pgatour

This post is about trying to beat the odds on CoinRoster daily fantasy golf, a game where the fantasy points are determined based on score to par. The worst score to par becomes zero and each fantasy point is awarded based on the difference from the worst score. For example, if the last placed player has a real world score to par of +4 and the first placed player has a score to par of -10, then the first placed player will have 14 fantasy points. All other players are assigned a relative point value.  Six players are drafted to each roster, so the total score of each roster is the sum of the individual scores of all players on each roster.

My goal is to find some drafting strategies that take advantage of the difference between the price of golfers available to draft on CoinRoster versus the odds of betting on golfers to win the tournament.

The price of each player in the CoinRoster draft is relative to their world golf ranking. But I wondered how to determine whether this is a good price or a bad one? And which factors should I consider while attempting to make this determination?

I have compared the prices of the players available to draft with their odds of winning the tournament. I know from previous research that the odds of each player is related to their expected relative score to par.

I made a list of all players available to draft using excel with their associated price on CoinRoster, then I calculated the percentage chance implied by the prices of each players in the draft by taking their drafting price divided by the sum of all player prices. So if a player costs $3000 to draft and the sum of all players prices is $80,000, then this implies 3.75% ($3,000 / $80,000).

By finding this drafting price ratio, it gives me an “implied” percentage chance of each player having the most fantasy points based on CoinRoster’s drafting price. Then for curiosity’s sake, I converted those implied percentage numbers into decimal odds. The next thing I did was add a column of each player’s odds of winning the tournament and then I converted that into a percentage number also. Now I can compare apples to apples using their percentage chances.

With this information, I can eyeball and compare the odds numbers and the percentage numbers (which are the same value, but just displayed in different formats). I can also rank and sort the data in various ways using excel, so I subtracted the implied market percentage chance from the implied price percentage chance to uncover the difference between the two numbers.

By subtracting the two prices (the percentage chance implied by drafting price with the percentage chance implied in the player’s betting odds) I can notice if the price for a player available to draft is relatively lower on CoinRoster than is implied by their market odds. If the player is cheap and represents good value to draft their price on CoinRoster will be lower than implied by their betting odds. This means the player is cheap to draft, but if a player’s market odds are lower than their relative drafting price on CoinRoster, the player is expensive.

The table below shows the numbers for the BMW Championship. The table is ranked best to worst value.  Dustin Johnson has the best value for this tournament according to this formula. His odds were 9.36 (which implies a more than 10% chance he will win the tournament, and thereby have the best score to par) but his CoinRoster price was relatively cheap (even though he is the second highest priced player). Justin Rose, Rory McIlroy, and Hideki Matsuyama are also some of the most relatively best priced players.

Tiger Woods also has the third highest relative value to draft. This makes sense since Tiger’s world golf ranking (which the CoinRoster drafting price is based on) is relatively low compared to his chances of winning the tournament. So intuitively, this affirms my belief that I’m on the right track.

Some of the most expensive players on CoinRoster are Tyrrell Hatton, Alex Noren, Brian Harman, Kevin Kisner, and Peter Uihlein.