Hey everyone, welcome back. Arnold Palmer Invitational! My favorite regular season event since I was a kid. I have only played this course once, surprising to me as well…don’t have enough connections, but have been around this course for at least one day during the event since 2004. Being to a course doesn’t mean much, but did want to point out I have seen this course play in all kinds of conditions so feel pretty good about the difficult test that awaits this week.

We do have some ugly weather Thursday (today as well), which we will discuss but let’s discuss the overall course. No screenshots this week. Please reference the Course Preview PRO, and of course all of our tools on the site. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed them, and excited to launch the FGB Sims next week for THE PLAYERS Championship.

With all that out of the way, let me give you all one more big THANK YOU! Really appreciate all of the old and new FGB Members who are here and I am really excited for us all to have a great year betting golf and playing PGA DFS.

Course Preview PRO

Let me summarize my biggest takeaways for Bay Hill this week. We know this coure is tough, playing about half a shot over par. We should expect the winner to be around -10 to -15 this week. Personally I am leaning under -10, and really hope that’s what we get.

When we start to dissect this course a bit, we can really peel back the layers on Driving proficiency and Irons.

Driving…

While this course boasts a shorter DD than Tour Avg. it in fact has 6 tee shots 290-310 and 5 270-290. 2 tee shots are approx. 230-250 which really skews this stat. Those 2 holes are 5 and 13. That doesn’t really matter, but its important to point out that the course as a whole demands more length off the tee than this DD stat states.

Driving Accuracy…

Very similar. This course demands accuracy off the tee, and while the DA% is easier than Tour Avg, this is literally 3 or 4 of the 14 tee shots the players will hit. In fact hole 13, the one where DD is about 244, has a DA% number over 80%. Again, just pointing out things that can be misleading, and Driving on this course, while the stats say DD matters less and DA is easier, that is just skewed.

A really important stat to look to every week is the Missed Fairway Penalty which is 0.41 shots, up 0.05 from Tour Avg. Driving Distance penalty is more stable each week, but even it is up +0.04 to 0.24 strokes of a penalty when the player drives it shorter than field average on each hole.

All of this is to say that good driving is absolutely a must. Really no other way to spin it. Some weeks we can take poor drivers and make a case that due to the shorter tee shots, they may have an opportunity to hide their weakness. This is the oppositie. Good drivers will need to be even better this week, mediocre drivers better hope their DA% ticks up slightly.

After that it is Approaches, and I really don’t have much to say. The approach shots are really spread out. It appears that there are many over 200, which there are, but the other ranges are about Tour Avg. So I think if you use the ApproachIQ, you can look at all buckets equally. *Working on a way for you to “model” approachIQ buckets, so you can weight multiple Distances into one concise number. Stay tuned, it should be easy to add for next week.

That’s pretty much it. We need good iron play but more importantly we need really good drivers. That’s where our focus should lie. In the PlayerProfiles we can see splits for long and very long courses, this isn’t a bad idea when trying to trim your pool, I view this as a long course.

Rolling Stats & StatModel PRO

This section will be used to highlight the stats I am using for