The second weekend of April is automatically circled on many sports enthusiasts’ calendars each year. Those dates encompass The Masters, the biggest pro golf tournament of the year.
Fittingly, DraftKings is commemorating the event by introducing a contest format that they found great success with during the NFL postseason earlier this year.
Single-game format making its fantasy golf debut
Single-Round Showdown – a version of DraftKings’ single-game contest format adapted to daily fantasy golf – will make its debut for the tournament’s second round on Friday, April 6. For the first time in the history of PGA DFS on DraftKings, participants will be able to participate in contests based on single-round play. In the case of the Masters, DraftKings will offer cash games and guaranteed prize pools for each of rounds two through four (on Friday through Sunday).
Moreover, final-round Showdown contests will have a scoring twist. Participants will also receive bonus points for the finishing positions of the golfers in the lineup. Consequently, players with golfers that make a late surge up The Masters leaderboard could find themselves doing the same in their contests.
The rules and the size of the guaranteed contests are to be announced. FanDuel has not said if it will be following suit, yet.
More DFS innovation
Single-Round Showdown represents the next iteration of the new contest format that’s become increasingly pervasive on both DraftKings and FanDuel as 2018 has unfolded. The two sites have already experimented with NFL, NBA and MLB single-game contests, with football leading the way with its debut during the wild-card round in early January.
The one difference is that when implementing Showdown for those sports, DraftKings took the opportunity to also modify positional requirements in the respective roster formats.
Conversely, with golf being a position-less sport, the only difference between Single-Round Showdown and standard PGA contests is the timeframe of the real-word sporting event they encompass. Participants still select six golfers and operate under a $50,000 salary cap, as they would with conventional fantasy golf contests.
Single-game contests no longer raising eyebrows?
Once thought to be taboo due to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, single-game contests are becoming so common at the “Big Two” of DFS that they’re essentially now a non-story from a legal perspective.
For all practical purposes, the sites are utilizing individual state laws as the default guideline in terms of compliance. None of those include language that specifically outlaws contests based on a single event.
In those “gray area” states where DFS is neither expressly legalized nor forbidden, the site are apparently confident enough to stand on the belief that the “multiple real-world sporting events” that the UIGEA requires paid-entry fantasy contests to be based on can be interpreted as occurring within a single game.
DFS contest innovation on the rise for PGA
Single-Round Showdown is technically the second new PGA contest format for DraftKings within the last month. During the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play tournament in late March, it rolled out a new Match Play format in which the innovative component came in the scoring.
As opposed to points being awarded for bogeys, eagles, birdies and par as they are in conventional PGA contests, Match Play participants’ scores were compiled based on eventualities such as holes or matches won or lost. This mirrored the unique head-to-head format of the tournament itself.
It’s also the second consecutive year in which DraftKings utilizes the Masters as a platform for a new offering for its golf fans. The 2017 edition marked the site’s introduction of “Weekend Golf”, where users were able to play in contests that exclusively consisted of the final two rounds of the tournament.
Naturally, Single-Round Showdown advances that idea one step further.
