FanDuel PGA DFS Cheat Sheet: Sims, Projections And Ownership

Stokastic's free PGA DFS cheat sheet for FanDuel is six small tables that condense tens of thousands of tournament simulations into a two-minute read, and this week's Wyndham Championship board opens on a contradiction worth the whole article. The most popular golfer in the FanDuel player pool is Maverick McNealy at a massive 60.2% ownership, and he does not appear on a single one of the other five panels. Meanwhile Ryan Gerard, the fifth-highest salary at $11,400, shows up on four panels and leads the one that wins tournaments: leverage, at 20.9%. The field's favorite click and the Sims' favorite build are two different golfers, and reading that gap is the entire skill this sheet teaches. By the end I will take Gerard's row and walk it into the anchor of a six-golfer FanDuel build under the $60,000 cap.

The Quick Answer

The FanDuel PGA DFS cheat sheet is a free weekly board built from a full Stokastic Sims run of the tournament, split into six panels: salaries, projections, ownership, value, top-150 exposure and leverage. Read the projection and salary panels to set your pecking order, then build your tournament core from the leverage panel rather than the ownership panel, which describes everyone else's lineup. The panel-by-panel breakdown, what a short Donald Ross birdie-fest does to those numbers, and a worked example that turns Gerard's 20.9% leverage into a six-man roster are all below.

What The FanDuel PGA DFS Cheat Sheet Is

The cheat sheet is the free weekly summary of what the paid Stokastic Sims produce for the FanDuel golf slate. The Sims play the full 72-hole tournament tens of thousands of times, assemble a pool of lineups, rank that pool by simulated ROI, and the sheet skims the top of the output into six top-five panels. Everything on it is FanDuel-specific: the salaries are FanDuel's, the projections are scored to FanDuel's system, and none of it transfers to any other site's slate.

The sheet itself costs nothing, every week, no package required, and no promo code touches it because there is nothing to discount. The code below applies to the paid Stokastic packages behind the sheet, where the full PGA DFS projections, Ownership Projections, Boom/Bust and the Sims themselves live. Code ALL15 takes 15% off your first week or month of a Stokastic All Access package, which covers golf and every other sport on the site.

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This week's capture is the good kind: every panel is fully populated, names and numbers both, so every figure in this article comes straight off the board.

The Six Panels And How To Read Each One

The salary panel runs Cameron Young at $12,800, Patrick Cantlay at $11,900, Jackson Koivun at $11,800, Hideki Matsuyama at $11,600 and Gerard at $11,400. That is a $1,400 spread across the top five, which is tight: the Wyndham field runs lighter than a signature event, with the very top of the world rankings mostly sitting the week out, and thinner fields compress salaries. Under a $60,000 cap that averages $10,000 per slot across six golfers, nobody on this board forces the kind of cap gymnastics an elite-field week does.

The projection panel is where the board picks its favorite. Young leads at 87.0 projected FanDuel points, and the drop to Koivun in second at 75.8 is 11.2 points, the loudest number on the sheet. Behind him sit Ben Griffin at 73.9, then Gerard and Matsuyama tied at 73.8. The defending champion, who won here at 22 under last year, projects a full class above a field that is otherwise bunched within two points.

Now the ownership panel, and the reason I called this board a contradiction. It reads McNealy at 60.2%, Young at 48.3%, Tom Kim at 37.2%, Keith Mitchell at 31.7% and Matsuyama at 22.9%. Three of those five names, McNealy, Kim and Mitchell, appear nowhere else on the sheet. The field is not building from the projection panel; it is building from name recognition and storylines, and the sheet quietly shows you exactly where.

The row worth staring at: Maverick McNealy is the most-owned golfer on the entire FanDuel board at 60.2%, and he is not top five in salary, projections, value, exposure or leverage. The Sims' 150 best lineups mostly pass on the golfer three of every five opponents will roster. You do not need a hot take to be different this week; the board's heaviest chalk is doing the work for you.

The last two panels belong to the Sims' own output. The value panel, projected points per $1,000 of salary, is five cheap golfers the engine likes as cap relief: Austin Smotherman at 7.78, Matthew McCarty at 7.75, Davis Chatfield at 7.65, Chandler Phillips at 7.50 and Joel Dahmen at 7.49. The exposure panel, the share of the top 150 sim-ROI lineups each golfer appears in, runs Young at 55.3%, Gerard at 28.0%, Harris English at 27.3%, then Aaron Rai and Griffin tied at 24.7%. And the leverage panel, optimal exposure minus projected field ownership, goes Gerard at 20.9%, Davis Thompson at 13.1%, Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen at 12.6%, Ryo Hisatsune at 12.5% and English at 11.8%. English making both the exposure and leverage top fives is the classic double: a golfer the Sims want who the field is leaving alone.

What Sedgefield And The FedExCup Bubble Do To This Board

Panels do not exist in a vacuum, and this week's venue explains most of the board's shape. Sedgefield Country Club is a short, tree-lined Donald Ross par 70 at roughly 7,100 yards, a positional birdie-fest where driver is optional and scoring runs through short irons and wedges. On a course like this, raw distance stops separating golfers, which is exactly why a big salary can outrun a golfer's actual edge: the salary panel prices reputation and season-long form, but the course compresses the on-grass gap between $12,800 and $11,400.

Two panels, one lesson: Patrick Cantlay is this week's cleanest example of reading the board together rather than panel by panel. He is second in salary at $11,900 and absent from every other panel on the board. That is not the sheet saying he plays badly; it is the sheet saying that at that price, on a course that shrinks skill edges, the Sims found better ways to spend the money.

The second storyline feeds the ownership panel. The Wyndham Championship is the final event of the PGA Tour regular season, and only the top 70 in FedExCup points advance to the playoffs, so part of this field is playing for its season. DFS fields over-react to that narrative in a predictable direction: familiar names with something on the line attract rosters on story alone, which is how you get three golfers in the ownership top five who appear on no other panel. The beauty of the leverage panel is that you never have to guess where the over-reaction is. Leverage is just optimal exposure minus projected ownership, so when the field piles onto a name for narrative reasons, his leverage falls, and when the field sleeps on a live one, his leverage rises. Gerard's 20.9% is that math pointing at one golfer harder than it points at anyone else this week.

How FanDuel Roster Rules Change The Read

None of those numbers mean anything without the FanDuel format in front of you. Three rules shape every read on this board:

• Six Golfers, One $60,000 Cap. That is a $10,000 average per slot, and every dollar you spend above it on one golfer comes back out of another slot, which is why the value panel exists at all.
• FanDuel Scoring Leans Harder On Finishing Position Than DraftKings. Final leaderboard spot carries real weight on top of hole-by-hole scoring.
• The 36-Hole Cut Is The Format's Kill Switch. A golfer who misses the weekend stops scoring entirely.

That first rule makes golf the purest budget-allocation game on the site, and the PGA lineup-building guide covers the construction shapes in depth.

The finishing-position lean is the wrinkle most players miss, because it pulls projected points toward the top of the board: Young's 87.0 is not just birdies, it is the Sims banking how often the defending champion contends here. It also changes who is actually cheap. A mid-priced golfer who keeps finishing tournaments near the lead is worth more on FanDuel than his raw scoring suggests, and that finish-heavy lens is baked into every projection and value number on this sheet, which is precisely why you should never carry a number from this board to any other site's slate.

The cut rule deserves its own paragraph, because it compounds with the scoring rule: a golfer trimmed after 36 holes stops scoring and surrenders the finishing-position points FanDuel's system leans on. Lose one golfer to Friday's cut and you are playing five against six; lose two and the lineup is done in a tournament of any size. The honest price of the leverage panel lives right here: a build carrying Gerard, Thompson and Neergaard-Petersen lives or dies on Friday afternoon, and surviving that risk is what the 20.9% edge costs. The cut is also why simulation output beats a static projection in golf more than in any other sport, a point the full PGA DFS strategy guide builds from. One format warning belongs here too: everything in this article describes the full-tournament slate. Single-round Showdown contests are a different puzzle, and the PGA Showdown strategy guide is the right tool for those.

How The Stokastic Sims Build These Numbers

Every panel is one engine viewed from six angles. The Stokastic Sims do not rank this field off a static projection list; they play the entire Wyndham Championship tens of thousands of times, cuts, weekend pairings and final leaderboards included. That matters in golf because a 72-hole tournament is a long-tail outcome distribution: the same golfer misses the cut in one sim, finishes 40th in another and wins a third. A median projection alone flattens that shape. Gerard at 73.8 and Matsuyama at 73.8 are identical as medians, yet one of them is second on the exposure panel and the other is fifth in ownership, because the Sims also know how often each posts the tournament that wins a large-field GPP.

Ownership runs through the same engine as a distribution rather than a single guess. Stokastic's Ownership Projections estimate where the FanDuel field will land, the sim-ROI rankings say where the optimal lineups actually land, and leverage is the gap between the two. The 150 best lineups by simulated ROI become the exposure panel, which is why it is written as top-150 exposure: it is a count from the lineup pool, not anyone's opinion. The Stokastic PGA Sims walkthrough shows the full workflow, and the complete output behind the sheet, PGA DFS projections, ownership and leverage for every golfer in the field, lives in the Golf DataHub.

Six top-five panels are the skim. The paid layer is the same engine with the lid off, which is the honest version of the upsell: the sheet shows you the Sims' five favorite leverage plays, the packages show you all of them.

From One Row To A Roster: The Gerard Worked Example

Now the promised walk-through, starting with Gerard's full line across this week's board:

Read that bottom half again: the field will roster Gerard less than half as often as it rosters McNealy, while the Sims put him in more of their 150 best lineups than anyone except Young. That is what a priority looks like on this sheet.

Start with the decision he forces. The projection panel says Young is worth paying for, and the cap math says you can: Young plus Gerard costs $24,200, which leaves $35,800 across four slots, an average of $8,950. On a compressed salary board that is entirely livable, and it is the both-stories build: the class of the field plus the golfer the Sims want most relative to his ownership. Those last four slots are exactly what the value panel is for; Smotherman, McCarty, Chatfield, Phillips and Dahmen are the five names the engine flags as points-per-dollar relief, and fitting two or three of them is how the build closes under $60,000 with room to move.

The alternative reads the 11.2-point projection gap the other way. If you believe a birdie-fest at a positional par 70 compresses Young's on-course edge, you swap him for Koivun at $11,800. The salary savings are only $1,000, but the real purchase is ownership: Koivun is not in the pool-ownership top five while Young sits second at 48.3%, so the swap keeps a top-two projection and steps out of the board's second-heaviest chalk at the same time. From there the leverage panel fills the middle of the build: Thompson at 13.1%, Neergaard-Petersen at 12.6% or Hisatsune at 12.5% as the differentiation slots, and English at 11.8%, holding his spot on both Sims panels, as the steadier version of the same idea.

One panel never came up in that build: ownership. It described the field, and then the leverage panel beat it, exactly as designed. Notice what the sheet never asked you to do, which is roster its most popular golfer. McNealy at 60.2% is the field's pick; the Sims' 150 best lineups mostly look elsewhere, and simply declining the week's heaviest chalk is the cheapest leverage you will ever buy.

Before you build your own version, this is the moment the sheet is designed for: the free panels found the argument, and the paid layer holds the numbers for the other 100-plus golfers in the field. Code ALL15 takes 15% off your first week or month of a Stokastic All Access package.

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One honest caveat. Exposure and leverage are tournament numbers built from simulated large-field ROI, not floor plays, and the board's top leverage golfer can absolutely miss the cut. If you are new to tournament thinking, the DFS tournament strategy guide explains why you judge the process over months of slates, not one Sunday leaderboard. The board also re-runs as the week develops, so check the sheet again before Thursday's lock, and cross-reference this week's PGA DFS picks for the golfer-by-golfer reasoning behind it.

FAQ

Is the FanDuel PGA DFS cheat sheet free? Yes. It posts free on Stokastic every tournament week, no package required, as the free preview of what the paid Stokastic Sims produce for the FanDuel golf slate. No promo code touches the sheet itself, because there is nothing to discount; code ALL15 applies to the paid All Access packages behind it.

Does the leverage panel mean I should roster zero McNealy this week? No. Leverage is an allocation signal, not a ban. When a golfer carries the board's heaviest ownership, simply rostering him less often than the field does, and spending those entries on the names the exposure and leverage panels actually list, is the differentiation the sheet is pointing you toward.

What does top-150 exposure mean? It is the share of the 150 highest simulated-ROI lineups that include a golfer. It is a count from the Sims' lineup pool, not a subjective rating, which is why the exposure panel can disagree with both the projection and ownership panels.

Why is leverage so important at the Wyndham Championship specifically? Sedgefield is a short Donald Ross par 70 where scoring bunches up, so on-course skill edges compress and large-field golf tournaments get decided by roster differentiation. Add the FedExCup bubble pushing ownership toward familiar names, and the gap between optimal exposure and field ownership, which is exactly what the leverage panel measures, gets wider than usual.

Are these the same numbers as the DraftKings cheat sheet? No. The salaries, scoring system and player pool are all FanDuel's, and FanDuel scoring leans harder on finishing position, so the projections, values and even the ownership picture are built separately for this slate. Never carry a number from one site's board to the other.

Six Panels, One Argument Per Entry

Read this week's board back to front and it tells a single story: the field is spending its ownership on names the Sims' output panels never mention, the course compresses the edges the salary panel charges for, and the leverage panel answers with one golfer, Gerard, promoted from fifth-place prices to first-place priority. The way I turn that into entries is a split, not a coin flip: the Young-plus-Gerard build carries the safer tournament entries, the Koivun pivot builds carry the contrarian share, and Gerard sits in both, because when one golfer leads the leverage panel while barely registering with the field, he is the piece you anchor across the portfolio rather than debate. A good PGA DFS cheat sheet never hands you a finished lineup; it hands you that argument, sized per entry, with the 60.2% number as your weekly reminder that the crowd's favorite click and the winning build are rarely the same thing. You must be 21+ to play.

When you want the full pool behind the panels, the Sims, Ownership Projections and Boom/Bust are the paid layer, and the code takes 15% off your first week or month.

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