Griffin Wong previews The Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club and gives his picks for your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups.
For the second consecutive week, all attention turns to the PGA TOUR as it plays one of its eight Signature Events. Last week, the world’s best players descended upon Pebble Beach Golf Links for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and for this weekend, they’ve made the journey down the coast to Riviera Country Club for The Genesis Invitational.
It will also be the first time that Riviera has been the host since 2024, since wildfires forced the tournament to be held at Torrey Pines South last year instead. The course and community’s recovery could be a major storyline this weekend.
As for the golf, it should be plenty competitive, and making the right picks as part of DraftKings’ featured DFS contest is key. Here are three players I like:
Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $1M Sand Trap [$200K to 1st]
Chris Gotterup ($8,800)
At Riviera, there are plenty of flat lies, the kikuyu rough isn’t overly penal, and Southern California weather conditions should always remain pretty comfortable. But with its undulations, occasional fescue, and tricky bunkers, missing in the wrong spots around the green can be heavily penal, so taming the course will require short-game wizardry. Driving distance is of slightly above-average importance at Riviera relative to other PGA TOUR courses and short game is even more paramount.
Gotterup has both. He ranks ninth in Strokes Gained: Around the Green and fifth in driving distance, so he should be able to bomb it past all the trouble and get up and down around the green if he needs to. He’s also had an incredible season, winning both the Sony Open in Hawaii and the WM Phoenix Open, the latter in a playoff over Hideki Matsuyama ($9,500), a 2024 winner at Riviera. The 26-year-old didn’t have a great weekend at Pebble Beach, but that course is far less kind to subpar putters than Riviera is.
Ludvig Åberg ($8,300)
Åberg is technically the defending champion, since he won the event last spring at Torrey Pines South, and while that course requires a slightly different set of skills, distance is always an advantage there and chipping is comparatively more important as well. While Åberg hasn’t finished a season as an above-average chipper since 2022-23, he’s always been capable of bombing the ball and is simply under-valued for his pedigree. He has top-seven finishes in both of his starts in The Masters Tournament at Augusta National (the third-most similar PGA TOUR course to Riviera, per Data Golf).
Admittedly, Åberg has been in exceptionally poor form this season, missing the cut in two of his three events, but he’s trending in the right direction after finishing with rounds of 69, 66, and 67 last weekend at Pebble Beach to salvage a tie for 37th. $8,300 just feels like exceptional value for a player who has finished in the top 10 in 18 of his 59 career starts and had a respectable T-19 in his lone appearance at Riviera.
Akshay Bhatia ($7,500)
This also feels like exceptional value for Bhatia, a Los Angeles native who ranks in the top quartile in Strokes Gained: Around the Green. To be fair, he hasn’t always been this good with his wedges, ranking in the bottom quartile in that same stat last season, but he’s still just 24 years old, so some improvement was always to be expected. I’m particularly encouraged by the fact that he ranks 13th in sand save percentage, given Riviera’s complex greenside bunkers.
It’s not like the southpaw is in poor form. He’s recorded top-10 finishes in each of his last two starts, tying for third at the WM Phoenix Open and finishing in joint sixth at Pebble Beach, even after a final-round 72. The most recent course he won at, the Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio, values short game to an even greater degree than Riviera. He also finished in a tie for ninth last season at Torrey Pines.