THE PLAYERS Championship week means MILLY MAKERS! This week we will touch on the CORE Plays as usual but I want to highlight some thoughts around Milly Maker strategy and thoughts.
Winning a Milly Maker is seemingly every DFS player's dream. There is no higher mountain in Daily Fantasy than throwing in $10 to $20 and having $1,000,000 deposited into your DraftKings account on Sunday night.
So how do you do it?
Maxing out these contests help but similar to lottos your odds aren't grossly higher with 150 entries vs 10 or 20 entries. Strategy is really the key for maximizing your EV no matter how many lineups you play. So let's talk through some simple strategies to implement this week for THE PLAYERS.
Lineup Correlation
While there is traditionally no correlation between golfers (all are independent outcomes) there is correlation in waves, especially with questionable weather...which is what we see this week. If you are looking to maximize your 0.001% outcomes, stacking waves will give you an edge. Wave stacks correlate quite often, so maximizing the number of players in a single lineup is a big advantage. How often do you see even in seemingly good weather, the AM wave plays 1 to 2 shots better than the PM wave. This is easily done in LineupIQ, but even if you're building by hand, the additional correlation in the event that a drastic wave advantage does occur is a huge edge. Most likely you have a player pool consisting of players in both waves, so simply taking the extra effort to pair up players based on wave is an undervalued strategy, especially this week.
Ownership
We all know ownership is important but how do you quantify "good" vs "bad" ownership. You can use a simple ownership cap of 72% (average of 12% per player) or a more advanced approach is using GeoMean. GeoMean under 10% is a strategy all of the top players implement. Many times our sims will push these to the top anyways, but it is an important strategy to understand and be able to use. What does GeoMean do that Sum Ownership doesn't? GeoMean weighs single players uniqueness. You can have a lineup with one or 2 players over 20% while still having a lower GeoMean than simply having 6 players between 10-15%. Be aggressive in the Milly Maker, you are entering into an extremely large pool of lineups, and contrarian plays are extremely valuable.
Rules
Setting rules also applies to the prior strategy of ownership. You can set an aggregate rule for GeoMean cap of 10%, or you could set a rule to use AT LEAST 2 players under 6% or AT LEAST 1 player under 4%, as an example. These low owned plays provide massive leverage when trying to separate from the field. LineupIQ also offers IF THEN rules, so you could theoretically say that if a player over 18% is used then you must use at least 1 player under 5%. This will help you avoid too much overlap with the field. Even if your lineup is unique, you could have 3 or 4 player combos that are played by upwards of 20% of the field which makes those low owned plays your difference maker.
Projections & Sims
Projections are very important. Even with massive Standard Deviations for players, the mean projection is what drives player exposures. How do Sims play a role? As you know, in Milly Makers we are trying to capture the top 1% outcomes (or higher) from every player in your lineup. Other DFS simulations fall short where they treat all players as equal, where their distributions are based around their mean and fluctuate 35 points above or below that mean in every simulation. But we know golf scores are more complex than that, especially with the cut. LineupIQ simulations run full bimodal simulations so that a player with a 25% chance to make the cut still shows the same upside as Rory McIlrory or Collin Morikawa, but obviously much lower frequency. Using StdDev instead of bimodal distribution could lead to a player like Lee Hodges never showing enough upside to win a GPP, but we know his outcomes can reach those top % outcomes.
Diversity
Just a couple quick thoughts on diversity. I actually think this depends a lot on the number of lineups you are playing. If you're playing 10 lineups, it is totally fine to diversify less, especially on top players where you concentrate your exposures, but as your pool grows you should look to spread out your ownerships a bit more to ensure more lineups have "outs".
Strategies that involve player skills or attributes is fine but harder to quantify. An example of this could be bombers at the US Open, even in bad form. Or perhaps a focus on Driving Accuracy. These player profiles could be played out in the course of 4 rounds, so it is similar to the correlation tip but not something I implement often.
Be comfortable getting uncomfortable. Outside of Augusta where you can be much more chalky (mainly due to fewer players), if you're going for first place, lean into the variance that is in golf and be willing to click or allow for some ugly names in your lineups.