I made my daily fantasy sports debut a few months ago. Some friends in an online discussion forum had created a weekly DraftKings golf competition, and it sounded like good and mostly harmless fun, so I asked if I could join in.
Now, I’m through the looking glass. The way I watch the PGA Tour has changed – massively, and possibly irrevocably.
DraftKings is by far the most popular website for daily fantasy golf competitions. Before each tour event, DraftKings assigns every golfer in the field a dollar value between roughly $5,000 and $13,000, and you get a budget of $50,000 with which to pick a lineup of six golfers. Each golfer scores points for you on every hole they play: 0.5 points for a par, minus-0.5 points for a bogey, minus-1 point for a double bogey or worse, 3 points for a birdie, and 8 points for an eagle. They also earn points based upon their final standing in the tournament – 30 points for a win, 20 for second, 18 for third, etc., down to 1 point for finishing between 41st and 50th – and bonuses for stuff like making three birdies in a row, shooting a bogey-free round, and posting four rounds in the 60s.
In my league of online friends, eight people pony up a $5 entry fee ($10 for the big tournaments) each week, and the two with the most points win everyone else’s money after DraftKings takes its cut. I started playing in March, and for the first few weeks I used my years of accumulated golf knowledge, a sliver of additional research, and a large dollop of gut instinct to choose my lineups. I never finished in the top two; I led the Masters competition with 18 holes to go, thanks in no small part to my bargain ($5,500) selection of Bernhard Langer, but as Langer faded on Sunday, so did my hopes of success.
I thought DraftKings would enhance my enjoyment of golf on television, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays when the drama of Sunday feels so far away. Instead, I found myself hate-watching each tournament, rooting insanely hard against 90% of the field. The stakes – $5 entry, $25.20 top prize – weren’t large, but they existed, and I struggled to ignore them as I watched. And I found myself caring less if Jordan Spieth birdied his final two holes to force a Masters playoff than whether Hideki Matsuyama might overtake Matthew Fitzpatrick and cost me 2 points if Fitzpatrick slipped from a tie for sixth into a tie for seventh. This wasn’t fun.
So for the RBC Heritage, the week after the Masters, I took a different tack: I went all in. I fired up an Excel spreadsheet, compiled lists of every Top 25 finish at Harbour Town since 2010, plotted everyone’s last four Tour results, even charted wind and weather forecasts relative to morning and afternoon tee times on Thursday and Friday. And then I chose eight unique combinations of 18 different golfers and entered those lineups into eight competitions, mostly “Double Up” events in which the top 44% or so of entrants double their initial stake but also one $3 event with a much smaller percentage of prizewinners but big rewards for the winners, including a top prize of $100,000. My reasoning was twofold: first, spreading my bets would make it harder to know who to root for and against, and therefore easier to enjoy what I was watching. Second, it might be fun to impersonate an inveterate gambler in the name of investigative journalism.
Everything started well: through two rounds at Harbour Town, one of my lineups in the $100,000 competition was in 143rd place out of nearly 100,000 entries, and sugarplum fairies were dancing in my head. But something funny happened: an ill-timed bogey here, an ill-timed birdie there, and by Sunday evening all of my lineups together had won exactly my original total stake and no more. I tried again at the Texas Open the following week (12 lineups, 21 golfers), and again I broke exactly even. My research became more and more extensive: now I have a database of every golfer’s PGA Tour results (and some European Tour results) for the past three months and their six-year track records at each event. But no matter how hard I work, I never win or lose no more than a few dollars. And I still have no top-two finishes within the original group that brought me down this ridiculous path.
My spreadsheet for the Dean & Deluca Invitational at Colonial: welcome to my Daily Fantasy Hell
DraftKings has taught me several lessons about professional golf. One is that form is fickle: e.g., in the first seven events after the Masters, the previous results of each tournament winner were MC (missed cut), T14 (tied for 14th), T55, MC, T5, T54 and T18. Nobody stays hot forever, but golfers like James Hahn – eight MCs in a row followed by a win at Quail Hollow – can find form from nowhere. We’re firmly in the post-Tiger era now: there are no sure bets in golf anymore.
Perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned to appreciate every golfer in each tournament. Jordan Spieth headlined the Colonial field and duly won in spectacular style, but Bronson Burgoon and Si Woo Kim and Hudson Swafford and Blayne Barber were there too – and when you study the form charts and see nothing but “MC” and “DNP” (did not play) in some rows, you really begin to fathom just how difficult it is to fashion a good PGA Tour career. I usually concentrate on and write about the best players in the world – their triumphs, their failures, their futures – and in that context I want Quail Hollow to showcase Rory or Rickie, or the next Rory or Rickie, not a playoff between Hahn and Roberto Castro. But the PGA Tour is as much about the Hahns and Castros as it is the Rorys and Rickies, and DraftKings makes me realize that more than I ever thought I could.
Still, fantasy golf annoys the hell out of me. The stats geek in me loves it, but the golfing purist in me detests it, and Dustin Johnson (whose charms are normally lost on me) finding the water on the 71st hole in Dallas – costing me at least $20 in the process – may be my most negatively ambivalent moment in golfing history. So this is what gambling addiction feels like, eh? I really hate golf sometimes.