Way back in 2016, I wrote about an idea called Vegas Bargain Ratings, which might seem more complicated than it actually is.
The basic premise: DraftKings’ wages are highly correlated with the odds of winning a golf tournament, but it’s not a perfect choice. Highlighting the golfers it is for Not correct – and this assumes that the liquid betting market is more efficient than static DFS wages, which is not a positive result – we can identify golfers with incorrect prices, or those that the betting market considers undervalued.
We can do this exercise with a variety of metrics, including our catch-call metric, Long-term adjusted rounded score, which is the average hits on a course with the adjustments made to take into account the difficulty of the field and the strength of the field .
So I can also compare the long-term adjusted round score with the odds of winning to identify which golfers are undervalued in the betting market compared to their long-term play.
This shouldn’t be the end of the betting history – the shape of the course and the history are also important, as is the recent game when there isn’t a layoff like we had – but it’s a valuable data point in research for this week. .
Let’s start with the DFS side of things; bets will be in the section below.
The best and worst DFS values according to the betting market
What to do with Bryson DeChambeau: this is the question this week.
Honestly? While Nate Lashley has long since won the event last year and the week looks set for a similar conclusion, I’m not out of Bryson. I mean, I don’t want to pay a price of 6/1 for him to win the tournament – but in DFS, yes, I have no problem using it in cash games.
Whether it’s narrative (it’s clearly zoned right now thanks to its extreme training regiment and the fact that it’s playing in all tournaments) or its data (it can earn as 60 hits on the field from the tee) is intriguing.
Forget your odds of winning, which are obviously high. It is also getting close to the money to enter the top 10 and is a huge favorite for making the cut. It is incredibly valuable in cash games, where the goal is really to try to involve all six golfers.
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Yes, it is expensive, but not as expensive as the betting market should be. And the reason, as I discuss, I feel nauseous (but thanks for humoring me once again), is because DraftKings operates with a salary limit and cannot correctly evaluate the upper level. If they put it where he is they should to be, it would be too expensive to be a list, and, well, it’s not fun.
Consequently, it is a fairly easy game in cash games given its security. Tournaments, however, are a different animal due to the dynamics of ownership. Will it approach 30% in this weaker field? Probably not, but that calculation is important: it is incredibly negative EV (expected value) to duplicate the formations, and the chances of this happening obviously increase with a golfer owned by 30%.
So I would use this exercise to try and identify the guys to use in cash games – and if it seems like a week is always tending towards a more balanced approach in tournaments rather than stars and scrubs, it’s time to take advantage of it.
The best and worst bet values based on the score of the correct round
Again, we can do this same strategy with the long-term correct rounded score and the final probabilities. Using regression, we can “predict” what a player probably implied they should to be and compare it to their real implied probability of winning.
Of course, there are also some complications here. In particular, there is much more to the handicapped than long-term play. The history of the course and the adaptation really matter, as does the current form and many factors based on the narrative. In addition, long-term metrics may not capture a recovering young golfer, such as Viktor Hovland.
In addition, the betting markets have juice, and in particular it is not evenly distributed over all golfers uniformly. Therefore, the implied odds for both actual and predicted odds are over 100% – I kept it that way only because of the uncertainty of the hold. This is more of an exercise to identify golfers who are priceless than something that should be used in an optimizer anyway.
As far as golfers are concerned, this week’s exercise has certainly exaggerated the probability of winning for some lower level golfers. Wesley Bryan, Cameron Tringale and Russell Knox should obviously be less than 4% to win the tournament, but it shows that they are probably a bit underestimated in the DFS landscape given their long-term talent.
Bryan is a particularly interesting guy this week. He’s coming out of a lengthy injury layoff, which is why his LT Adj Rd score is so low – it’s a small sample size. Those tournaments, however, were impressive and, as Josh Perry noted here, Bryan led the field in Strokes Gained: Approach last week.
Again, this regression is designed to help you easily spot golfers who are a little underestimated based on their long-term talent through our proprietary metric. I wouldn’t blindly bet to win, but it’s possible that guys like Tringale, Adam Hadwin, Rory Sabbatini and others are also a little underestimated in safer markets like them to enter the top-40, for example.
And again, given DraftKings’ salaries and betting odds are the same, it could also mean that those guys are a little underestimated given their talent and could be worthy of dart shots in the tournaments there.
Good luck this week!
