Daily Fantasy Golf Strategy
So you signed up to play daily fantasy golf at FanDuel or DraftKings thinking that it would be easy money to win since you have watched every event on the PGA Tour and know everything there is to know about golf. You made your deposit and entered into a big DFS contest with dollar signs in your eyes…and came somewhere in the middle of the standings and didn’t win any money.
It’s not as easy as it looks to win money playing at DraftKings, FanDuel or any of the other daily fantasy golf sites but we may have some tips to help you out.
We’ve been playing DFS for years and have come up with a few strategies that you should keep in mind when you are playing fantasy golf for real money. We don’t promise that you will win any of the million dollar contests but we will help you finish in the money and also help you grind out some extra cash on the side too!
Play The Lower Entry Contests First
Hey, I do it too. Every golf major when DraftKings runs the Fantasy Golf Millionaire I put in $100 – $200 and get 5-10 entries at $20 each and start making my fantasy lineups. The good news is I usually break out even over the season and I’ve managed to crack the top 100 a couple times but the odds of winning the large field DFS tournaments are extremely high. Now you can’t win the million dollars if you don’t play but don’t count on it as a financial strategy because if that is the only contest you play you will bleed money trust me.
The key is to play the lower entry contests for as long as you can, I’m talking about the $0.25 and $.50 contests on DraftKings and the $0.10 or $0.25 FanDuel. While these contests have many entries as well the competition is so much weaker and your odds of turning a profit are much higher. You want to grind away in these smaller fee contests and all the single entry contests to slowly build up your bankroll to the point where you can take some shots at the high entry, high prize pool contests.
Study The Best Players
DFS has turned a lot into what poker use to be where there are now famous DFS players that seem to dominate the sites from day to day, maybe you have even heard of some of the names by now; guys like Awesomo, Papagates, bric75, moklovin. These guys have figures out the optimal ways to build lineups and have deleveloped their own process. Look at their lineups, study what they are doing. Did they fade the top owned guy this week? How many golfers did they use? Who was their top owned guy? Try to figure out why they are doing what they are doing and see if you can learn from their process to develop your own. Learn from the best and you will be in a much better place to compete with them down the road. DraftKings allows you to download he CSV file for every contests so you can view anyones lineups at any time you want. You can also use the Fantasy Labs Contest Dashboard to view lineups.
Pay Attention To The PGA Tour
Is it possible to be successful at DFS without knowing the sport at all? Actually yes you can be believe or not. After all fantasy sports is just a lot of math and percentages. So if you have a knack for statistics and correlation you could likely figure out how to build winning lineups without knowing anything about sports, however you are going to need to use a lot of tools and optimizers to help you out and those can be quite expensive.
So most people can improve their results by simply following the Tour more closely and paying attention weekly who’s doing what. Whose game is in a groove or who is struggling? Which players are using new equipment and who is spending extra time on the range. The coverage will talk about who’s hot and who’s not and any other tidbits of info that a fantasy golf player can use to their advantage when making picks. Even just watching the events you’ll see what guys are playing really well and just missing some putts and who are the guys that are way off the mark with their golf game.
The key thing to pay attention to is whose putting game is just off right now. They are hitting the ball solid but just can’t make a putt to save their lives. These guys can turn into great sleeper picks because good players usually have variance in their putting game and win it clicks again that’s win they can win a tournament out of nowhere. If you are paying attention you can pick your spots and draft them when they are expected to be at very low ownership.
Play The Weaker Field PGA Tournaments
Most casual fantasy players will show up for the four majors and for some of the other big name events on the PGA Tour, like the Players Championship, but it’s the lesser known tournaments that can mean a better payoff for you. In a smaller tournament you will have maybe 4-6 Top 50 players in the world competing against the rest of the tour field. Many times the cream rises to the top and one of those 4-6 will either win or be atop the leaderboard. Those guys are also the most expensive salary cap players at DFS sites so you need to be strategic about who to pick. Pick two or three that your research has shown have the best chance to win and build a team around them. You can make multiple teams and spread around your chances but the key is then building your lineup with the less popular players. This is where you look at important facts like course history, who’s playing the hot hand leading up to the tournament and whose golf game is best suited for that particular course.
Consider Investing In Fantasy Golf Tools
If you want to seriously make money paying Fantasy Golf then at some you are really going to have to look into paying for some advanced tools to help you out. Most pros use fantasy golf optimizers to produce their lineups, some of the most popular ones are made by RotoGrinders and Fantasy Cruncher. If you are knowledgeable in excel or a database program like MySQL then you can likely build your own at no cost but you will have to spend a considerable amount of time learning how to use the software properly.
Are There Any Cheaper Fantasy Golf Tools?
Yes, we were happy to discover Golfstats.com a few years back and have found it to be the best alternative to paying for more expensive options. It does not have a lineup optimizer but what the site does provide is endless amounts of information and data from every golf tournament in history. The owner Sal Johnson is guru of golf knowledge and stats. His database is massive and has historical performance reports dating back as far as the PGA Tour goes.
What does this do for you a fantasy player? A lot actually, data is your friend and the key to success. Some of the things you can do with endless amounts of golf data found on GolfStats:
– You can view course history for every tournament to see who plays the best at which events,
– You can view individual performances year by year to see who’s improving and who’s on decline
– You can view trends to see what type of golfer performs best on which course. Do long drivers have an advantage at this course? Is scrambling a key? etc..
– You can even produce your own projections if you wanted because you have performance reports for every player in every tournament
Even if you don’t want to do all the work yourself he provides extensive previews for each event including DraftKings analysis. You can read our full GolfStats Review for more in-depth analysis.
If you want to check them out and decide to sign-up for a membership we offering $5 off a membership there for a limited time.
