CIMB Classic Recap 2016

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 CIMB Classic overseas in Malaysia. 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:

• Justin Thomas ($10400)

• Hideki Matsuyama ($11300)

• Derek Fathauer ($6200)

• Anirban Lahiri ($8300)

• Marc Leishman ($7000)

• Keegan Bradley ($7600)

• Scott Hend ($7800)

• Tyrone van Aswegen ($6700)

• James Hahn ($7200)

We see two of the top priced guys paid off their salaries and then some, but also rounding out the leaderboard (top 9 is what we are looking at) is a good mix of cheap guys. They say that in a no cut event, you can take more chances. Kudos to you if you shot out a stars and scrubs strategy this week as we see that was clearly the way to go. It was a frustrating week for me because I like stats based models and leading into the segment where I discuss pertinent stats, there just aren’t any that tied most of these guys together as a predictor of success. The only thing relevant (well, perhaps) that I found is Apex Height – 6 of the 9 golfers listed rank in the top 25 (or in the case of this statistic, the top 25 highest average apex height). Do with this what you will – could be a signifier of the softer conditions all throughout the weekend. While scoring categories are good indicators of DraftKings points, only Matsuyama was ranked in the top 25 in Birdie or Better % coming into the week.  I'll call this week more of a random week in terms of stat correlation.  

Who fared well in fantasy?

DraftKings user “craigbengel” took down the $3 Birdie this week with a massive score of 689.50 fantasy points. He rolled out 5 of the top 10 in Thomas, Matsuyama, Fathauer, Hend, Si Woo Kim, and also a top 25 finish in Adam Hadwin. Craig used all but $100 of the salary cap, leaving him a greater chance of having his lineup duplicated, but he did a good job selecting his “punt” guys who were low owned – Hadwin, Hend, and Fathauer (all came in around 6% owned). All these guys obliterated the course, shooting under par in the high teens and low twenties, giving us very large scores across all contests. The perfect lineup, by the way, would be the combination of Thomas, Matsuyama, Lahiri, Fathauer, Leishman, and van Aswegen for a mind blowing 747 fantasy points!

Let’s see some top pros:

@futureoffantasy – Josh Culp

Josh entered 110 lineups into the $3 Birdie and used 65 players. I really like his ownership strategy as his “core” is between 25-30% owned, and he slowly deescalates from there. Here’s his setup:

• Rafael Cabrera-Bello ($9200, 31%)

• Charles Howell III ($7000, 30%)

• Sergio Garcia ($10100, 28%)

• Adam Scott ($10900, 27%)

• Russell Knox ($8200, 25%)

We see he zones in on some of the best golfers in the field as well as searches for good value in CHIII. I like this setup because he is focusing on guys who should perform well at the top, not going too crazy in ownership numbers, and then rolls through most of the cheap “punts” at the bottom of his ownership (20 of his 25 golfers under $7k in price are at or below 6% ownership in his construction). This strategy isn’t necessarily better than going 100% ownership on a guy, etc, but I’m a fan of it because he sets up a wide variety of lineups and hopes to hit the right combination. I’ll direct you back to the leaderboard at the top – with such a mixed bag of golfers there, it’s clear that this strategy would have been the correct one this week with the “randomness” of results.

@SaahilSud – Saahil Sud –

We see a similar roll out in Saahil’s construction, though he uses only 24 players to fill his (max) 150 lineups. Here’s his core:

• Adam Scott ($10900, 98%)

• Sergio Garcia ($10100, 63%)

• Keegan Bradley ($7600, 60%)

• Daniel Berger ($8500, 56%)

• Marc Leishman ($7000, 55%)

Saahil also focuses on two of the top priced guys and doesn’t dip incredibly low with his core players. He utilizes this strategy more often than not and is clearly trying to gain an edge by eliminating 70% of the field and cashes huge when his core does hit the way he expects them to. Saahil ends up avoiding other top golfers except for Thomas & Matsuyama, though both he uses around 1% each. Since he used two top golfers so frequently, we see a lot of sub $7k guys being utilized up to 40% (Swafford & Danny Lee) on his lineups. Saahil does a great job of differentiating his lineups this week – only a small percentage had duplicates and he only used the max salary cap about 20% of the time.

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!