PGA DFS: DraftKings Showdown Strategies

PGA DFS: Intro to DraftKings Showdown

Hey there PGA DFS players and welcome to Thunder Dan’s PGA Showdown Special! You may follow me for NBA, NFL, or MLB content here at FantasyCPR, but little did you know that I love to play PGA DFS, too!

Let me just start by saying, if you’re not reading my good friend JuanBondDFS’s free PGA power rankings and FanDuel articles, you are missing out on some of the best PGA content in the industry as DailyOverlay has him ranked as one of my reliable PGA touts this season.  I like to dabble in some four day PGA contests, but my favorite way to play PGA DFS is on single day showdown slates!

Draftkings offers single day showdowns for rounds 1-4 of each tournament as well as weekend contests for just Saturday-Sunday. I am only going to cover how to play single day showdowns in this article, but much of the scoring and strategy is similar and easily transferrable to weekend contests.

My favorite thing about showdowns is that you have a clean slate every day. Isn’t that one of the most appealing aspects of DFS? Nothing is more frustrating than picking a golfer for a four-day tournament and then watching him go out and shoot +6 on Day 1 and kill your lineups right from the start.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had some success playing showdowns on DraftKings and I’d like to share with you some of the strategies that I use to build winning PGA showdown lineups. But first, let’s back up and cover some of the basics of how PGA showdowns work.

PGA DFS: Showdown Scoring and Basics

So how exactly is playing PGA showdowns different than regular four-day PGA DFS contests on Draftkings? Well, let’s actually start with the similarities.

***You still get to roster six golfers using a 50k salary cap, with the higher-ranked golfers being considerably more expensive than the others.

***DK scoring still rewards golfers who score more than golfers who just make pars. Scoring is slightly different, however, and the only round in which you earn finishing points is round 4 (more on that a little later)

Here is the DK scoring system for rounds 1, 2, and 3.

Double Eagle +16

Eagle +11

Birdie +5.75

Par 1.5

Bogey -1.8

Double Bogey or Worse – 3.9

Birdie Streak of 3 in a row (max 1 per round) +5

Bogey-Free Round +5

Hole in One +5

You can see based on this scoring that we are really looking for players who can score and you have to be willing to take a chance on guys who play aggressively and sometimes bogey. A player who ends up even par for the day with 5 birdies, 8 pars, and 5 bogeys is going to end up with 31.75  DK points, while a golfer who also ends up even par with 1 birdie, 16 pars, and 1 bogey is only going to score 27.95.

For rounds 1 and 2, ownership is usually spread out a little thinner since there are more golfers in the field. Once we get to rounds 3 and 4, we see ownership clump up around the top of the leaderboard and we have to apply some game theory.

Let’s next take a look at what factors you’re going to want to consider when playing round one Showdown on Thursday mornings.

PGA DFS: Round 1 Strategy

I’ll have to be honest, this is the one round of showdown that I play the least. One of the biggest edges I’ve found in these contests is the ability to use strokes gained data from each of the rounds in order to help build my rosters for rounds 2, 3, and 4. That doesn’t mean we still can’t find an edge for round 1, however.

Some players I know like to use their cash game lineup from their four-day PGA contests as their round 1 showdown lineup (the salaries are usually pretty close, so it certainly can work). This makes a ton of sense because these are the golfers that you feel the most confident in for that given week and therefore you are expecting them to come out and play well in round 1.

One of the biggest things you have to also consider here is the weather. Golf, like baseball and football, is a sport that is played outdoors and the athletes and course can be significantly affected by the weather. As an MLB writer, I have to check the weather every day when breaking down baseball slates and if you play PGA DFS enough, you know that the anticipated wind speeds, precipitation, and temperature can all play a role in which golfers play well on any given day.

One of my favorite strategies for round 1 (and if the weather demands it, other rounds, too) is to load up on either the morning or afternoon tee times.  Let’s just say the forecast is calling for rain and wind in the morning, but then clear skies in the afternoon. It would make sense then to target as many golfers who are teeing off after the weather passes through in your showdown lineups.

If there’s no clear cut weather advantage, I favor stacking the early tee times. The golfers who are out first in the morning usually get softer and slower greens and a course that hasn’t been played on all day, which can give them even the slightest advantage of scoring on more holes.

PGA DFS: Round 2 and 3 Strategy

Ok, so now is when we can really get an edge on the field. I was trying to think of an analogy for another sport to relate the concept of using strokes gained data in golf to and the best I could come up with was this baseball example.

Imagine if you were able to play only 3 innings of an MLB game in a DFS contest. You’d be able to study the at-bats of all the hitters from those first three innings. How many times did they swing and miss? Did they make contact? How far did they hit the ball when they did?

Now, you’re ready to make your innings 4-6 lineup. Assuming that the same pitcher is still in the game, which batters are going to choose? The player that swung and missed badly and three breaking balls, or the player who drove an inside fastball to the warning track, narrowly missing a home run? How many times have you watched a baseball game and thought, “man, this guy is really squaring up pitches today, he’s going to smack a double or homerun here in one of these at-bats.”

This is what it’s like playing rounds 2, 3, and 4 of PGA showdown. Thanks to some great free statistics over at DataGolf, we can look here to see a detailed account of how each golfer and each aspect of his game fared in the last round.

It’s going to take some time getting used to it, but with some practice, you can become a pro in reading strokes gained data and using that information to make some educated guesses as to which players will perform well in the next round(s).

There are five categories of strokes gained data that we can analyze and a “total strokes gained” column at the far right of the screen. The three most important statistics that I use are “strokes gained-putting,” “strokes gained approach,” and “strokes gained tee-to-green.”

PGA DFS: Rounds 2 and 3 (cont)

So how do we leverage the strokes gained data from the previous day’s round to find players who might perform well in rounds 2 and 3?

Well, what I am looking for is players who are gaining strokes on their approach, but are not putting well or even putting kind of poorly. Players who are gaining strokes on their approach are giving themselves opportunities to score and just not converting. Putting is the most variant stat in golf. The best putters on tour can have terrible days in which they lose 3-4 strokes putting while some of the worst putters on tour can get hot with the flat stick in any given round.

Who you are definitely NOT looking to roster are golfers who are gaining the majority of their strokes with their putter and not with their other clubs. Those are the golfers we want to fade as their putting is likely to regress in subsequent rounds.  If you want to see who’s playing well with every club besides their putter then “strokes gained tee-to-green” is the stat you’re looking for.

Now, this is an inexact science and remember, we are gambling and guessing here so there is a ton of variance involved even if we do locate some golfers that we think look good statistically. A golfer who played horribly in round 1 can have the low score in round 2, or a golfer who dominated the course in round 1 by making every long putt can do it again in round 2, we are simply playing the odds here and trying to figure out the most likely outcome for each golfer.

The public is going to naturally gravitate towards players who played really well in their last round, or well-known, high priced players that they know can play really well in any given round.  That’s why using the strokes gained data is so important to help locate some lesser-known golfers who have the potential to own the course in each round.

I try to target at least 1-2 golfers who I know will be low owned in every GPP lineup (I don’t play cash games in showdown with all the variance). I’ll then usually spend up for a few of the best high-priced golfers whose stats line up with my model and then fill in the last few spots with a few golfers who are playing well.  The key here is not trying to predict who is going to go from playing badly to really well overnight, it’s in finding the golfers who played okay but should have been better.

PGA DFS: Round 4 Strategy

Round 4 showdown is pretty much a unique animal unto itself for several reasons. For one, we have three full rounds of data to look at from each golfer on the course. You have to decide how you’re going to weigh their most recent round 3 performance compared to their average play over the course of three rounds. On top of that, the scoring system adds in finishing points that are going to affect our strategy when we evaluate which golfers we want to roster.

Round 4 Finishing Points

1st – 13 points

2nd  – 10 points

3rd – 9 points

4th – 8.5 points

5th – 8 points

6th – 7.5 points

7th – 7 points

8th – 6.5 points

9th -6 points

10th – 5.5 points

11th-15th – 5 points

16th-20th – 4 points

21st-25th – 3 points

26th-30th -2 points

31st-40th – 1 point

41st-50th – .5 points

As you see, there is a clear incentive to getting the winner right in the final round. However, once you drop out of the top three places, the finishing points flatten out relatively quickly. Picking the 10th place winner correctly is really only worth a little less than one extra birdie in that player’s round, so you don’t necessarily need to pick the top 6 finishers.

But we still do need to find players who are going to score. This is where you need to stray from the pack. The players who are in the top 10 going into Sunday are all going to be highly owned, however, the odds of all them playing well enough to stay in the top 10 are pretty small. This is where we can again use our strokes gained data to try to locate some players who perhaps played over their heads for the first three days and may choke down the stretch. Is there someone in the top 10 who is only there as a result of one big round and they played mediocre on the other two days? This is why I like looking at players’ collective strokes gained data from the first three rounds combined. In fantasy sports, the larger the sample size, the more reliable the results.

It might be prudent to roster the leader if you think there’s a really good chance they win, just know that you’re doing so at extremely high ownership. Try to target a few players who are sitting just outside the leaders who you think might make a run. And don’t be afraid to roster a golfer who is well behind the pack. These golfers are going to be on the course first playing some relaxed golf without any pressure of losing their lead or TV camera crews following them around and there’s the potential for some really low rounds at really low ownership there.

PGA DFS: Final Thoughts on DK Showdown

Showdowns can be a lot of fun to play and if you love tilting golf, there is no greater tilt than seeing a no-name golfer have a great round virtually un-owned and win you some money.

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I would recommend experimenting with some low dollar entry tournaments. DK usually does a great job of offering a number of 1-3 dollar multi-entry and single entry tournaments that I would recommend targeting if you’re a beginner at showdown.

If you crash and burn with your first lineup, don’t get frustrated. It’s golf and it’s DFS, two things that don’t usually go as planned. Take a look at your process and try to evaluate why you were on each golfer and identify which golfers had big rounds that you weren’t on.

Playing DK showdowns can be a fun excuse to keep paying attention to the tournament that weekend, even if your Thursday-Sunday lineups take a big hit and you have multiple golfers miss the cut. Make sure you’re having fun with it, and don’t just use showdown as a way to chase your losses (I never do this by the way).

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my first ever PGA content! Good luck in your PGA contests this week and I hope you try out the showdown format if you haven’t before. Make sure to keep reading all of the high quality, free DFS content here at FantasyCPR!