Your core goal when building your lineups and competing in any daily fantasy contests is to maximize the number of fantasy points your lineups earn so that you can win your contests more often than not, and make a profit. DFS golf is the most challenging sport you can get involved with in my opinion, as the fantasy point projections are not typically very accurate compared to other sports, the weather can totally wreck havoc and ruin rounds, and one bad hole can easily cost golfers the ability to make the cut and earn a paycheck for that week.
Get Your Golfers Into the Weekend
Today we look at why it’s so important to pick golfers that make the cut, whether that be the typical 36-hole cut or the odd 54-hole cut. In any other sport your players are guaranteed to be part of full games unless of course, they are ejected, or get injured. In golf, a typical weekly tournament consists of every golfer getting to play 36 holes on Thursday and Friday, but the weekend to play offers no certainty as we usually see the top 70 golfers plus ties move on to play Saturday and Sunday out of 144 golfers or more. There are exceptions of course, take this weekend for example at The Masters, the top 50 golfers plus ties make the cut plus any players who are within 10 strokes of the leader – the field has only 87 golfers in it this week, so around 60% of the field will earn the right to play rounds three and four, which is higher than normal.
Construct Multiple Lineups
With only 36 holes that a player is guaranteed to play outside of a withdrawal happening, there are only 36 opportunities to earn fantasy points, up to a maximum of 72 holes and 72 opportunities to tally up those valuable fantasy points. When I’m building my DFS golf lineups each week, I’m very focused on selecting golfers who have a high percentage of making the cut, especially for tournaments where scoring is strong and the winning score is going to be around 20 strokes under par. I play DFS golf on DraftKings where a lineup consists of 6 golfers, and the goal is to always select 6 golfers who make the cut and get to play all 72 holes. Easier said than done though, as usual, only around 9% of lineups have all 6 golfers making the cut based on the data I’ve collected over the years. This is why you will see many DFS users playing multiple lineups to try to have as many 6 golfer lineups as possible playing all 432 holes.
What I’ve found is that you can take “sure bet” lineups where every golfer on it has made all of their cuts during the season and never missed a cut at that particular tournament, and still have a golfer or two miss the cut – it’s inevitable and quite frustrating, to say the least. I typically play 10 to 20 lineups or so every week between cash games and GPPs so that I have some decent 5 player lineups, and the hope is to have one or two lineups that have all 6 players in action for all four rounds.
Cash Games vs GPPs
I tend to balance my lineups out for cash games with golfers in the salary range of $7,500 to $9,000, and when it comes to GPPs I get more aggressive where I have two or three golfers in the $9,500 to $11,500 range and then go after value picks where the players have high odds to make the cut, but will likely only finish in the 30’s at best unless their tournament is an anomaly and go off for a top 10 finish which is always a big plus for DFS users.
Holes Lost Stats
Taking a look at percentages of holes lost when it comes to players missing the cut looks like this – 5 out of 6 golfers making the cut means losing 36 holes out of 432 holes total or 8.3%, 4 out of 6 golfers making the cut means losing 72 holes out of 432 holes total or 16.6%, 3 out of 6 golfers represents losing out on 25% of holes, 2 out of 6 golfers means 33.3% of holes are lost, and if you only get one golfer into the weekend your lineup loses 41.6% of holes. It’s evident by looking at these stats that you pretty much need 5 or 6 golfers on a lineup to make the cut so that it has the opportunity to place in the money in either cash games and especially in GPPs. I have had 4 golfer lineups on a weekend that helped me to win money in GPPs, but you pretty much need the tournament winner and the rest need to be top 10 or 20 for that outlier to be successful.
Spread Your Bets Around
While it’s frustrating to have lineups that all look like losers heading into the weekend, more recently, DFS sites now allow their users to hedge their bets by entering fresh lineups for the weekend rounds where cuts don’t matter anymore. When competing in four round contests though, you need to put in your research and lineup building time to get as many golfers as you can playing all 72 holes, as every hole can mean earning 10 fantasy points or potentially even more. One last insight, if you have a weekly budget of say $10 for GPPs every week, I would advise making ten $1 lineups or even more as $0.25 entries as opposed to one $10 lineup, or two $5 lineups for example, hedge hedge hedge and hedge your bets some more when playing DFS golf!
