DraftKings PGA DFS Picks: Masters Cash and GPP Strategy

This article is part of our DraftKings PGA DFS Picks series.

THE MASTERS

Purse: $18M (estimated)
Winner's Share: $3.24M 
FedEx Cup Points: 750 to the Winner 
Location: Augusta, Ga. 
Course: Augusta National Golf Club 
Yardage: 7,555 
Par: 72
2023 champion: Jon Rahm

Tournament Preview

It's a universal belief in golf that the most predictable tournament of the year is the Masters. It's the one major played at the same course every year. It not only has the smallest field among the majors, it has one of the smallest fields of any tournament. Since 2000, the winner has come from inside the top-12 in the world rankings every year but five. And when you combine all that with the majority of such a small field returning from one year to the next, well, that's about as predictable as a sporting event can be.

Now, if there's one word to describe the PGA Tour season so far in 2024, it would be: unpredictable.

So it is with those two contrasting truths that we welcome you to the 88th Masters.

To be sure, contrasting and unpredictable aren't necessarily bad, especially when last year at this time there was acrimony and apprehension about what would happen when two rival golf leagues met up for the first time since the sport had been fractured. Things are much more pleasant and genial this time around. Kumbaya, anyone? Perhaps it is true that time heals all wounds, but PGA Tour golfers and LIV golfers are on much better terms with one another, largely in agreement that everyone needs to find a way to join back into one. And a year ago, that was about as far away from predictable as possible.

There are 89 golfers in the field, small even by Masters standards though one more than last year. Thirteen are with LIV, down from 18 a year ago, plus five amateurs and four "legacy" champions, the smallest number of those long-ago Augusta winners in years. The entire field is ranked in RotoWire's Major Power Rankings: 2024 Masters Field. 

At the top of those rankings and every other metric is world No. 1 and 2022 Masters winner Scottie Scheffler, who has been one of the few predictable things on the PGA Tour this year. He's followed in the RotoWire rankings by defending champion Jon Rahm and last year's co-runner-up Brooks Koepka, both of whom staged an extended 30-hole Sunday duel last year after weather delayed the tournament. Rahm wasn't with Koepka at LIV last year; he is now.

LIV golfers are harder to gauge than the PGA Tour golfers, what with their limited schedule and very small fields. But there was no doubt they brought their A game last year, with three of them finishing top-5. Phil Mickelson shared second place and 2018 winner Patrick Reed tied for fourth.

The way the majority of the top golfers on the PGA Tour are playing, would a top-heavy LIV leaderboard surprise anyone this time around? Not a chance.

Why are so many of the top PGA Tour guys playing poorly? There have been many long-shot and first-time winners already this year and about half of the top 25 in the world rankings are off their game -- that is, if they haven't fallen out of the top 25 altogether.

As Golf Channel's Brandel Chamblee has noted, there are many distractions in golf these days, notably the constant attention to money and signature events and did we mention money? He called it "an epidemic of distraction." Then there's declining TV ratings and fan disenchantment (or even anger) over the state of the game. 

Here's who has not played well for much or all of the season (and by "well," we mean relative to their normal standards): Rory McIlroy, Viktor Hovland, Patrick Cantlay, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Max Homa, Tommy Fleetwood, Tom Kim, Jason Day and Rickie Fowler, for starters. They will collide head-on with the most predictable week in golf. That Masters predictability allows us to think that some of those guys playing poorly this year will still play well this week.

Scheffler almost fit into that group, until he snapped a nearly one-year-winless drought by winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational and THE PLAYERS Championship in back-to-back weeks last month. Wyndham Clark, Xander Schauffele and Hideki Matsuyama have also been playing great.

We're a dozen or so paragraphs into this Masters preview and still no mention of Tiger Woods. That kind of sums up where he is in the golf landscape these days. It's impossible to know what to expect of Woods after he has played only 24 holes all year and inexplicably didn't enter THE PLAYERS. But if he makes the cut this week, it would be 24 in a row, breaking the Masters record he shares with Fred Couples and Gary Player. Couples, 64, is also in the field.

The most anticipated event of Masters week before the first tee ball is hit on Thursday morning always comes when Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley holds his traditional news conference on Wednesday. The golf world will scrutinize every word from Ridley, one of the sport's biggest bellwethers, if not the biggest.

Augusta National has been changed once again this year, as seemingly happens every year to some degree. The year, the one modification took place on the par-5 second hole. The tee box has been moved 10 yards back and to the left, making it play at 585 yards, the longest hole on the course. The desired goal was not to make the hole player longer but to alter the angle of the tee shot, bringing the right-side fairway bunker more into play. That doesn't seem like a big change, but it could be. Last year's major change was a lot more overt.

Last year, they moved the tee box back 35 yards on the par-5 13th, one of the easiest holes on the course, so it played at 545. The hope was to make the watery risk/reward decision of going for the green in two harder. Well, there were 8 eagles, 108 birdies, 11 pars, 30 bogeys, 7 doubles and 2 "other" there last year, not all that different from the past. Oh well.

The 1933 Bobby Jones/Alister MacKenzie design usually ranks among the 10 most difficult tracks of the year. Last year, it ranked as the sixth-hardest course on the PGA Tour.

Length always aides at Augusta National. Many believe the course plays closer to 7,900 yards with all the intricacies, such as mowing the fairways "backwards" in an attempt to blunt distance. That said, other considerations are far more important for the golfers than distance. They better also bring their short game, as things get very dicey on and around the greens. There are only 44 bunkers on the entire course, but the bentgrass greens are dastardly all by themselves. They are above average in size (averaging 6,500 square feet) and lightning fast at about 14 on the Stimpmeter with undulations and run-offs, enough to frustrate poor putters and especially Augusta first-timers (and second- and third-timers). The hardest holes tend to be the long or longish par-4s, and last year the three hardest were the 495-yard 5th, the 520-yard 11th and the 465-yard 18th. There is water on five holes, most notably on the diabolical par-3 12th, plus the par-5s at 13 and 15, and the par-3 16th.

So how should you construct your lineup? Let's start with trying to find the winner. He usually comes from way up high. As mentioned above, he's mostly come from the top-12 in the world rankings. That's no longer an exact science with LIV guys not being ranked. Greens in regulation and scrambling have been vital over the years, scrambling maybe more than any other metric. No first-timer has won since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979, but today's young golfers emerge from college ready to compete and Will Zalatoris came close three years ago as the runner-up to Matsuyama. There are 19 first-timers this year, including four of the five amateurs. As we always see, some pretty big names are priced in the $8,000s and even $7,000s. There definitely is value deep down the DraftKings board. This would allow you to take a $10,000+ guy, plus maybe even a $9,000+ guy and still fill out your lineup with quality, Masters-proven golfers. Plus, with 50-plus-ties making the 36-hole cutoff point, about two-thirds of the field will make the cut -- if we exclude the nine amateurs/legacy champs from consideration. That means lots of $6,000s will survive for the weekend.

As for the weather, it's taken a big turn in the past few days and as of this writing on Monday morning, Thursday is looking bad. Thunderstorms. A 100% chance. And windy. At least it won't be cold, with temperatures in the 70s or higher all week. The rain is forecast to end by Friday but not the wind. Right now, the weekend looks fine, but by then some golfers could have had a huge edge. As always, wait until the last minute before the lock to see whether there is a tee-time advantage. Yes, there are only 89 golfers, but since they all start on No. 1, there is a wide disparity in tee times -- no different from a field with 156 golfers.

Masters champion factoids: There have been only three repeat champions in the past six decades -- Jack Nicklaus in 1965-66, Nick Faldo in 1989-90 and Woods in 2001-02. Further, only twice in the past 17 years has a defending champion so much as finished top-10: Spieth was runner-up to Danny Willett in 2016 and Scheffler tied for 10th last year.

Key Stats to Winning at Augusta National

The most important indicators every week are current form and course history. "Key Stats" follow in importance.

• Strokes Gained: Approach/Greens in Regulation
• Strokes Gained: Around the Green/Scrambling 
• Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee/Driving Distance 
• Strokes Gained: Putting/Three-Putt Avoidance 
• Par-5 Scoring 

Past Champions

2023 - Jon Rahm
2022 - Scottie Scheffler
2021 - Hideki Matsuyama
2020 - Dustin Johnson
2019 - Tiger Woods
2018 - Patrick Reed
2017 - Sergio Garcia
2016 - Danny Willett 
2015 - Jordan Spieth
2014 - Bubba Watson

Champion's Profile

For years, the vast majority of the time the winner has come from the top-12 OWGR. With LIV golfers no longer accruing world ranking points, that's a wrinkle. But how many of them could/would be in the top 12? Maybe Koepka, Cameron Smith and Joaquin Niemann. The only outliers in the past decade were Matsuyama ranked 25th and Reed ranked 24th -- and they had been top-10 at some point in their careers.

In the past 12 Masters, every winner but one has finished top-7 in the field in greens in regulation (Reed, 21st). Rahm ranked third in GIR, Scheffler was fifth, Matsuyama seventh, Johnson and Woods first. Some bad putters have won this tournament, but it's almost impossible if they are bad scramblers or have trouble around the greens. Only two of the past 10 winners have been outside the top-10 in scrambling (Woods 47th, Reed 16th). Rahm and Scheffler both were ninth. Only one of the past 10 winners has been outside the top-15 in putting average (Watson, 28th, 2014).

We've established how long Augusta National truly plays. If the rain leaves its mark, the course will play longer, more greens will be missed and scrambling could be an even greater factor than usual. With putting, it's perhaps more important to avoid three-putting on the speedy greens than to make birdies.

You can really make up ground on the par-5s. Rahm won at 12-under last year and was 10-under on the par-5s. Mickelson and Koepka shared second at 8-under; Mickelson was 8-under on the par-5s, Koepka was 11-under (not a typo). Before that, Scheffler and Matsuyama both won at 10-under total -- Scheffler was 8-under on the par-5s and Matsuyama was 11-under.

If we're talking about who can win, we're almost surely talking about a longer hitter. But that doesn't mean a shorter hitter cannot contend or contribute to a solid DFS lineup.

As always at Augusta, there is one thing no statistical data can measure: the pressure a golfer feels on Sunday.

DRAFTKINGS VALUE PICKS

Based on Standard $50K Salary Cap

$10,000+

Scottie Scheffler - $12,100 (Winning odds at the DraftKings Sportsbook: +450)
Of the 1,246 golf clubs in play this week -- 89 golfers, max 14 clubs in the bag -- the most watched and potentially most pivotal will be Scheffler's putter. Because every other aspect of his game has been an A+. After struggling on the greens for almost a year, Scheffler finally made a switch to a mallet head, then went out and won Bay Hill and THE PLAYERS. He's now gaining strokes on the greens, just like he did last year when he tied for 10th in one of the best title defenses in the past two decades.

Jon Rahm - $11,200 (+1100)
It's perfectly understandable that there have been only three repeat winners in the past 60ish years. But the part about defending champions not even finishing in the top 10? That is some wild stuff. Rahm finished top-10 four years running from 2018 to '21. Of course, he wasn't the defending champion then. He has not missed a beat with LIV, finishing top-8 in all five tournaments so far. Still, word on the golf grapevine is that Rahm is not happy with all the bells and whistles of LIV and has been longing to play a "regular" golf tournament. Not that anyone needs any extra motivation to play the Masters, but Rahm seems to have it.

Brooks Koepka - $10,200 (+2000)
You may not remember that Koepka actually had a two-stroke lead over Rahm heading into the final round last year, but he surely hasn't. Koepka said in the aftermath that he knew what went wrong and that it won't happen again. And we believe him. There's no point in even checking whether Koepka is playing good or bad this year, because he's proven too many times that he can just turn it on for these majors weeks. (Okay, we did peek at how he's playing, and he's gotten worse every LIV week: T5-T12-T12-28-T45.)

$9,000-$9,900

Xander Schauffele - $9,900 (+1600)
Top-10 in six of eight starts this year. Top-10 in three of the past five Masters, including runner-up in 2019 and T3 in 2021. No non-major winner has a better record in majors than Schauffele. Yeah, the dreaded Best Golfer Who Hasn't Won a Major. Schauffele is playing better in 2024 than he did in 2023. Of course, he hasn't won in 2023 or 2024, and you'd have to go back to the 2022 Scottish Open to find Schauffele and a trophy in the same picture.

Jordan Spieth - $9,300 (+2200)
Hard to believe it's been almost a decade since Spieth won his lone Masters (2015). He's been runner-up twice, third twice and he tied for fourth last year. Even when Spieth fell into his four-year abyss and didn't play well anywhere, he played well at Augusta. Is his performance a certainty? No, he missed the cut two years ago. And we don't know when he will tee off in relation to the weather. But it's Spieth. And the Masters. And Spieth AT the Masters.

Hideki Matsuyama - $9,000 (+2500)
There's nobody playing better on the PGA Tour right now, non-Scheffler division, than Matsuyama. And maybe even including Scheffler. Since winning at Riviera in February, Matsuyama has finished 12th, then sixth, then seventh on Sunday at the Valero Texas Open. He is playing better than he has at any point since winning at Augusta in 2021. His back/neck injuries are gone (or taking a break). Remember, even though Matsuyama is a bad putter, he's an elite scrambler -- he's ranked first on Tour in SG: Around-the-Green.

$8,000-$8,900

Cameron Smith - $8,900 (+4000)
There are only two golfers who have finished top-10 of the Masters three of the past four years. Smith is one of them. Now, it's not optimum that the one miss was last year's T34. But Smith did go on to record top-10s at the next two majors, so it wasn't a case of his game falling off. It's also not optimum that he withdrew from LIV Miami after one round last week with food poisoning. But Smith and his world-class putting game should be good to go by Thursday.

Shane Lowry - $8,000 (+5500)
Only three guys have finished top-25 at the Masters the past four years. Scheffler and Matsuyama, who have won the tournament, and Lowry. Talk about predictability. Lowry clearly has figured out how to play the course after missing the cut in three of his first four tries. He tied for third two years ago and for 16th last year. And we know if the weather gets dicey, this Irishman will just roll up his sleeves and get to work (unless he's already wearing short sleeves in the rain, which is entirely possible for him). Seriously, Lowry has also been playing great in the run-up to the Masters with a pair of top-5s on the Florida Swing before a top-20 at THE PLAYERS.

$7,000-$7,900

Matt Fitzpatrick - $7,900 (+3500)
It may seem too convenient to connect these dots: A four-gram weight that wasn't supposed to be in Fitzpatrick's driver was discovered right before THE PLAYERS. He finished fifth that week, then tied for 10th in his next start at the Valero, his two best finishes of what had been a subpar year. But while 4 grams couldn't even get you arrested these days, it's all the difference in the world for a professional golfer. Besides, Fitzpatrick has a very good history at Augusta: two top-10s, including last year, plus four top-25s and eight made cuts in a row. Does that sound like a $7,900 golfer to you?

Sahith Theegala - $7,700 (+4500)
Augusta National aligns very nicely with Theegala's game. But still, not many people saw last year's solo ninth coming in his Masters debut. His putting is elite. His short game normally is, too, though not as great this year as last. He tends to spray the ball off the tee, which you can get away with somewhat this week, but Theegala has been improving in that area. He has quietly snuck up to No. 15 in the world with two top-5s and four top-10s already this season.

Patrick Reed - $7,400 (+6500)
When Reed plays well at the Masters, which is almost all the time, you get the feeling he gets more satisfaction from pissing off his haters than from the actual golf accomplishment. Regardless, he's one of two golfers -- along with Smith -- with top-10s three of the past four years here. Reed has repeatedly shown that a short hitter, the right kind of short hitter -- with an elite short game and an expansive course knowledge -- can succeed this week.

$6,000-$6,900

Emiliano Grillo - $6,400 (+25000)
Sub $6,500, we're looking to make it to the weekend and then hope for the best. Grillo has not missed a cut in nine starts on the PGA Tour in 2024 and hasn't missed in three prior Masters. Granted, this will be his first trip to Augusta since 2019. Always a great ball striker, Grillo has putted great this season, ranking top-25 in both SG: Putting and three-putt avoidance. His pitching and chipping are not optimum, but he is ranked 57th in scrambling.

Denny McCarthy - $6,200 (+9000)
If you look at our Masters Power Rankings linked above, you'd have to go pretty far down to find McCarthy's name. Just like you had to go pretty far down on the DraftKings board. DraftKings can't call an audible, but we can. McCarthy's otherworldly performance on Sunday at the Valero changed things for us. Yes, he has to be crestfallen over not winning his first PGA Tour title, not to mention losing in such a disheartening way (hitting a wedge into a creek in the playoff). But he's not a kid anymore. He's 31 and should be able to quickly rebound over the thrill of his first trip to the Masters. McCarthy is ranked 27th on Tour in SG: Around-the-Green and ninth in SG: Putting (how are there eight guys putting better than him?).

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