2016 WGC-HSBC Champions Recap

Welcome back, fantasy golf world! Our article series here will be a more in depth recap of the fantasy golf weekend, this time looking back at the WGC-HSBC Champions over in Shanghai. This will allow us to expand on what some of the top pros did this past week, but also looking at winning lineups in GPP’s, the “perfect lineup”, relevant stats that panned out, among any other thing we can think of! It’s always important to evaluate your process and evolve your game, always looking for improvement. As always, I am using some of the free tools over at TheFantasyFanatics.com and their new website design is just spectacular. Let’s get to it.

Here's your final leaderboard:

• Hideki Matsuyama ($10000)

• Daniel Berger ($7800)

• Henrik Stenson ($9800)

• Bill Haas ($6900)

• Rory McIlroy ($12100)

• Ross Fisher ($7800)

• Rickie Fowler ($8400)

• Francesco Molinari ($8300)

• Sergio Garcia ($9100)

• Russell Knox ($8600)

It’s clear that the correct approach for the week should have been a balanced approach – this is more apparent when looking at DraftKings fantasy points scored and that Rory, the top expensive golfer on the leaderboard, scored the 8th most points. Your perfect lineup looks like this – Hideki, Berger, Haas, Fowler, Molinari, Fisher – all using $49200 of the salary cap and totaling 675 fantasy points. Hideki turned in such a dominant performance in this scoring fest that he tallied 40 more fantasy points than the next highest guy.

So another scoring fest, do we see correlation with scoring stats??

Yep! A much better testament than last week. Looking at pertinent stats coming into the week, we have several categories to talk about. Scoring Average sticks out like a sore thumb – 7 of the top 10 ranked in the top 25 in this category while the other 3 also rank in the top 50. What’s wrong here? Well this was a WGC event so all these golfers are good, so pretty much all rank highly here. This is a good stat to look at for this event but probably a better stat to use to rule out 25% or so of the field. Ranking next highest with 6 of the top 10 of golfers showing on the leaderboard were Ball Striking, Strokes Gained Tee to Green, and Greens in Regulation. The latter of the two being a normal week to week good indicated of scoring success as well.

Who fared well in fantasy?

Looking at the top tournaments, the $3 Birdie sported the highest score, as usual since it has the most participation. DraftKings user “jetsfan017” took the top prize with a lineup of Matt Kuchar ($7,900, 15.5% overall ownership), Russell Knox ($8,600, 16.7%), Daniel Berger ($7,800, 5.7%), Francesco Molinari ($8,300, 4.2%), Bill Haas ($6,900, 5.4%), and Hideki Matsuyama ($10,000, 15.5%) for a total of 648.5 fantasy points. They also left $500 salary on the table, a great strategy for no cut fields to differentiate yourself and greatly reduce your risk of someone having a duplicate lineup.

Let’s look at some of the top pros:

Jetsfan017 –

Decided to take a deeper look at jetsfan as they are another max entry player who has seen success. Jets entered 150 lineups into the $3 Birdie and used 44 players (remember, there were 78 in the field). Jumping into the core of players:

• Kevin Na ($7200, 33%)

• Adam Scott ($9400, 33%)

• Rory McIlroy ($12100, 29%)

• Matt Kuchar ($7900, 22%)

• Bubba Watson ($8800, 22%)

You see Jets trying to take advantage of a couple of slight value plays with Na and Kuchar. Looking down into the player list, I notice there aren’t any $6k range guys in 11+% ownership except for Haas (16%) and Woodland ($6700), so Jets saves most of the cheapies for the 1%-10% range (uses 9 of them in this range!) and therefore minimizes some risk that way. This is interesting to me because they say usually in a no cut event you can take more risks and perhaps not be as penalized. What I also want to point out in Jets’ lineups is that 75% of players selected were used in 15 lineups or more. As we’ve talked about already, using less than full salary cap is ideal in a no cut event to differentiate yourself. Jets does a fantastic job in this as only 6 of the 150 lineups have the max salary utilized.

@Jae686 – Jason Eisele

Another successful max enter guy, Jason used 45 golfers to fill his 100 lineups in the $33 Dogleg this week. Jason ended up taking the top prize with his lineup of Matt Kuchar ($7,900, 11.7% overall ownership), Bill Haas ($6,900, 4.9%), Hideki Matsuyama ($10,000, 13.8%), Rickie Fowler ($8,400, 11.6%), J.B. Holmes ($7,200, 5.4%), Adam Scott ($9,400, 24.8%) and scoring 610 fantasy points. Again, you can possibly score much less in lower participated tourneys to win. Let’s look at his core:

• Henrik Stenson ($9800, 37%)

• Adam Scott ($9400, 31%)

• Matt Kuchar ($7900, 30%)

• Bill Haas ($6900, 26%)

• Rory McIlroy ($12100, 25%)

We see similar ownership numbers from Jets but a different roll out as Jason focuses on two of the top golfers in the world that are slightly under priced. Doing so gives him flexibility to either key in on a balanced roster approach, or pair Stenson/Scott with Rory or DJ (23%) and take a stars and scrubs approach. Another similarity with Jets is Jason mostly stays away from the $6k range (except Haas, Luiten, and Woodland) until he gets to the 12% ownership mark and below, where he rolls out 8 from that salary range! It’s clear that they are wanting to limit most of their ownership on the cheap guys and trust the slightly below average up to the top guys to carry their teams. It’s interesting too that at least two of the max entry players found great success this week in a no cut event. Seems perhaps that many lineups in a short field does give them an edge over the field. We get back to normal next week with the Shriners.

Feel free to drop any comments or questions – I go by NateKnocks to the fantasy and twitter worlds (Knocks being a tribute to where I grew up – Knoxville, TN) and have been playing fantasy golf for about a year and a half now. I honestly haven’t found a more fun fantasy game than a four day golf “sweat” and I believe we are all out to help each other. May the best lineup win.