It’s time for one of my favorite events of the year, the WGC-Dell Match Play! PGA Golf’s very own March Madness Bracket!
My name is Josh Thomas, and I am a PGA and NFL Coach here at DFS Army! Welcome to the 2019 PGA Season! We here at DFS Army have got you covered this year for DFS golf with my weekly preview out on Sunday Nights, Chalk Donkey article breaking down the ownership projections, where to pivot, and GPP strategy out Tuesday Nights, and our Research Station that is full of more information than you could ever need!
This week the tour heads back to Austin, Texas for the second year in a row for the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play Championship! Last year’s winner Bubba Watson is back to defend his title against 63 of the best golfers in the world, in one of the most fun formats the tour has all year. While the format is fun, it’s essential that you are optimally building lineups this week to ensure that you are giving yourself the best chance to win.
Golfers are placed into four player pods, meaning that each golfer is guaranteed three ‘matches’. After all the matches are completed, the winner of the ‘pod’ will then move onto the round of 16. In the round of 16, it is now single elimination until you get to the final four. It’s win or go home time. To give yourself the best chance of winning a GPP this week, you want to have all four golfers in the semifinals. These golfers are guaranteed TWO more rounds of golf than any other golfer in the field. Giving you a ton of extra points on the field.
This week’s article will be a little different than a normal ‘chalk donkey’ as I will spend some time on a course breakdown as usual, and then get into optimal roster construction, and a full breakdown of each of the 16 pods. Let’s get to it!
Course Breakdown:
The WGC-Matchplay returns to Austin Country Club in Austin, Texas for the third straight year and hopefully finds its home here for years to come as the course sets up great for a Match Play event. Playing at 7,108 yards, Austin County Club is a Pete Dye designed course with a ton of risk-reward holes and even though the scorecard says 7,108 it often plays much shorter due to the fast fairways and those Texas winds.
All of the Par 3’s on the scorecard are in the 150-200 yard range, so we won’t see guys playing a lot of long irons into par 3’s like we did last week. All four par 3’s are among the 8 easiest holes on the course. The Par 4’s range from the driveable 317-yard #4 to the 490 yard 18th. There are 10 on the course and 6 play as part of the 9 hardest holes on the course while 4 are among the easiest. Many of the holes will have an approach shot of fewer than 120 yards, and with undulating firm greens, a strong wedge game will be essential. The four Par 5’s can all be reached in two, especially by the big hitters, but like any Pete Dye course with undulating greens, tightened fairways by the green and protection bunkers, it’s often difficult to get on in two, and sometimes the better approach is to lay up. Two years ago, Bill Haas, made the semifinals and he is notoriously short off the tee but was able to lay up on these par 5’s and attack them with wedges, Kevin Kisner employed a similar strategy last year. We have also seen a bomber like Bubba Watson and Dustin Johnson win this event the last two years though.
Due to this being the second year of this event on DraftKings, let’s review the scoring system. Taking the place of birdies and bogeys are holes won and lost.
- Holes Won = 3 pts
- Holes Halved = .75 points
- Holes Lost = -.75 points
- Holes not played = +1.6 points (match winner gets bonus points for finishing an opponent off early.)
- Matches Won = +5 points
- Matched Halved = +2 points
- Win 3 straight holes = +5 point bonus
- Do not lose a hole in the match = +7.5 points
The scoring is pretty similar to a normal event if you think about a hole won as a birdie, a par as a halve, and a bogey as a hole lost, but there is a lot of bonus points that are going to be awarded at the end of each match. It’s hard to imagine that the winner of the tournament won’t have the highest amount of DK points on the week, but it’s possible that the runner up does, if he blows out his opponents throughout the tournament.
With players who reach the semifinals playing 7 matches total for the tournament, anyone who has all 4 in their lineup will be on their way to a big cash for the week. Most weeks you are attempting to pick 6 guys who make the cut and almost 50% of the field makes the cut. This week you are trying to pick 6 guys to make it out of their pod when only 27% of the players will. It’s going to be MUCH harder to create a solid lineup this week, and it’s very possible that we’ll see more lineups with 0 players moving on to the ‘Sweet Sixteen’ than teams with 6 of 6 players moving on. DFS Golf has a massive amount of variance to begin with, throw in match play and it gets even crazier. For this reason, I will be playing less volume this week and will be avoiding cash games entirely. I’ll throw some DFS Golf GPP darts and hope for a big win, this is not a week to try to increase your bankroll.
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Key Stats this Week:
In this section, I’ll cover what I feel are some of the key stats this week. We get lots of questions in slack about what to look for in the RS and here are some of the things that I’ll be focusing on this week for the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play:
Before we get into the stats this week, I wanted to provide you guys with a link to some info about Strokes Gained Data. Strokes Gained is a confusing topic and DFS Army member (And Milly Maker winner) @redkacheek has put out a great article explaining how they work better than I ever could over at his site Fantasy Golf Bag. I normally don’t link other sites but this is just too good not to share. Give it a look here! How Do Strokes Gained Stats Work?
With the match play aspect, I’m going to focus more on some of those type of stats than the typical strokes gained stats here.
Match Play Winning %:
Match play is a completely different animal than stroke play. You get an 8 on a hole? Doesn’t matter you just lose one hole. It’s all about stringing together some wins and some players do that better than others.
Some of these guys have a fairly small sample size, but its a decent indicator of who is pretty good in match play. Jason Day, Alex Noren, Jon Rahm, Kiradech Aphibarnrat, and Ian Poulter all have great recent match play records. Tiger’s is also crazy but you gotta think about the era he played the majority of his matches in. He was the most dominant player in the world by a landslide. He’s not that anymore. Don’t get enamored by the record.
Rafa Cabrera-Bello is an interesting match play contender that I really wasn’t considering until I saw this.
Projected Round Score:
Below you’ll find our projections for the top 10 players round score based on their strokes gained on the type of holes (long par 4, short par 5, etc) at Austin Country Club.
No surprise that DJ leads the way here, but Justin Rose is an interesting play given his price this week. I think he has a fairly easy walk to the knockout stage outside of maybe Gary Woodland and he lets you do quite a bit with your roster.
Brooks Koepka also looks to be a good fit and has quite possibly the easiest group to come out of, but his recent play has been pretty poor.
Roster Construction:
How you build rosters this week is almost more important than the players themselves. Here are a couple of rules I have for it.
- Do NOT play players from the same pod. Only one player can make it out so avoid doubling up on them.
- Since they started the pods, only 35% of the #1 seeds have made it out. When building your roster, pick 2-3 high seeds and fill out the rest of your roster from the other tiers.
- Pick one player from each REGION. Essentially you want to make sure that you have the best chance of having all four players in the semifinals. A region is a group of 16 golfers, think of it like NCAA March Madness and break the bracket down into quadrants. This is likely the ‘chalk strategy’ but more on why I think this might not be your best strategy overall.
- Getting all 6 players to the knockout round is less important than getting players to the semifinals. Last year’s big GPP winner had all four golfers in the semi-finals, but also had one player not even make it out of the group stage. And the player in 2nd had two players not make it out of the group stage.
- DO NOT PLAY CASH. SERIOUSLY. DON’T DO IT.
There are some other strategies you can consider. If you follow the four rules above you should be in good shape. Being able to get all four golfers in the semifinals is a pretty astronomical ask though. Anyone who gets three of the players, heck even two of the players in the final four is likely going to have a top 5% lineup, which is what we are looking for in GPP most of the time. There might actually be some strategy in just loading up on two quadrants with three guys from each and hope you get two into the semis. You likely aren’t winning a GPP with that strategy, but you are going to set yourself for possible nice cash, especially in higher dollar contests with fewer entrants as the likelihood of someone getting all four in the semifinals is MUCH lower. In fact, almost every higher dollar, lower entry contest winner only had 2 semifinalists in their winning lineup.
Last year, everyone freaked out about the ‘dead lineups’ with players from the same pod. I think its a fair argument that by going one player from each quadrant you are spreading yourself too thin. Of the 100K entrants in the 5$ GPP last year, only ONE entrant had all four semifinalists. That’s a .00001 chance of getting all four if you break it down. So why not increase your odds of getting 2 or 3 players to the semifinals by focusing on 2-3 quadrants and ignoring one completely. By playing two players from each quadrant you increase your odds of getting a semifinalist from 6% to 12% And overall by focusing on only three quadrants your likelihood of getting a semifinalist is 12% compared to 9%.
It really is all about getting those two extra matches by getting a player to the semifinals to increase your score. What I will say is try to avoid 2 golfers in a group of 8 that will play each other in the round of 16. It’s not a horrible move if you do it, but it’s not ideal in that only one will advance to the quarterfinals.
Pod Breakdown:
I’m going to organize these Pods in their quadrants to give you a better idea of where you want to pick players from. Note that the number next to the players in the pod is not my ranking of them, but rather their actual ranking within the pod based on Official World Golf Ranking.
Quadrant #1
Pod #1
- Dustin Johnson
- Hideki Matsuyama
- Branden Grace
- Chez Reavie
Wow, tough break for DJ to get Deki in his pod. I think this pod essentially comes down to their matchup on Friday. Grace is no slouch, and Chez is a bit of a wildcard having only played this event once and gone 1-1-1. Neither Deki and DJ can putt, but both have been just outstanding with a wedge or short iron in their hand this year. I’m probably going to be going DJ out of this pod, but a Deki upset wouldn’t surprise me and the massive savings you get on Deki here, make him a very interesting GPP candidate. The winner of the DJ/Deki match will be whoever misses the fewest amount of 5 footers.
Pod #2
- Patrick Reed
- Sergio Garcia
- Shane Lowry
- Andrew Putnam
Captain America against Sergio? Yes, please. While Reed is the higher seed here, this is a 7-10 NCAA Tournament matchup where you feel way more confident in the ten, the ten being Sergio Garcia. Reed’s game is completely out of sorts and Sergio has been playing some really good golf and has an excellent record in this event. I want to like Shane Lowry but he’s had back to back MC’s and only a 26% win percentage here over the years. Putnam’s in a similar situation missing the last to cuts and playing some pretty poor golf this year. Sergio went 3-0 in his pod last year and I think we might see that again. This is an all in on spot on Sergio for me.
Pod #3
- Xander Schauffele
- Rafa Cabrera-Bello
- Tyrrell Hatton
- Lee Westwood
Oofta, this is a really difficult pod, with all of these guys playing good golf at times, and poor golf at others. Rafa has a great match play record and some good history at this course, but Westy has a great history here, and the extensive Ryder Cup history to boot. Westwood is playing some good golf right now and makes an interesting punt at only $6600 on DK. He lost out in a playoff to get to the round of 16 here last year when he was playing awful golf. If I’m not punting Westwood, Xander is my guy but you can absolutely make a case for Rafa as well.
Pod #4
- Jon Rahm
- Matt Kuchar
- J.B. Holmes
- Si Woo Kim
Welcome to the group of death. Rahm and Kuchar have crushed this course, and both are excellent match play players. Holmes won the Genesis Open this year (which the last two winners here have also done), and Si Woo Kim is a Pete Dye assassin, playing good golf, and made the round of 16 here last year. I’m likely going to bank on current form with Rahm in this group, but Si Woo is obviously in play for cheap, and Kuchar coming out wouldn’t surprise me either. Holmes is likely a no go for me.
In this quadrant, my favorite plays are in order:
- Sergio Garcia
- Dustin Johnson
- Hideki Matsuyama
- Jon Rahm
- Lee Westwood
Quadrant #2
Pod #1
- Justin Thomas
- Keegan Bradley
- Matt Wallace
- Lucas Bjerregaard
This feels like a JT run away, but Keegan Bradley can shoot that -6 round and if he does so against JT he’s in good shape. I’m a big believer in Wallace/Bjerregaard’s game in general, but neither have much match play experience and will likely struggle on a Pete Dye track. All in spot here on JT. Wouldn’t be surprised to see him win the whole thing.
Pod #2
- Jason Day
- Phil Mickelson
- Henrik Stenson
- Jim Furyk
Day really struggled last week at the Valspar Championship, had he played a bit better I’d have been all over him here, but this group is entirely up for grabs. Phil Mickelson is obviously a wild card. He’s got a great match play record with a 53% win percentage at this event over the years, but is coming off two pretty bad missed cuts. Stenson has been up down this year and Jim Furyk is hot right now and with the course playing firm, the short hitters are definitely in play. I kind of like Furyk here, but Stenson’s price is really juicy given his skill level. He’s also won this event before, albeit on a different course.
Pod #3
- Tiger Woods
- Patrick Cantlay
- Brandt Snedeker
- Aaron Wise
This group comes down to Tiger Woods and Patrick Cantlay for me. Cantlay went 2-1 here last year, beating Hideki Matsuyama but losing to a super hot Cam Smith. I think he’s a great course fit but he obviously runs into the buzz saw that is Tiger Woods. Tiger’s match play record is insane, but Cantlay’s isn’t anything to scoff at, especially when you consider his Walker and Palmer Cup record. Everyone is going to play Tiger and I think Cantlay has as good of, if not better, chance of winning this pod. You get the big discount on Tiger as well on DK.
Pod #4
- Rory McIlroy
- Matthew Fitzpatrick
- Justin Harding
- Luke List
Rory seems like he should be a MASSIVE favorite here given his recent play but I really don’t think you can sleep on any of these guys. If Luke List gets hot here, I can see him coming out of this group. Fitzpatrick beat Rory heads up two weeks ago at the Arnold Palmer, and Justin Harding, while no one has likely heard of, is an excellent player in his own right. I obviously lean Rory here, but I think all of these guys are live.
In this quadrant, my favorite plays are in order:
- Justin Thomas
- Patrick Cantlay
- Rory McIlroy
- Tiger Woods
- Henrik Stenson
Quadrant #3
Pod #1
- Justin Rose
- Gary Woodland
- Eddie Pepperell
- Emiliano Grillo
Justin Rose should run away with this. Woodland is struggling right now. Pepperell is obviously hot and could find a way to keep that going and Grillo has struggled at this event over the years. I don’t love Rose to win the event which means I might end up just avoiding this group entirely or take a few shots on Eddie Pep.
Pod #2
- Bubba Watson
- Jordan Spieth
- Billy Horschel
- Kevin Na
Buzz, your girlfriend…WOOF. This pod is a whole lot of awfulness. Bubba is playing good golf but admittedly hates match play and said it would be a miracle if he wins here again. Spieth is just in a free fall with his game. Horschel has been consistently just OK this year. Kevin Na is coming off a late WD. This is another pod that I’m likely avoiding. Maybe a dart or two on Jordan Spieth just in case.
Pod #3
- Paul Casey
- Cam Smith
- Charles Howell III
- Abraham Ancer
Wow, now we get a pod where everyone is playing really well right now. This is another really tough group. I actually might like CH3 the most here. I think his game sets up really well here in Austin. Went 3-0 last year in the pod stage. Smith really hasn’t been the same since the tour left the West Coast, but as any Australian seems to play well here. Ancer is playing good golf as well as evidenced by his trip up the leaderboard at the Players.
Pod #4
- Francesco Molinari
- Webb Simpson
- Thorbjorn Olesen
- Satoshi Kodaira
All of the Francesco Molinari. Literally almost a fully all in spot. Webb actually may be the favorite here given his prior match play experience, but really, Molinari is playing great golf and should be able to capitalize on it here. No real interest in Olesen, and Kodaira is a complete NO NO.
In this quadrant, my favorite plays are in order:
- Francesco Molinari
- Justin Rose
- Charles Howell III
- Webb Simpson
- Paul Casey
Quadrant #4
Pod #1
- Bryson DeChambeau
- Marc Leishman
- Kiradech Aphibarnrat
- Russell Knox
Bryson leads the way here and though he is the number one player, he has actually never played in this event. He lost his singles match last year in the Ryder Cup but does have a US Amateur title to his credit so he does know how to play match play. Marc Leishman has struggled a bit here over the years and isn’t a great course fit. Kiradech Aphibarnrat is an EXCELLENT match play player due to his aggressive style and he’s done well here over the years while also winning a match play on the European tour. His form is so up and down that he’s hard to trust, but if we go by his current history of good performance, horrible performance, good performance, horrible performance, he’s due for a good one here! Russell Knox is a bit of a wild card here. Everyone will flock to Bryson and Barnrat and Knox is cheap and absolutely has the ability to win this event.
Pod #2
- Tommy Fleetwood
- Louie Oosthuizen
- Kyle Stanley
- Byeong Hun-An
You can essentially chalk up a win for the three guys that have to play the ghost of Kyle Stanley this week, but after that its a crap shoot. Fleetwood’s form has been excellent but he’s a mediocre match play player. Louie is coming off a great performance and is one of the best match play players in the field. And Byeong Hun An is priced ridiculously given his chances to win this group. An is a former US Amateur winner (match play event) and finished T9 in this event in 2016, winning a group with Rickie Fowler before losing to Rafa Cabrera Bello. I actually really like the value on Louie here so for me its between him and An.
Pod #3
- Tony Finau
- Kevin Kisner
- Ian Poulter
- Keith Mitchell
Here’s the issue with this group…any of these guys can win the entire event. But only one can come out of this group. I’m honestly going to avoid this group entirely and hope it doesn’t come back to bite me. I give each of these guys about a 25% chance to win this group with maybe a slight edge to Tony Finau. It’s so hard to get guys through to the knockout stage that I want to take every edge I can get and I just don’t see one here.
Pod #4
- Brooks Koepka
- Alexander Noren
- Hao-Tong Li
- Tom Lewis
While this SHOULD be a cakewalk for Brooks Koepka, I actually think this group is wide open given his poor play lately. Alexander Noren is a match play specialist but even playing worse than Koepka currently. Hao-Tong Li got smoked in 3 straight matches here last year and Tom Lewis is brand new to this event and might be the dark horse in this event. I don’t think anyone in this group advances too far in the knockout stage outside of Koepka getting hot, but paying up for his current form is difficult to do.
In this quadrant, my favorite plays are in order:
None? I hate this quadrant…
- Louie Oosthuizen
- Byeong Hun-An
- Brooks Koepka
- Bryson DeChambeau
- Kiradech Aphibarnrat
GPP Core:
Want to know who is my GPP Core? How bout Taco or Brody’s? Check it out here on our brand new Coaches Notes page.
Final Thoughts:
This is a really fun week, but a very difficult one to handicap. Have some fun with it, but don’t kill your bankroll this week. Like I said earlier, you can build a lineup you love and have it go 0 for 6 in getting guys to the knockout stage. That’s the nature of Match Play.
As ownership trends start to finalize this week, I’ll post some updates in my coaching channel and make sure to join in and ask any questions. This is going to be a great week and I can’t wait to see some of those green screens and winning lineups!
Join us in our coaching channels this week and let’s win some money! I’ll be there off and on all week, but will be in helping build lineups from 9:00 to 10:00 PM CST on Wednesday night getting you guys ready to take down some huge GPP’s!
Also, give me a follow on twitter @dfsupnorth as I’ll be posting updates there as well as useful retweets leading up to this weeks event!