Sentry TOC Wrap UP & DK Analysis
With perfect scoring conditions and lift-clean-cheat in play on the first two days, records were broken throughout the week. Not only did Cam Smith go wire-to-wire with his 4th PGA Tour victory, he set the Tour record by finishing 34 under par! While the course didn’t present any real challenges to Cam, the battle came from having to stay ahead of the #1 ranked player in the world. As the announcers obnoxiously reminded us throughout the telecast, Rahm will have to go home knowing three rounds of 7-under along with the course record -12 will not be enough. Justin Thomas had just set the new course record a mere few hours before Rahm tied it but Matt Jones equaled the feat in the final round to make it 2 Aussies in the top 3. Any DK lineup with these 3 players left you with plenty of options since their combined salary left 24,700 for you to work with.
HOW DID WE DO?
On Bovada we made 3 bets:
Sungjae Im: 25–1
Marc Leishman: 33–1
3leg 3ball Parlay that needed:
IM to beat Spieth & Koepka
Bryson to beat Spieth & Koepka
JT to beat Spieth & Koepka
Leishman did not give us much of a sweat while Sungjae was within striking distance for the first 3 days of the event until he stalled on Sunday. Going into Sunday, our parlay was looking good as Spieth and Koepka didn’t play well enough to get into contention while IM and JT both were in the top 10. Bryson wasn’t playing as well as he’d like but was still 3 shots clear of both Spieth and Koepka prior to Sunday’s play. Unfortunatley, Bryson struggled for a paltry 1 under round on Sunday which opened the door for Spieth to move ahead even as Koepka continued his struggles. For the week, we lost $50 and look to rebound at the Sony Open.
DK ANALYSIS
Below is a chart with the full slate, their salary, accumulated Draftkings Points, and their ownership in Mass Multi Entries. I’ve broken the slate into four pricing categories in order to understand how we needed to build our lineups. The green boxes represent the average amount of points earned by players in their block so that we can see how players performed relative to their price range. In each section the players with a black block next to their name signify players we needed to avoid, white spaces were players that performed around average, and the $ were the top three performers we needed to have in our lineups. One interesting note is that the players in the 6k range on average outperformed the 7k range. Underneath the four blocks of the full slate is the optimal 6 man lineup that earned an astonishing 920 Draftkings Points! At the bottom is my 16-man player pool used for the 40 lineups I hand made.
There is a ton of information we can glean from this data set and while that doesn’t mean every week will be similar to this, it’s important to learn from our mistakes.
DK SLATE NOTES:
In Tier One, the top 2 point earners were also the two lowest owned. In Tier Two, the top 3 point earners were the highest owned players. Back in the 7k Tier, the single highest owned and lowest owned player were the top 2 earners. More importantly, the optimal lineup did not need any of the players in this Tier. It was a mixed bag in the bottom tier as Seamus Power scored quite well by finishing 4th in the tier but as the highest owned, his value is a bit diminished. Matt Jones and Cam Davis, on the other hand, were extremely valuable by scoring 162.5 and 133 respectively as min-priced players.
OPTIMAL LINEUP
It’s rare when anyone on Draftkings builds the optimal lineup but evaluating it and trying to understand how to get there will give us the best chance at finishing at the top of a GPP. One thing to remember when analyzing this particular slate compared to future events is that this is a limited field no cut event. The value in this analysis will likely be more relevant when the TOUR heads back to a WGC but nonetheless, let’s take a look at how this lineup could have been made.
As we see above, the optimal lineup had 2 guys from the top tier, 2 from the 2nd tier, skipped the 7k and finished with 2 guys from the 6k tier. This is not a unique result when one of the top guys is able to finish so high in DK points. If you were to believe that Rahm was going to pull this off, it makes your decisions in the 6k range that much more important. If Jones, Davis, and Kisner had not scored that many points, it’s quite possible that the optimal builds would not have had Cantlay and instead needed more of the 7–8k players in a balanced build. Obviously the most important player will always be the winning player and in this case it was the most owned player on the entire slate in Cam Smith. There will always be a discussion on whether to pivot away from projected chalky (highly owned) players in order to gain leverage but if one of those players win, your lineups are likely dead in the water.
Leaving money on the table will always help in making your lineup unique but it’s not necessary to go overboard with this approach. For this particular lineup, $400 was left over which is likely to not be enough to make it extremely unique relative to the mass of lineups. If I would have told you prior to the event that the optimal build would only leave $400 on the table, had the first and third highest owned players, and the #1 ranked player in the world you would likely have told me that the top prizes would be chopped by multiple people. Instead, it was a line up no one used because it had 2 low owned players from the 6k range and the two lowest owned top tier players.
HOW DID OUR PLAYERS DO?
We were fortunate to have the eventual winning player included in our player pool but unfortunately only used 2 of the 6 players in the optimal build. Of our 16 players, 6 performed above average relative to their pricing tier, 3 were average, and 7 under-performed. This is usually a recipe for a losing week but we were very fortunate that we happened to pick the best of our 40 lineups to be used in all of the Single Entry GPPs. What’s even crazier is that our best lineup didn’t even have Cam Smith in it!!! What allowed for this lineup to cash as high as it did in the SE GPPs is that 5/6 players played above avg with respect to their pricing tier and the other matched the average. Had this lineup had any of the black box selections, it may not have even cashed while substituting CAM for IM would have made the lineup cash for nearly $2,000. Interestly, had we made a lineup with the 6 best players in our player pool, we would have barely finished with a top 100 lineup in the MME’s while the same lineup would have cashed for $3000 in the SE GPPs. This is an example of why game selection is such an important of how we approach our Draftking’s Bankroll allocation.
ADJUSTMENTS FOR SONY
The next article will delve into more of the specifics regarding the Sony Open but a few things to keep in mind as we move from the TOC slate to the Sony. We are now playing our first full field slate with a cut and a much weaker field. We are going to keep the Bankroll Builder guidelines in tact for this week but we may adjust the allocations for cash games and single entries GPPs once the player prices are released. Let me know how you all did and let’s keep on digging for the data that opens up our path to the top of the GPPs!
