How A Stokastic Sims Subscriber Won $200K At DraftKings PGA DFS

Every golf DFS player has heard the excuse: you can't win the big one without dumping 150 lineups into the pool. Then a Stokastic Sims subscriber named Kevin took down an $800K DraftKings PGA DFS tournament for a $200,000 first-place prize with exactly 10 lineups. Roughly $200-and-change in entries, one six-man lineup at the top of the field, and a process built entirely inside our PGA Sims.

We ran his entire entry set back through our post-contest Sim tool, and the story it tells is the point of this article: he didn't win on volume, and he didn't win by force-feeding the chalk. He won on lineup quality you can measure before the tournament tees off. Below we walk through his exposures, the exact winning six, his salary usage, and the one leverage decision that swung the whole contest.

The Quick Answer

A Stokastic Sims subscriber won $200,000 (first place) in an $800K DraftKings PGA DFS tournament playing only 10 lineups, built and simulated with Stokastic's PGA Contest Sims. His set projected a 43.6% simulated ROI before lock, he used all or nearly all of his salary in every lineup, and his winning build came from a modest overweight on a 14%-owned golfer rather than from mass entry. The full winning lineup, his exposure sheet, and the five lessons worth stealing are below.

Watch The Video

The original video walks all 10 of Kevin's entries through the post-contest Sim tool on screen, from his exposure sheet down to the contest-wide Sim ROI leaderboard where his set ranked third among the 10-plus-lineup players. Watch on YouTube. One note: the 20% code mentioned in the video has since expired; the current live code is PGA200K10, which takes 10% off your first payment.

Ten Lineups, $200,000: What Actually Won

Start with the numbers that make this a case study and not a lottery story. Kevin entered 10 lineups at a $20-25 buy-in, a little over $200 in total entries. Before the first tee shot, our Sims projected his set at a 43.6% simulated ROI, averaging 478.5 projected DraftKings points per lineup. His lineups actually averaged 559 points, and the best of them finished first out of the entire field.

That 43.6% figure is the thesis of this whole piece, so hold onto it; we'll come back to what it did and didn't predict. A 43.6% expected ROI doesn't mean you expect to win $200,000, because nobody projects to take down a tournament every week. It means the set of lineups was strong enough that first place was a live outcome rather than a miracle. The post-contest data backs that up: among every entrant who played 10 or more lineups in the contest, Kevin's set had the third-highest simulated ROI. He didn't just get the good end of variance. He brought some of the best lineups in the building.

His process was the standard Stokastic PGA Sims workflow: build a pool of lineups in the contest generator, simulate the slate, keep the builds with the highest Sim ROI, and enter those. He used the same numbers that live in the GOLF DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub, and you can try the Sims free before committing a dollar.

Ready to build the same way? PGA Sims access is 10% off with code PGA200K10.

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The Exposure Sheet: Leverage Where It Counts

Because the process starts with a simulated lineup pool instead of hand-building one "perfect" entry, exposures come out shaped like a portfolio. Here's where Kevin concentrated across his 10 lineups:

The row that decided the tournament is Tom Kim's. Kevin wasn't wildly contrarian. He had Kim in two of 10 lineups against a 14% field number, a modest overweight rather than a dart throw. But in a golf GPP, being meaningfully heavier than the field on the right mid-owned golfer is exactly the kind of leverage that separates first place from a min-cash, and the ownership work in our PGA DFS strategy guide exists to find those spots before lock.

Just as instructive is the bottom row. Scottie Scheffler won the golf tournament and was the highest scorer on the slate, and Kevin was underweight at 10%. You do not need to be overweight on every one of the best golfers. You need the right combination in at least one lineup, which brings us to the six names that cashed the check.

The Winning Lineup: A Worked Example

Here's the exact six-man DraftKings roster that finished first:

This lineup scored 724 DraftKings points with an ownership sum of 78.2 (the field-ownership percentages of his six golfers added together), one of the lower-owned builds in his own set (his 10 lineups averaged an 82.6 ownership sum). And here's the callback to that pre-lock number: this exact lineup carried a 34% simulated ROI before the tournament started, toward the lower end of the 30%-plus band nine of his 10 lineups projected in. The winning entry wasn't the set's best projection, and it didn't need to be; it was a representative product of the process. A 34% ROI in the simulation means every $1,000 entered projects to return $1,340. That's a projection, not a promise of real-money results, but keep clearing that bar and one of those days the top of the range hits.

Salary Usage: Spend The Money

One persistent piece of PGA DFS folklore says you have to leave salary on the table to be different. Kevin's set is a clean counterexample. Of his 10 lineups, five used every dollar of the salary cap, four left just $100 unspent, and one left $200. Despite spending up in all of them, nine of the 10 builds were unique lineups.

The takeaway: uniqueness came from golfer combinations — the Tom Kim leverage, the Scheffler underweight — not from punting salary. Being different and being underfunded are not the same thing.

If your lineup-building process only generates differentiation by leaving money unspent, it's solving the wrong problem. Our guide on how many unique lineups you actually need digs into the same tension for every DFS sport.

Judge The Process, Not The Sweat

The forward promise from the top: what did that 43.6% projected ROI actually predict? Not the $200,000. No simulation promises that. What it predicted was that this was a set worth entering. Nine of Kevin's 10 lineups projected a simulated ROI north of 30%. His single best build by Sim ROI, at 94.1% (Xander Schauffele, Viktor Hovland, Sepp Straka, Adam Scott, Si Woo Kim and Lee Hodges), didn't even cash. The lineup that won "only" projected at 34%.

That spread is the most valuable lesson in the whole case study. Results and process disagree constantly in golf DFS, a sport where half the field misses the cut. The post-contest Sims are how you tell which one to trust: if you lost money on a slate but your lineups simulated well, the process is fine; if you profited on lineups that simulated badly, don't get comfortable. Kevin's win looks like variance from the outside. From the inside, it was the third-best 10-plus-lineup portfolio in the field by simulated ROI finally getting paid for it.

The Lessons You Can Steal

1. Volume is optional; quality isn't. Ten simulated, high-Sim-ROI lineups beat a field full of mass-entry players. Build fewer, better lineups, and pick your spots with the same care you'd apply to contest selection.
2. Spend your salary. Half his lineups used every dollar. Differentiate with combinations, not leftover cap.
3. Leverage is a modest overweight in the right spot. 20% exposure against 14% field ownership won $200,000. You don't need to be 5x the field on anyone.
4. You can be underweight the best golfer and still win. One lineup with the right mix matters more than heavy exposure to every star.
5. Review every slate with post-contest Sims. Grade your lineups on simulated ROI, not on whether the sweat went your way. That habit is the core of winning DFS tournaments long-term.

Every slate is different, and nobody should mechanically roster Tom Kim and Scottie Scheffler every week expecting profit. What repeats is the process: project, simulate, keep the top Sim ROI builds, and check your work afterward. For this week's slate, our PGA DFS picks run on the same engine.

PGA DFS Winner FAQ

How many lineups do you need to win a PGA DFS tournament? Far fewer than 150, or even 20. This contest was won with 10 lineups against entrants playing far more. Simulated lineup quality, not entry count, is what gave the set a 43.6% projected ROI.

Should you leave salary on the table in PGA DFS? Not as a rule. The $200K winner used the full cap in five of 10 lineups and never left more than $200 unspent, and nine of the 10 were still unique builds.

Did the winner's best-projected lineup win? No. His best build by Sim ROI, at 94.1%, didn't even cash, while the lineup that won projected at 34%. That's the point of building a set: get every lineup above a healthy Sim ROI bar (nine of his 10 cleared 30%) and let variance decide which one gets paid.

The tools that built the winning lineup — the contest generator, the Sims and the post-contest review — are the same ones in every Stokastic PGA package, and code PGA200K10 takes 10% off your first payment.

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