FanDuel has recently added PGA action to its long list of daily fantasy sports contests. The largest legal DFS website now allows you to get in on the action of professional golf. This is an exciting opportunity if you play fantasy sports and are interested in gaining access to fantasy golf tournaments, this is your chance to get in on the action.
How to Get Started
Want to enjoy the experience of fantasy golf on a single tournament level? We can help you get started. The first step is to create an account at FanDuel. You will need an email address and be of a legal age. In most of the United States, you need to be at least 18 years old, but in some states that age bumps up to 21. Also, it is worth noting that daily fantasy sports are not legal in all states.
To create an account, just go to the homepage. At the top of the page, you will see a link encouraging you to either log in or join the site. Click on the join button and you will be walked through the process. Funding your account is a necessary part of joining real money games, but there are ways around this if you don’t want to make a deposit right away. It is possible to enter free tournaments and work your way up into paid tourneys.
How to Play
If you want to play daily fantasy golf at FanDuel, the process is pretty simple. If you’ve played DFS golf at other sites, FanDuel’s structure is a little different. The process of drafting players is going to be odd at first, but it’s actually not tough once you get a feel for it.
It breaks down into two parts. You want to draft four golfers for the first two rounds (Thursday and Friday play), and then four golfers for the next two rounds (Saturday and Sunday play). Your eight golfers must all be different—you cannot have the same golfer in rounds one and two and in round three and four. Also, all eight golfers must stay within the salary cap that you are provided with. The better the golfer, the higher their salary will be. And while you can draft whoever you want at first, spending too much money on a few great golfers will eat up all of your available money, leaving you unable to complete your roster.
To do well with this type of format, you will need to have a strong strategy. Read on to learn more.
FanDuel Golf Strategy
It’s no secret that some fantasy golf managers are better than others. What separates them? Certainly, it’s not luck, not if they are repeating their success week after week. That leads us to believe that a solid strategy is the way to be successful. So how do you get ahead of the competition and better your chances of winning some money?
First, you need to get a handle on how FanDuel scores events. Managers are awarded points based upon how the golfers that they draft do in the rounds that they are used for. The better they do, the more points that they will get. Golfers can also be penalized for poor performances. If someone shoots a bogey, they are given -1 points. The goal is to draft the players that will give you the highest point total.
On top of all this, you will be rewarded if your golfers finish in the top 25 in the tournament, regardless of which round you used them in. So if one of your golfers that you used for the first two rounds of play finishes in first at the end of the tourney, you will be awarded the full 20 points that FanDuel gives to the winning golfer.
One strategy that can be employed is to draft high risk players in the first two rounds, and more stable and reliable players for the last two. This way, you are maximizing your chances of having golfers that are still active on your roster as the actual tournament comes to a close.
Don’t forget that you won’t get any points if your rounds three and four golfers don’t make the cut! You want to draft players here who have a strong chance of making the cut, and who are going to finish out the tournament on a strong note.
A nice blend of specific talent and overall potential is what you’re looking for. You want to draft golfers that will get you points in their specific rounds, but you also want golfers that will have the best chance possible of making the top 25. This will push you forward in the overall rankings and give you the best chances of winning some money. You should also take a look at the specific payouts of the tournaments that you are entering so you can know just what kind of money is at stake. Different tournament structures necessitate different drafting strategies in order to give yourself a chance at making money. In some cases you will want to play conservatively, in others you will want to shoot for the moon, especially if there is a huge payout to the winner.
We encourage you to go to FanDuel yourself and look at their scoring chart so that you can get a better feel for what types of things are weighted the most heavily. They also have a strategy section that you can peruse to give yourself ideas other than what we’ve mentioned in this brief introduction.
We’re excited that FanDuel now has daily fantasy golf. This is one of our favorite contests to enter in the world of fantasy sports, and now that it is available on the biggest platform in the business, many more opportunities are available to the golf fan. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a casual golf viewer, or you are an intense enthusiast, fantasy sports are designed to bring the fan closer to the game, and FanDuel has accomplished just that. We hope that you are excited, too!
