In my opinion, the $8,500 – $9,900 range is make or break for most PGA DFS lineups. While the guys at the top provide a ton of safety, this range has a lot of golfers that move in and out and there’s always some bad chalk. We know that we aren’t particularly good at picking golfers from this range. I went through this range’s performance over the past three-plus years to see if I could find some criteria to act as our checklist to make smarter decisions.
Ownership vs. Performance
The bottom half of ownership in this range actually outperforms the top half of ownership from a ceiling perspective. For the table below, I split the range in half by event.
| Ownership Group | Ceiling Rate | Average Rate |
| Top Half | 35% | 72% |
| Bottom Half | 40% | 67% |
This range is impossible to ignore, regardless of your preferred build for the week. If you’re going stars and scrubs, you are going to have to make a decision on one or two golfers somewhere in the lower part of this range. If, on the other hand, you’re going balanced then you’re picking the majority of your golfers from this range.
Price Changes
The price changes in this range aren’t really enough on their own. There’s a slight bump for the golfers that drop down into this range from the $10,000+ range.
| Last Price Range | Ceiling Rate |
| $10,000+ | 41% |
| $9,900 – $8,500 | 37% |
| $8,400 – $7,500 | 38% |
| $7,400 – $6,500 | 37% |
| Sub-$6,500 | 29% |
By itself, this might not seem like a large enough boost to care about but it is important to filter down as one of our boxes to check off. A price jump up from below $6,500 into this range is rare, but it’s worth avoiding.
What About PRK Score?
When it comes to the PRK Score in this range, I set the cutoff at 75. We’re looking at about two-thirds of this price range that hit that threshold over the course of our sample. I broke out golfers that hit 90-plus, just to illustrate the small bump that they get, as well.
| PRK Score Group | Ceiling Rate |
| Over 90 | 39% |
| 75 – 90 | 38% |
| Under 75 | 35% |
Again, we aren’t necessarily looking at huge edges here. We know, though, that compiling these small edges over a long enough time frame is going to pay off.
Checking the Boxes
There are three boxes that we’re attempting to check off in this round:
- Projected ownership in the bottom half of the price range for that week.
- PRK Score of 75-plus
- Previous event salary over $6,500
| Boxes Checked | Ceiling Rate | DK Points Above Tournament Average |
| 3 | 44% | 16 |
| 2 | 35% | 13 |
| 1 | 34% | 13 |
Golfers that manage to check all three of these boxes are the obvious targets for us. They make up nearly 30% of the sample population for this group, so we should find ourselves with targets that fit all three criteria just about every week. Building within this structure gives you a better chance at a ceiling outcome from your $9,900 – $8,500 golfer.
