Honda Classic Tournament Preview and Draftkings Optimal Lineup Analysis

Now that Joaquin Niemann closed out his impressive wire-to-wire victory at the Genesis Invitational, the Tour ends its West Coast Swing and heads to Florida for the Honda Classic. The event will again be played at PGA National’s Champion Course in Palm Beach Gardens where it’s been played at since 2007. The original George and Tom Fazio design has had redesigns in 1990 and 2013 by Jack Nicklaus where the famed “Bear Trap” lurks on holes 15–17. Here are the key stats for the course:

· 7100 Yard long Par 70

· Ranks 3rd on tour for difficulty

· Bermuda Greens

· Back Nine plays over a stroke more difficult than the Front Nine

· Water comes into play on 15 of the 18 holes

· Average Winning Score in the last 10 years is 9-Under with the winning score getting to double digits just 3 times.

While the tournament doesn’t usually attract a lot of big names like Riviera CC last week, winners in the last 10 years would mostly be considered reliable multi-win tour Pros along with major winners. Here’s the list of the winners and their winning score.

· Matt Jones -12

· Sungjae Im -6

· Keith Mitchell -9

· Justin Thomas -8

· Rickie Fowler -12

· Adam Scott -9

· Padraig Harrington -6

· Russell Henley -8

· Michael Thompson -9

· Rory McIlroy -12

This year’s field is a bit softer than in years past but it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the Tour stalwarts ends up victorious on this tough track. With this course having so much water in play, it only takes a few bad holes to play yourself out of the tournament. It’s obvious that finding players who are proven ball strikers should have the best chance to survive this event but all it takes is a few slight misses and bad bounces to destroy your week. The only thing that may keep this event from becoming a bloodbath is that the winds look to be relatively calm all week so that variable mitigates some of the ball striking variance. Let’s take a look at the Optimal Draftkings Lineups for the last five years.

Those highlighted in green denote actual winner of the event.

One thing I want to point out with regards to the scheduling of this event is that this year we are going straight from the West Coast to this event. In most years, there is a WGC event in Mexico in between the Genesis and this event. Last year this event was held after both the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players Championship so the Honda had a bit of the 5th Major hangover. Some would argue that none of this matters or has any meaningful effect on the players themselves but the courses on the West Coast are nothing like PGA National. One thing I will look at when creating my Player Pool is to see how players perform at their 1st event in Florida. When looking at the Optimal Line Ups, I’ve always been minimizing the importance of 2017’s because the pricing structure was more polarized in Draftkings first year running these events. Since last year the event was held after two events had been played in Florida, I’m minimizing that lineup a bit as well so my focus will be on mirroring the three years between 2018 and 2020.

This is the first event of the year where we have a strong correlation between Optimal Lineups not just in the highlighted three year range, but in all 5 years. The most notable correlation is that in all 5 years, each lineup had exactly two players from the 6k section. In three of those years we had 2 players in the 7k section and two years with just 1 6k player. Of those ten 6k players, 6 missed the cut in the year prior, 1 finished 61st, 1 didn’t play, and two were playing this event for the first time. This event has always been one of the most volatile to predict so I’m going to lean into the madness and construct lineups with two 6k players who either did not play last year or did not play well. Of the eight players in the 7k tier, none finished better than 35th in the year prior with 3 missed cuts, 4 middling finishes, and one debutant. I’ll also lean into this oddity and choose players who finished outside the top-30 and sprinkle in a few guys who may be playing this event for the 1st time.

When it comes to make a decision up top, this event is also unique in that in most cases, an 11k player only makes the Optimal Build if they are the winner. When players cost that much, there are usually enough players that accumulated the same amount of points at a much cheaper cost so the build can be optimal without them. In both 2019 and 2020, an 11k player made the Optimal Build without winning the event. This came after two years of the 11k player winning this event when Rickie Fowler won in 2017 and Justin Thomas repeated the feat in 2018. This year only Sungjae Im is priced in the 11k tier but I also plan on using a few of the players in the 10k range as well. One running pattern we’ve noticed specific to just this year is that the lowest owned 10k+ players have performed the best in that range in almost every event this year. Currently the lowest owned players in the 10k range looks to be Brooks Koepka and recent winner Joaquin Niemann. Tomorrow I’ll make my final decisions for our Player Pool and tournament selections once we have tee times and up to date ownership projections.