DFS PGA Odds and Leverage Data for Draftkings Tournaments - CJ Cup Byron Nelson May 2 2025

Welp got beat pretty badly 2 weeks ago with Morikawa laying an egg in a no cut event. Cashing most til day 4 when the sand burial came for me. Thats the breaks of leverage though, where you will either get first or last. If you are prepared for one or the other, this write up is for you!

Updated 2:26am

Vince Whaley and Justin Lower are the 2nd and 3rd Greenest dots on the chart. May get one or the other involved in my Scheffler build.

Odds and Situations

This is one of the more slanted scatterplots I've built to date towards one player - Scheffler. The price, odds, ownership and essentially the lock status has never looked like this before on the upper end. I show his implied ownership should be 90% based on his success odds and expectations. Understanding his ownership is that high, it means I will shift a lot of focus on my remaining 5 plays so that they are high leverage (table 3). Hubbard, Whaley, Putnam, and Lower all seem to be candidates to consider to offset the leverage and cost. I'll dive deeper into that scatter plot when comparing to optimal percentages. Spieth also looks like he has specifically done well here with 2 top 10 finishes in the past 5 years, yet not quite the full leverage I tend to seek in a tournament recommendation.

Core But Leveraged Plays

Only two players are currently showing up in this visual who check all the boxes of a core play that also hold leverage. Wallace and Power both have a top 10 here. They are mid range in price so it likely requires a balanced build to get to either of them without stretching too far with Scheffler. Power looks like he has played better on average in his finishes recently.

Course Fits

The course looks to be a little bit less about driving and moreso about putting/approach play. Looking into the course stats this is one of the easier courses to score on so birdie makers might want to be in your lineups. I will pull last year's optimal to confirm this.

Last Year's Optimal

Confirmation this is a birdie fest. 23 golfers last year were able to put up scores over 100 points, and 772 total lineup points were possible, so this will be a scorer's paradise. I will say that some people were less leverage than I'd like to pursue but Kohles may have been the top leverage play on the slate. A side note is that Justin Lower played here last year, finished 24th but was top 10 in dk points due to putting up 27 birdies here.

2023 Optimal

I pulled the 2023 optimal as well because I noticed that Scheffler played this year too. He was not optimal at 11k price so now I'm inclined to think he might not make it this year either in a case where 9K golfers may do well. The score lines up though. That writeup from 2023 is located here: https://www.dfsed.com/post/dfs-pga-odds-and-leverage-for-draftkings-at-t-byron-nelson-may-11-2023

Birdie Counts

The left side finds guys with leverage. The right chart is sorted by total birdies. Ben Griffin looks like an excellent candidate for scoring as does Cha Kim if your lineup allows for it. I may build a lineup using this view to maximize leverage and birdie potential.

SG over past 3 years

Just sorting this by the strokes gained data, Scheffler has gained the most strokes by a bit here in this field, while Sungjae and Hubbard also look intriguing per their birdies per round averages.

Historical Darts

These guys have had top 20 finishes at least half the time they have played at correlated courses. History here isnt exactly predictive of future success but figured I'd pull this list for this purpose since there were multiple highly correlated courses to this one.

Under-owned and Optimal Plays with Odds Value

This list will update one more time this evening and possibly once early in the morning if I wake up in time. Bridgeman and Ghim stood out the most. However I have to zoom in to see the names of dots who are crammed tightly into the cheap range in the next update.

Put it all together and lets see what comes out for the optimal. I may post that later as well so check back!

Updated:

I temporarily removed Scheffler in order to zoom in on the plays underneath and found these 5 plays. I think 2 of them make my lineup with Scheffler and 3 will make it without him. The 4 with a line indicate they have the birdie counts above average.