🛣️ The Road To Valhalla

📢 Fore, Please:

• I’ll be on-site at Valhalla this week, so the Live Chat will be Tuesday 8PM ET — see you there!

• If your O&D Season is going horribly (like mine), you now have a second chance. There’s a new $50 O&D starting at the PGA Championship and running through the BMW Championship. I’ve heard your feedback and the payout structure is much flatter.

  • You can sign-up here: https://bit.ly/44pB7DP

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Rory McIlroy: $11,800 | 144.0 PTS
Ben An: $8,100 | 104.5 PTS
Jason Day: $7,800 | 92.0 PTS
Sungjae Im: $7,900 | 88.0 PTS
Mackenzie Hughes: $6,600 | 81.5 PTS
Sepp Straka: $7,300 | 78.0 PTS
TOTAL: $49,500 | 588.0 PTS

😭 Rory’s Double Ruins The Fun

I had some really awesome Rory McIlroy stats ready to fire off on Sunday night as he was in the midst of a historically great round and week.

He had cracked 21.9 strokes gained for the week, which would have been the third best tournament for any golfer since the start of the 2020 season.

He also was trending towards gaining 9.18 strokes in the final round which would have been the 4th best round of his career — out of 1,158 rounds.

But — he made double on 18 and ruined my fun. So now you get to see the “what if” numbers here.

😡 Xander’s Weekend Woes

The hits keep coming for Xander Schauffele who hasn’t won since the summer of 2022 and he continues to struggle when the lights are the brightest.

Since his most recent win, he’s the 4th best player in the world, gaining 1.70 strokes to the field and sitting behind only Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm during that stretch.

The “Big Four” account for 19 total wins during that span … but Schauffele has zero of them. The weekend struggles aren’t just your imagination, they are showing up on the stat sheet as well.

Rounds 1 + 2: +2.07
Rounds 3 + 4: +1.31

I generally think that we overvalue wins because there’s so much “Win Luck” involved in every event. But after seeing the staggering difference in victories between his peers, I’m starting to think there’s something more to it.

🤼 Crowded At The Top

The top of the board is jam-packed this week with eight different golfers priced at $10,000 or more on DraftKings. That ties the record for most $10K+ golfers in a single week since I’ve been tracking salaries.

Those eight golfers have played in a total of 49 PGA Championships since 2014 and account for (5) wins and (20) Top 10 finishes. They received absolutely zero help from Ludvig Aberg who will be making his PGA Championship debut.

🔥 The Props Are On Fire!

Underdog has gone nuts with their PGA Championship props — currently with over 350 options by my count. They’ve also upped the deposit match to $250 so there’s no better time than now.

Below is my favorite round one play along with a few other considerations.

Tail or Fade: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/es-65G610U0fg
(This includes up to a $250 deposit match if you use the code “RICK”)

Tiger Woods & Phil Mickelson (Higher) on R1 Strokes:
Let’s pick on the old guys! If you had asked me to set this line myself, I’d probably been closer to 74 or 75 on a golf course that will play incredibly long and also be very penal. These two have offered little evidence that they can get anywhere close to the field average unless it’s at Augusta National. I hope I’m wrong, but my hopes are quite low.

I made a mistake on my Monday Preview show wondering why the payouts were so low on golfer’s fourth round finishing position. For example, Scottie Scheffler “Better than 1.5 Finishing Position” is 2.5x while his odds to win are +460.

Well, someone pointed out to me that since you cannot enter just one leg on Underdog, it is going to effectively make Scheffler’s odds +500 and actually better than his outright odds.

Yeah, hand up. That’s on me. I owe you and Underdog an apology! Here’s a decent example:

If you think Scottie Scheffler is going to win and Brooks Koepka is going to finish inside the Top 5, you could put those together and get a 16.87x return or $10 to return $168.70. Obviously there are endless combinations but these should be really fun sweats.

Tail: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/es-KwKWRlE7tE

🩲 RAW, But Not Blockie

Strokes Gained is the best metric we have to compare golfers. It just says “how much better (or worse) were you than your opponents?”. Now, there are lots of ways to weigh those numbers based on field strength, course rating and a variety of other factors. But let’s keep it raw.

Here are the best players in the world since January 1st with the LIV Golfers highlighted.

Dean Burmester has been objectively awesome. And this run of numbers doesn’t even include his two DP World Tour wins at the end of 2023. He’s gaining strokes throughout the bag and has a game built for long courses.

📌 Pins Don’t Matter At Majors

In my opinion, there is one really simple way to succeed at Major Championships. Hit the green. That means forgetting that the pin even exists and simply playing every approach to the middle of the green. And I’m very serious about this for a few reasons:

1) In Majors, greens are hard to hit. Usually firm and fast conditions, being able to have more birdie (and even par) opportunities than your peers is one way to separate from them.

2) Par is often a good score — building off #1, Majors aren’t played at TPC Craig Ranch. Shooting even par every day would have provided the following results over the last five years:

2023: T12
2022: T13
2021: T17
2020: T43
2019: 7th

3) The penalty for missing the green, especially on the short side, is massive at Majors compared to regular TOUR events.

The idea of hitting to the middle of the green has been adopted by Brooks Koepka, Viktor Hovland and others as they try to pursue history.

📜 Here’s an Example

Let me provide a real world example from the 3rd hole at Valhalla.

This is a 203 yard par-3. guarded by large bunkers and “Floyd’s Fork” (water hazard) for bigger misses to the right. The problem is that the Fork plays bigger because the terrain slopes right towards the hazard to collect poorly hit shots to the right.

On the left — Represents a 200 shot dispersion pattern for a TOUR player hitting a 6-iron into this green, using the middle of the surface as his target. I see a lot of safe shots, a few looks at birdie but rarely a bogey or double.

On the right — That same dispersion pattern but using the round one pin location from 2014 as the target. There are definitely a lot of birdie looks here but there’s a ton of bogeys, doubles and worse. That bunker, to that pin location, was dead in 2014. You were more likely to make bogey than anything else.

This is obviously an oversimplification but something that professional golfers find difficult to actually commit to. They see the pin, they think they can hit every shot and it’s intoxicating to try and make a birdie. As they try to put their foot on the pedal, it’s easier for things to go sideways. The best Major players are the patient ones.

🤏 Aim Small, Miss Small

The PGA of America often employs “Graduated Rough”, meaning that the rough gets thicker and the penalty gets worse the further away from the fairway. It seems that Valhalla will be no different this week and here’s an example from no. 5:

The landing area at 300 yards is narrow — just 28 yards of fairway. Add in a few yards of rough and golfers will have a 41 yard wide landing zone to avoid bunkers/hay at the 300-yard mark. That might sound like a lot but most pros plan for a 60 yard dispersion with their drivers. And that’s in ideal conditions.

This is not unique to no. 5 — there are countless holes at Valhalla that are just going to require multiple strong shots with little room for error.

🦓 Long & Mostly Straight

Based on the information above, there will be a big edge to 1) long hitters and 2) guys who can keep it in play. Let’s figure out who that might be…

I’m going to create my own ranking, similar to “Total Driving”. But instead of Driving Distance + Driving Accuracy, I’m going to do Driving Distance + Distance From Edge of Fairway. I believe that missing the fairway won’t be the end of the world, but missing big will be!

😱 Remember Our History

One of my biggest priorities with RickRunGood.com is to have as much data as possible. My goal, which I’ll likely never accomplish, is to have every round from every professional golf tournament ever played. That’s obviously a huge task, so I break it up into more consumable projects.

Recently, I added every single round played at the PGA Championship since they went to stroke play in 1958. Then I calculated the Strokes Gained for all of those rounds.

Jack Nicklaus has gained 321.7 strokes to the field in his PGA Championship career, which is nearly 100 more than the next closest golfer — Raymond Floyd. That level of dominance converted to five wins.

Tom Watson has the dubious distinction of gaining the most strokes (205.4) without ever recording a victory.

If you filter this list to the Top 10 players who are in the field this week:

And then finally, here are the best PGA Championship players (by average) in this field — with at least four starts.

That’s right — Scottie Scheffler has actually gained more strokes per round than Brooks Koepka (and everyone else) in his four trips to the PGA. That’s (3) Top 8 finishes but zero wins.

🪙 Brooks & Done

Wow! The projected O&D Ownership is coming in and it nearly made my eyes pop out of my head:

Brooks Koepka is projected to be selected in 40% (!!!!!) of O&Ds. I knew he’d be the most popular but my goodness! He was selected by ~15% of users for the Masters, so if this holds, he’ll be used by ~55% of users through two Majors.

Based on my own pool size, who I’ve used, purses and future value — here are my best options for this week:

Well, this is a no-brainer for me. Both Koepka and Rahm grade out as my best options but Rahm will be 15% owned to Koepka’s 40%. I’ll be running out Rahm nearly across the board, then using Koepka for the U.S. Open and probably finishing with Cameron Smith at The Open (depending on how he plays the next few months.

Above is a screenshot from the PoolGenius tool that I consulted on and I recommend you check out.

⭐ Before You Go …

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