2023 Masters DraftKings Preview and Pricing

The Masters DraftKing Pricing has now been released. It feels like they made us wait a couple days longer this year than the last few times. I’ve been playing their golf games since 2015 and this is always one of my favorite times of the year the 10 days between the release and the start of the tournament where we can toy with lineups. I have built hundreds of lineups and if you are like me the ones you start with as your favorites usually aren’t the ones you finish with as your favorites.

I thought before the release it be very interesting to see what they do with the LIV golfers, especially the ones like Sergio Garcia (7800 last year) who have seen their OWGR’s crater. Would these legacy players with known names like Sergio, Reed, and Phil be in the 6000’s? Will we get big discounts on players like Louie Oosthuizen and Brooks Koepka. Official World Golf Rank prior to LIV forming seemed to be a valuable part of their pricing algorithm in all majors especially. It was a given that would change some as some players like Bryson DeChambeau just didn’t have the rankings.

The Masters is the tournament that is played the heaviest every year by the general public. Many players making these lineups may only know of some of the big names anyway. Even if the world rankings have dropped LIV still has a lot of big names and older players.

Here is our course history and initial power rankings to help you build your lineups.

Let’s take a look at the pricing. The points are their Draftking points I included, but I wouldn’t worry a whole lot on that.

What immediately strikes me is there are only three players over 9800 dollars. There were NINE last year. This will fundamentally changed how lineups are built, and have been built for many years because I can’t remember pricing like this in recent years. The pricing is more what you might typically see see in weak fields smaller tournaments with a few top 10 players and a weak field behind them. They would do this at events like that to create distance and get some play off of the top guys. There isn’t that kind of distance in my opinion from Justin Thomas, Victor Hovland etc and Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, and Rory McIlroy as there is in the pricing.

These were the players ranked over 8000 last year for reference. These were all the players last year for reference that were over 8000.

Clearly we have gotten some discounts on the top LIV players. I’ll write up some value plays IMO when I’ve had more time to think about them. I can tell you right now I’m building more balanced lineups and ignoring the top 3 highest priced ones. They may win but I think you can build lineups with 5 or 6 guys that realistically could win and it wouldn’t shock anyone with this pricing. We say that every year but it’s more believable this year even the way the top 3 are playing. Of course if you think they are going to win you got to play them. I picked Rahm to win but I’ll be mostly playing against that in Draftkings and will probably just bet him.

April 3rd Form Edit

We’ve gotten through all the preceding tournaments now and the one thing I personally didn’t want to see was 7600 Brooks Koepka to win since I was going to be playing him a lot. He will undoubtedly be highly owned now so fade him at your own risk. He says he’s healthy and he’s playing well again. When healthy he might be the best player in the world. Form is a nice component but not completely necessary in my opinion for a course that is played every year like the Masters. Still the total here and checking all boxes at that price stands out.

Of the other players no one else really stands out. It was nice to see Patrick Reed and Dustin Johnson play well this week as well. Most of the top PGA players have been off or haven’t played a stroke play event since the Players or haven’t played since Valspar a couple weeks ago. Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, and Tommy Fleetwood all posted top 10’s there. Corey Conners won the Valero if you want to go in that direction.