Welcome to Masters week, my friends, and welcome to a whole new way to play fantasy golf and PGA DFS at StatHero! I’m ecstatic to be bringing you an article covering a few of my favorite plays for Thursday’s Round 1. But before we get to that, click the link below to sign-up with promo code “Awesemo,” then follow along to go over the rules, strategy and PGA DFS picks for this November edition of The Masters.
Fantasy Golf: The Masters PGA DFS Picks | StatHero
StatHero Fantasy Golf Rules:
StatHero’s massive Masters offering is a $15 buy-in, $10,000 guaranteed prize pool with a 10-entry max. If you’ve played in NFL survivor pools and a DraftKings Showdown contest before, this is truly the perfect marriage of the two. For Round 1, simply pick five golfers to complete your lineup with one of them designated the Team MVP, meaning they’ll accrue double the fantasy points for the day:
The entire field is at your disposal; in other words, there is no salary cap preventing you from putting certain players together. But once a player has been used, you may not use him again for any future rounds of the tournament. For example, if you utilize Jon Rahm as your Team MVP in Round 1, he will not be available to put into your lineup for Rounds 2, 3 or 4. The scoring system for all four rounds, including extra points for the final round, is listed below:
Here’s the most important part: Instead of competing against your peers for most points in a lineup each round, your lineup faces StatHero’s pre-disclosed lineup. In order to advance to the next round, you must beat StatHero’s fantasy point totals (a tie will eliminate your team). Thursday’s Round 1 lineup has already been posted:
In order to advance to Round 2 where you will build another team, you must beat this StatHero lineup in Round 1. If you can defeat StatHero’s lineup on all four days, you will share the prize pool with any other entries that do the same. And if your lineup is the only one standing after the Final Round, you’ll take home the whole pot!
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StatHero Fantasy Golf Strategy
First off, I love competing on new sites in new formats, especially when they combine the best elements from multiple game types. This is part survivor pool, part game theory, and part educated guessing at what the StatHero lineup will look like as the tournament progresses. I would have to imagine that everyone in the field — including StatHero — will stack their best available players together for the Final Round. So the key is not only to advance each day, but to have a stacked lineup of players to choose from at the finish.
As I go through lineup-building scenarios, here are my three main strategies for Round 1:
- Stack Round 1 with the best plays available and hope StatHero’s lineup goes bananas against the field. If a large portion of entries are eliminated in Round 1 and you utilize five studs to squeak out a win, there’s still a large enough portion of elite players in the field at your disposal going forward.
- Build five completely different players in Round 1 from the StatHero lineup, but mixing in studs and not-complete-studs. After all, you’re only going to play 20 players total in the entire contest, so no need to go too thin (unless the weather looks excellent for a certain tee time grouping). That way you could have access to a different grouping of plays for the final round.
- Set up 3v3 situations each day, since you’re allowed two of the same players as the StatHero lineup per round. In other words, build a near-identical lineup to StatHero, and utilize three head-to-head matchups you should be a favorite in. For example, Sungjae Im is my lowest-projected performer for Round 1 out of the five players in StatHero’s lineup. If I simply build the StatHero lineup with the exception of Im, I could pit him against Dustin Johnson or Bryson DeChambeau and be a massive favorite. I expect this to be a popular way to build lineups, so if Im shoots 67 and I don’t utilize this strategy, that’s a massive portion of the field that could be in danger of elimination.
StatHero PGA DFS Picks
- Tyrell Hatton at Team MVP: I’m a fan of matching StatHero’s Team MVP and trying to differentiate at the other four spots of my lineup. The hoodie-enthusiast has been flat-out good in 2020 with a whopping nine top-10s in 16 events. And with three sub-67 first rounds in his last four events, Hatton’s propensity to get out of the gate strong freaks me out to fade.
- Webb Simpson: Im has the very last tee time of the day, so I’m going to target him in 1v1 situations with players that have earlier tee times. Enter Simpson, who tees off over five hours earlier at 7:11 a.m. off of 10 tee. I like his high-draw ball flight at Augusta, as well as his familiarity with the grass conditions at this time of year since he lives nearby in Charlotte, N.C.
- Kevin Kisner: Kisner played his college golf at the University of Georgia, so he is another player with familiarity to the nuances of November golf in the state. Like Simpson, he has an early 7:22 a.m. that should mitigate some wind risk. I’m also not terribly saddened to see Kisner eliminated from my pool before the final round, so he makes for a solid pivot off one of StatHero’s players.
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