FREE MONEY
Congrats to @Pazzman99 for claiming the $500 dollar giveaway on Wednesday’s PME. But now there’s ANOTHER $500 up for grabs thanks to Tambo.
Here’s how to get into that draw. If you’ve already done any already this week, you remain in the draw. And, thank you for the support.
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PLAYERS SCHEDULE
OUT — DK Picks & Player Profiles (Idone)
OUT — Research, Picks, Course, Custom Model
OUT — Write Up, Predicitons, Trends, New Schedule
OUT — Fantasy Picks, Bets, One & Done + Cust Corner (Geoff & Cust)
OUT — Best Bets (Cam & Rob)
OUT — Final Bets, Weather + DraftKings Picks (Tambo)
FRIDAY — CUT SWEAT LIVE (Cust, Geoff, Others)
SUNDAY BONUS — LIVE Recap + March Madness Bracket (Cust & Rasa)
PME DRAFTKINGS OPEN ($75K in RAKE FREE MONEY)
THE PLAYERS BETS
LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
Max Homa — One poor week on the greens and Homa’s been vaulted by a few on the betting board. No player gained more strokes between driving and approach at Bay Hill than Max Homa, but he just happened to lose more strokes on the greens than in any start in 18 months. The putting stroke isn’t a usual occurrence. If Homa just has his average putting week he actually wins the API and we’re talking about him 10 points worse right now.
Tom Kim — It’s far more important to hit fairways this week; Kim sits 15th in the field in fairways gained in the 2023 season. He’s great with his wedges and can scramble, so it’s likely to hinge all on his putter. His putting stroke seems like a legit coin flip each week. He’s lost as much at 6.7 strokes, putting over two rounds at one point. He also gained 12.5 over four en route to a victory in the same stretch. There really seems to be no in-between.
Ben Griffin — Griffin has become the short course superstar. In his past five starts on courses under 7200 yards, like TPC Sawgrass, he’s found the weekend four times with results of T4/T3/T12/T21 along with a missed cut at Pebble Beach. Yes, it’s worrisome he’s never played in THE PLAYERS previously, but that’s all baked into this price.
Webb Simpson — Hopefully Webb can shed the “one bad round” game he’s been playing the past two weeks and get it all back together a couse which fits his style perfectly. Or at least what his style used to be.
PLAYERS WEATHER
It looks like the wind is picking up later in the afternoon on Friday vs the morning, but it doesn’t seem like enough to shift my straegy. I’ll likely have some PM/AM stacks, nothing too crazy, but that will mainly be to get a bit different with some chalkier players and maybe I’ll get lucky on top of it.
PLAYERS WIND TOWER: PONTE VERDE/VILLANO
PLAYERS DRAFTKINGS PICKS
Tambo and I talked through the different style builds starting at the most likely starting point for DraftKings lineups and worked backwards from there.
WATCH: DraftKings Picks, Strategy, Ownership
Ownership Guesses
Jason Day 26%
Keegan Bradley 23%
Patrick Cantlay 23%
Rory McIlroy 21%
Scottie Scheffler 20%
Max Homa 19%
Essentially, you don’t need to get different at the bottom if you can just jam in Jon Rahm who, it appears, will be in the 8-12% range in the $25 DraftKings Milly Maker.
If have a gut feeling one or two of these guys is going to be on the winning roster. It’s far too underowned versus the chalk that surrounds it. I love Ben Griffin this week. But, let’s be real, if forced to pick one vs one, you’d likely say every single player in this range above him is better. Henley, then Power are my fav two from this dead zone to roll the dice on.
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Past Players DraftKings Notes
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)
The point is, don’t fear discomfort in your DraftKings lineups this week.
Since picking a winner is more random than most weeks at The PLAYERS, lean on the one thing that is predictable for DraftKings lineups: 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 2022 in the $25 DraftKings Millionaire Maker:
$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 Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa (yes, it’s still Morkiawa, btw) 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%
— PM