The Approach -- WGC-HSBC Champions

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The Course

We finish off the Asian Swing this week with a WGC event in Shanghai at Sheshan International golf course. Shehan is a 7264 yard par-72 with a narrow fairways, guarded by thick rough and a boatload of water hazards.

With three reachable par-fives and a driveable par-four on the sixteenth, this course gets the reputation as a bombers track, but we’ve also seen some shorter hitters succeed here – Matthew Fitzpatrick, Brian Harman, and Kyle Stanley all finished in the top-ten last year.

If the bombers narrative affects ownership, I’ll make some accuracy/ball-striking lineups to gain an edge on the field.

Remember to get those lineups in – the tournament starts at 9 o’clock EST tonight.

GPP strategy

As is always the case with these small-field, no cut events, chase those birdie makers. For FanDuel, you’re almost always better off fading the insane chalk at the top, but with so many big names this week, there might not be that obvious 40%+ owned player. We’ll have a better idea once Awesemo’s grades come out this afternoon.

Again, we’ve got no shot-tracker, so very little data to go on this week. That’ll mean using weighted round scores, Vegas bargain ratings and ownership, to your advantage.

Fortunately, we’re back to golf normalcy next week, with The Shriners Open in Las Vegas.

FanDuel

Got some bad news for you FanDuelers out there. This isn’t a great week for Awesemo value grades. Not a single player in the field has a value better than a “C” grade. With no obvious values out there, you’re probably better off focusing on ownership, taking lesser-owned players with similar grades and values, as opposed to simply locking a player in because of how high their value is.

DraftKings

The pricing is much softer on DraftKings this week, with a number of players in the high 6000s and low 7000s receiving strong value grades. That implies a more feasible stars and scrubs approach to lineup construction. We’re still not seeing a lot of crossover between value and grade though – only one player has a “B” or higher in both categories.

Basically, we’re dealing with very different pricing structures this week, so take that into account when you’re building lineups on either site.

The plays

Matt Wallace: DraftKings: $6700, Grade: C, Value: A; FanDuel: Grade: C, Value: D

The 28-year-old Englishman has two wins in the last two months on the Euro tour at the BMW Int (three of every four events are sponsored by BMW on the Euro tour) and the Made in Denmark. In between those wins, he had three missed cuts and a 50^th place finish. Basically, this is a boom or bust GPP play. If he’s hitting fairways, he can contend with the best of them. He has the highest Vegas bargain rating on DraftKings and the second highest on FanDuel.

The stats:

32 in Birdies per round (euro)
8^th in Eagles per round (euro)
153 in driving accuracy (euro)

Thorbjorn Olesen: DraftKings Grade: C, Value: C; FanDuel: Grade: C, Value: C

I challenge you to find one golf writeup that doesn’t call him Thunderbear. And with good reason – it’s far and away the best nickname in golf, maybe even in all of sports. Olesen has quietly put together a fantastic run of form of late, with a win, and six top-20s in his last seven events on the Euro tour, and he’s got two top-20s at this course. Olesen is a better play on FanDuel, where he his is the top priced golfer with a minimum ‘C’ grade. He ranks first in my model, which back-tests metrics that have correlated with success at Sheshan.

The stats