DraftKings PGA DFS Cheat Sheet: Sims, Projections And Ownership

Golf DFS hands you one job: pick six golfers under $50,000, no positions, no excuses. Stokastic's free cheat sheet exists to make that job easier, and this week it is telling an unusual story. The FedEx St. Jude Championship is a no-cut playoff event, which quietly deletes the biggest risk in golf DFS, and the board has produced something I rarely see: the most expensive golfer on the slate is also its second-biggest leverage play. I will explain every panel on the sheet, then come back to why that almost never happens and how to build around it.

The Quick Answer

Stokastic's DraftKings PGA DFS cheat sheet is a free six-panel summary of the paid Stokastic Sims: median DraftKings projections, projected field ownership, points-per-dollar values, top-150 exposure, leverage plays and the week's highest salaries. Read the projection and value panels to find scoring, then read the exposure and leverage panels to see where the Sims disagree with the field, because that gap is where tournaments are won. The full panel-by-panel breakdown, this week's FedEx St. Jude Championship numbers, and a worked $50,000 roster decision are below.

What The DraftKings PGA DFS Cheat Sheet Is

The cheat sheet is free. No package, no code, no catch. Every number on it comes out of a full tournament simulation rather than a single median guess, and it condenses that Sims output into the six numbers that decide a DraftKings golf lineup, refreshed for each tournament. That matters more than usual this week: with a playoff field compressing salaries into a narrow band, the six panels below are doing heavier lifting than they do on a normal Tour stop. Everything on the sheet is DraftKings-specific: classic golf slates are six golfers under a $50,000 salary cap with no positional requirements, so every panel is really answering one question from a different angle: where should your salary go?

If you are new to golf DFS entirely, my guide on how to build PGA DFS lineups covers roster construction from zero. This page makes you fluent in the sheet itself; the only jargon you need is GPP, the big-field tournament format where winning takes a high ceiling, not a safe floor.

This Week's Slate: The FedEx St. Jude Championship Has No Cut

The FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind is the first FedExCup Playoff event: a field of roughly 70 qualifiers, and, unlike a regular Tour stop, no 36-hole cut. Barring a withdrawal, all six of your golfers play all four rounds. That changes how I read the sheet in three ways:

• The Missed-Cut Zero Is Gone. In a normal week, the worst outcome in golf DFS is a golfer who plays two rounds and goes home. This week every roster banks four rounds, so floors rise across the entire field and lineups bunch closer together. Separation has to come from ceiling and leverage, not from surviving Friday.
• There Is No Salary Bargain Bin. A playoff field has no true long shots padding the bottom of the pricing, so salaries compress. The value panel matters more than usual because points per dollar, not raw projection, is what untangles a board where everyone is playable.
• Motivation Is A Real Ownership Story. Only the top 50 in FedExCup points advance to next week's BMW Championship, so bubble players arrive with something concrete to play for. The field tends to overreact to that narrative at the top of the ownership panel and underreact to it further down, and the leverage panel is where the Sims call that out golfer by golfer.

Course fit still matters even without a cut. TPC Southwind is a tight, water-lined par 70 that rewards precision iron play and punishes wild driving, closer to a positional test than a bomber's paradise. Approach play, not raw distance, is the skill the course pays, which is worth remembering when you see big names with big salaries. Because the projections come from simulated scoring on this specific setup, that course profile is already baked into the numbers below rather than something you need to layer on by hand.

How To Read Each Panel On The Cheat Sheet

Highest Salaries And Top Projections (Proj FP)

The salary panel lists the week's most expensive golfers; the projection panel lists each golfer's median projected DraftKings fantasy points. Here are both boards this week:

Sam Burns and Cameron Young crack the projection panel's top five without appearing among the five biggest salaries, which is your first hint of where the value sits. Still, the row that matters most is Scheffler's: he projects 9.3 points clear of the next golfer, the largest projection gap in the published top five. On a no-cut week, a projection edge that size is not something to talk yourself out of. The question is never whether he is good; it is what rostering him at $13,500 does to the rest of your build, and that math gets its own section below.

Highest Ownership (Own%)

This panel projects field ownership: the share of DraftKings rosters each golfer will appear in. This week's top five are Cameron Young (23.3%), Scottie Scheffler (21.1%), Sam Burns (21.1%), Justin Thomas (18.7%) and Rory McIlroy (18.1%). Ownership is not a quality rating; it is a price tag on popularity. The interesting row is Young at 23.3%: the field's most popular golfer this week is fifth in projection, a classic case of the crowd chasing a name that fits the week's storyline harder than the numbers ask it to.

Top Values (Value)

Value is projected points per $1,000 of salary, and this is the panel that untangles a compressed playoff board. This week's top five: Sungjae Im (11.68), J.T. Poston (11.55), Jordan L. Smith (11.50), Ryo Hisatsune (11.49) and Matthew McCarty (11.48). Notice how tightly bunched those numbers are; a fifth of a point per $1,000 separates first from fifth. The free sheet only prints the top of each panel, so treat these five as the doorway into the value tier rather than the whole tier.

Top Exposures (Exp%)

Exposure is the panel most people misread, and it is the one I check first. Stokastic Sims simulate the tournament tens of thousands of times, build lineups, then rank those lineups by simulated return on investment. Top-150 exposure is how often a golfer appears in the 150 highest sim-ROI lineups. This week: Scottie Scheffler (46.7%), Sungjae Im (40.7%), Jordan L. Smith (28.0%), Xander Schauffele (22.0%) and Sam Burns (20.7%). Where ownership tells you what the field will do, top-150 exposure tells you what the Sims would do, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole game.

Leverage Plays (Lev%)

Leverage is that gap made explicit: optimal exposure minus projected field ownership. A positive number means the Sims roster a golfer far more often than the field will, which is exactly where tournament edges come from. This week's leverage panel: Sungjae Im (28.3%), Scottie Scheffler (24.9%), Jordan L. Smith (21.2%), Michael Brennan (11.5%) and Alex Fitzpatrick (5.5%).

Here is the payoff on the promise from the top of the page. Chalk and leverage are usually opposites; the most expensive golfer is normally so popular that the Sims cannot justify rostering him above the field. This week Scheffler appears in 46.7% of the top sim-ROI lineups while the field only rosters him at 21.1%, and I read that as the no-cut format doing the work. With no missed-cut risk to price in, his projection edge compounds over a full 72 holes, and the field, anchored to his salary, is not paying for it. When the board's biggest name is also a top-two leverage play, the expensive build is the contrarian build. That almost never happens, and it is the single most actionable number on this week's sheet.

How Stokastic Sims Build These Numbers

Every panel above is an output of the same engine. Stokastic Sims play out the tournament tens of thousands of times rather than assigning each golfer one static number, and in golf that distinction is everything. A 72-hole event is a long-tail proposition: the same golfer misses the number one week and contends the next, and a single median projection hides that entire range. Simulating the event over and over captures the shape of each golfer's outcomes, which is why a steady four-round grinder and a boom-or-bust type can share a median yet belong in completely different lineups. The Boom/Bust view inside the full product exists to show exactly that split.

The same logic applies to the people, not just the golfers. Ownership is modeled as a distribution too, projecting how the field will spread its salary across the slate, and the exposure recommendations come from ranking simulated lineups by ROI, not by raw points. That is how the sheet can tell you that Im belongs in four of every ten optimal lineups while carrying a 28.3-percentage-point leverage gap over his projected ownership: the Sims are scoring lineups against a simulated field, the way a real tournament scores you against real opponents. The full PGA DFS projections, ownership and the ROI-ranked lineup pool live in the Stokastic DataHub; the cheat sheet is the free top slice of that output. For a deeper walkthrough of the engine itself, see how to build winning DFS lineups in Stokastic Sims.

Worked Example: Fitting Scheffler Under The $50,000 Cap

Time to turn one panel row into a roster decision, because the exposure panel is only useful if you can act on it. Say the leverage read convinces you to start your build with Scottie Scheffler at $13,500. The cap math looks like this:

• $50,000 Minus $13,500 Leaves $36,500 for five golfers, an average of $7,300 per slot.
• Add Xander Schauffele At $10,000 (22.0% top-150 exposure himself) and you are down to $26,500 for four slots, an average of $6,625.
• Try To Pair Scheffler With Rory McIlroy At $11,500 Instead and four slots must split $25,000, an average of $6,250, which is thin even on a compressed board.

That average-per-slot number is the real currency of golf DFS. A Scheffler build lives or dies on whether the $6,000-to-$7,000 range can score, and this is where the value panel stops being trivia. The Sims' answer is sitting right there: Sungjae Im leads the value board at 11.68 points per $1,000 and carries the slate's highest leverage at +28.3%, which is why he shows up in 40.7% of the top sim-ROI lineups. The free sheet does not print salaries below the top five, deliberately, but the pattern it is pointing at is clear: the optimal builds this week pair the expensive projection anchor with the value tier the field is skipping, names like Im, Jordan L. Smith (11.50 value, +21.2% leverage) and Michael Brennan (+11.5% leverage). The exact salary of every golfer in that tier, and the full ROI-ranked lineup pool, live one click deeper in the paid Sims.

One honest caveat: leverage is a tournament concept. If you are building for cash games, where you only need to beat half the field, the calculus flips toward floor and you should read how to use Stokastic Sims for cash games before borrowing any of this.

That free-versus-paid line is worth naming plainly. The cheat sheet shows you the top five rows of each panel; the Sims show you the whole field, every salary, and the lineups themselves.

The cheat sheet is the free preview; the Sims are the whole engine. Stokastic DFS packages (Weekly or Monthly) unlock the full PGA Sims output behind these panels: every golfer's projection, ownership and Boom/Bust range, plus the ROI-ranked lineup pool. Code ALL15 takes 15% off your first week or month.

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FAQ

Is The DraftKings PGA DFS Cheat Sheet Free?

Yes. The cheat sheet is completely free and updates for each tournament. The paid Stokastic Sims packages unlock the full engine behind it: all golfers rather than the top five per panel, plus Boom/Bust ranges and the ROI-ranked lineup pool.

Is There A Cut At The FedEx St. Jude Championship?

No. The FedEx St. Jude Championship is a no-cut FedExCup Playoff event, so barring a withdrawal, every golfer in the roughly 70-man field plays all four rounds. For DFS that removes the missed-cut zero, raises floors across the board, and makes leverage the main way lineups separate.

What Is The Difference Between Ownership And Top-150 Exposure?

Ownership (Own%) projects how often the field will roster a golfer. Top-150 exposure (Exp%) measures how often that golfer appears in the 150 highest sim-ROI lineups the Sims build. Ownership describes the crowd; exposure describes the optimal. Leverage (Lev%) is the difference between them, and positive leverage marks the golfers the Sims like far more than the field does, like Sungjae Im at +28.3% this week.

When Should I Check The Cheat Sheet Before Lock?

Check it early in the week to frame your player pool, then take a final look before Thursday's opening tee shots, because the main slate locks when the first round begins. On a normal cut week that last check is largely about late news changing who can survive to the weekend; with no cut this week the board is steadier, so the final look is mostly about catching any withdrawal and confirming the leverage picture, led by Scheffler and Im, has not moved. For the week's featured plays alongside the sheet, our PGA DFS picks page carries the current tournament's board.

The Bottom Line On This Week's Sheet

Zoom back out and this week's six panels tell one coherent story. A no-cut playoff field compresses salaries and floors, the crowd responds by piling onto the storyline names, led by Cameron Young at 23.3% ownership, and the Sims respond by pointing at the two ends of the barbell: the $13,500 anchor the field refuses to pay for and the value tier it is scrolling past. You now know how to read every number on the sheet, and more importantly, how to notice when two panels disagree, because that disagreement is the edge. The cheat sheet gives you this week's answer for free; the full Sims give you the same answer at every salary, for every golfer, all season.

Stokastic DFS Weekly and Monthly packages include the complete PGA Sims, projections and ownership behind this cheat sheet, and code ALL15 takes 15% off your first week or month.

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