAYO: Adam Scott Top 20 (With Ties) +280
COLEY: Aaron Rai Top 20 (With Ties) +300
BYRON: Russell Henley Top 20 (With Ties) +170
SILVER
MAYO: Carson Young Top 40 (With Ties) +230
COLEY: Alex Noren Top Continental Euro +900
BYRON: Mattieu Pavon over N. Hojgaard -110
BRONZE
MAYO: Harman Top Left Handed Player -150
COLEY: Harman Top Left Handed Player -150 + Grillo Top South American -150 Parlay
BYRON: Doug Ghim Top 20 (With Ties) +333
Plus, we made an Underdog Entry for Round 1 doing H2H matchups. Come sweat along with us and try and 6x your money
CLICK HERE TO GET THE EXACT UNDERDOG ENTRY ON YOUR SCREEN
MORE DFS STRATGEY
Since picking a winner is more random than most weeks at The PLAYERS, lean on the one thing that is predictable for DraftKings lineups (kind of): Ownership Projections. See who the masses are gravitating toward, and just find a soft spot or two in the projections around those players and throw them in your lineups. It certainly won’t guarantee success, but it’s a way to give yourself a more direct path to victory in a large DraftKings tournament
Here are the scoring leaders and their ownership in 2023 in the $25 DraftKings Millionaire Maker. For the first time in recent memory the chalk actually did quite well in 2023 versus most other PLAYERS:
$10,600 Scottie Scheffler 23.5%
$7,400 Tom Hoge 4.8%
$8,300 Tyrrell Hatton 17.2%
$8,400 Hideki Matsuyama 3.6%
$8,900 Viktor Hovland 24.9%
$7,300 Min Woo Lee 1.5%
$6,600 Justin Suh 4.4%
$9,000 Sungjae Im 9.7%
$7,000 Cameron Davis 0.4%
$6,200 David Lingmerth 0.3%
Here are the results of the highest owned players…
Jason Day 30.5% (T19)
Justin Thomas 26.7% (T60)
Viktor Hovland 24.9% (T3)
Scottie Scheffler 23.5% (Win)
Keegan Bradley 23.5% (MC)
Max Homa 21.5% (T6)
Rory McIlroy 19.5% (MC)
Keith Mitchell 17.8% (T35)
Patrick Cantlay 17.3% (T19)
Tyrrell Hatton 17.2% (2nd)
2023 was a bit of a different story:
$9,400 Cameron Smith 9.6%
$6,100 Anirban Lahiri 0.05%
$7,100 Kevin Kisner 1.5%
$7,400 Paul Casey 6.9%
$10,100 Viktor Hovland 13.7%
$6,900 Keegan Bradley 7.2%
$7,400 Russell Henley 13.3%
$9,800 Dustin Johnson 5.9%
$6,900 Patton Kizzire 0.88%
Here are the results of the highest owned players…
$7,700 Matt Fitzpatrick 25.2% (Missed Cut)
$8,800 Daniel Berger 24.1% (T13)
$10,700 Collin Morikawa 24.1% (Missed Cut)
$10,400 Justin Thomas 22.7% (T33)
$9,200 Scottie Scheffler 20.6% (T55)
$9,000 Patrick Cantlay 17.0% (Missed Cut)
$11,100 Jon Rahm 16.8% (T55)
$7,200 Talor Gooch 16.8% (Missed Cut)
$8,100 Billy Horschel 16.1% (Missed Cut)
An aberration because of the winds, rains and lengthy delays? Not really. Here were the scoring leaders and their ownership in 2021 in the $20 DraftKings Millionaire Maker:
$9,900 Justin Thomas 17.0%
$7,200 Lee Westwood 3.3%
$9,700 Bryson DeChambeau 13.3%
$8,400 Paul Casey 10.4%
$6,900 Brian Harman 4.5%
$7,500 Sergio Garcia 6.8%
$7,000 Talor Gooch 0.8%
$7,400 Corey Conners 13.2%
$6,800 Charley Hoffman 2.7%
$8,200 Matthew Fitzpatrick 9.4%
Here are the results of the highest owned players…
$9,100 Tony Finau 24.1% (Missed Cut)
$9,500 Webb Simpson 22.2% (Missed Cut)
$9,200 Patrick Cantlay 21.8% (Missed Cut)
$7,700 Joaquin Niemann 19.8% (T29)
$9,400 Collin Morikawa 19.5% (T41)
$7,600 Will Zalatoris 19.3% (T21)
$7,900 Tommy Fleetwood 17.6% (Missed Cut)
Obviously, going into the week, everyone, myself included, thought these were almost all excellent plays. If you knew who was definitely going to win and finish at the top of the leaderboard, you wouldn’t be reading this, and I wouldn’t be writing this. We’d own private islands with all our winnings.
Stacked fields like this, and major championships, require you to embrace game theory over your instincts as there’s such little difference between the players in each range. We can debate who is better between Sam Burns and Shane Lowry all we want, but it’s probably smarter to admit they have about the same probability to actually win this week.
Take a gander at the $9,000 range from the 2021 PLAYERS Championship on DraftKings.
$9,900 Justin Thomas 17.0%
$9,700 Bryson DeChambeau 13.3%
$9,500 Webb Simpson 22.2%
$9,400 Collin Morikawa 19.5%
$9,300 Viktor Hovland 16.6%
$9,200 Patrick Cantlay 21.8%
$9,100 Tony Finau 24.1%
$9,000 Patrick Reed 6.4%
When you can identify the most popular plays, which we were pretty close to last year, it allows you to understand how others are building their rosters and what you need to do to be different when most of the options are so similar. It would be different at a weaker field tournament when the ranges of golfers are mixed and matched with long-term talent and the flavors du jour.
It’s simply not the case at these types of events. Something you’ll have to get used to with this new schedule. And, you can see, using this one isolated example, that it wasn’t necessary to blindly use Patrick Reed just because he was by far the lowest owned — although, it didn’t hurt to do that as he was the third-highest scoring player on this list. It was to notice Webb and Finau were standouts in terms of ownership, meaning they were very likely to be paired together in a lot of lineups (along with either Cantlay or Morikawa as a trio), which left far fewer teams building around Bryson and Thomas. It’s not like they were unowned. That’s usually the misconception about discussing ownership. You’re not looking for six players with zero ownership. What you want in giant field DraftKings tournaments is a unique path to the top where you have to duke it out with far fewer people.
If you had some combination Webb/Morikawa/Cantlay/Finau, along with the majority of other entries, even if those guys did well, you’re still battling with half of the other 114,000 lineups, and you need to have the perfect other four players on your roster. With a more unique build, you severely reduce your path to the top if you’re correct, and it will give you more leeway with your other four players since you’re competing with fewer lineups for the top prize. In smaller DraftKings tournaments, the fewer the amount of entries, the most mistakes you can make with your picks and still win money.
DraftKings Showdown Trends
There will likely be an influx of casual players for this event, so it's a good time to leverage this angle. Hole 18 is the toughest on the course (2.5x more likely to bogey than to birdie), making a back-to-front build a tough sell. If you can get that hole (462-yard Par 4), holes 1-2 are very gettable, but I prefer front-to-back. Going that way, you get access to two of the five easiest holes (9 and 11, both Par 5's) and while #10 isn't easy, a 15.3% birdie rate isn't the end of the world. Scheffler strung 3+ birdies together in holes 8-11 twice last season (he birdied Hole 9 every round, Hole 8 twice, Hole 10 twice, and Hole 11 twice).
NEW FANTASY NATIONAL OFFERING
The BEST DEAL on Fantasy National of the year is THIS WEEK!!!! Any monthly membership this week will take you through the commencment of The Masters. Capitalize on that and game the calendar to your advantage. And get 20% OFF for doing so.
JOIN: 20% OFF Tools and Stats at FantasyNational.com
Not only that, but starting Thursday morring, there will be a banner at the top of the Fantasy National page inviting you to come join the beta test for the new Fantasy National Leaderboard APP. It’s currently for iPhone only right now, but we’re excited to share it with you before it goes live.
DRAFTKINGS PLAY & FADE
FADE: Victor Hovland — Despite leading the field in SG: Florida over the past two years, and not actually drawing all that much ownership (somewhere in the 7%-12% range currently) something just seems off with Viktor. Specially, the driving isn’t at its usual elite level and his short game has reverted back to bottom of the barrel. Unless he magically gets it all back together this week, the result you need at that price is unlikely to come through.
PLAY: No one believes Finau can do anything this week. Well, maybe that’s not exactly true, since he’s trending in the 9%-14% range. But lineup constriction leads me to believe people will go out of their way to get to Henley for $100 more, or just save with Conners or Ben An for less an improve elsewhere. That’s my hunch, at least.
However, Finau’s ball striking is the best in the field over the past two months. You could argue he’s never better with his driver or irons. He just happens to not even be grazing the hole on 3-foot putts at the moment. No great. But at a course with higher variance, his ball striking makes his floor to make the cut fair higher, ands though he’s going through struggles with the flat stick, he has gained on these greens four of the past years. And I like Sahith enough, but his wayward driver could get him wet this week.
Coming Wednesday:
DraftKings Picks Show
Final Bets & Info Newsletter
LIVE CHAT at 730pm ET on MMN
— PM