A Golf Noob’s Journey with DraftKings Reignmakers PGA — The Beginning
Hello if you are somehow reading this!
My name is Glenn, and I’ve started dabbling into DraftKing’s new Reignmakers NFT game for the PGA. I thought it would be a good idea to document my experience as we start to explore the inaugural season of the product.
My Background
A little bit about myself: I started my journey with fantasy sports way back in high school as commissioner of a small fantasy football league with my family. As I grew older, I transitioned that experience into becoming a daily fantasy sports player instead. My background is mostly in daily NFL and NBA play on DraftKings, although I do dabble in other sports and sites from time to time. I love the thrill of every day being a new chance to hit it big, and I am also a total geek when it comes to using data and statistics to help get an edge on contests which others may think boildown to luck of the draw.
That exposure to being so involved in basketball eventually led me to discovering NBA TopShot, my first dip into the world of NFTs. I quickly fell deep into that community, and despite the tribulations of the NFT market overall I am still actively engaged and excited about what that product means for collectors and NBA fans.
When DraftKings introduced Reignmakers for football in 2022, you would think that the marriage of these two things I love would be a match made in heaven. I opened my free pack…and promptly forgot about it. My Fall tends to be pretty busy season, so between real-life priorities and the season-long/daily fantasy grind it was of very little interest to me to add in this new other thing to my todo list.
Why Reignmakers PGA?
Smash cut to a couple weeks ago, when I received an email that I had a free pack waiting for me for Reignmakers PGA in my account.
Quick sidebar for those who do not know: Reignmakers is a daily fantasy game where you use golf NFTs that you acquire (through packs or from others via the Marketplace) to enter lineups into tournaments, with cash prizes on the line.
Here is what I knew about the PGA at that point:
- PGA is golf
- Tiger Woods is a dude who used to play golf, and allegedly still kinda plays today
- If you get the ball in the hole in the first swing it’s called a “hole in one”
That’s pretty much the extent of my golf knowledge.
But you know what? Free is free. So I clicked on the link and all of a sudden I am on a screen ripping “cards” of people for all I could tell may not even exist. Here’s what I opened:
I had heard of Rory McIlroy through the zeitgeist…and that’s about it. I did enjoy that there was a guy named “Huh”, because that was my exact reaction to each card as I revealed them in the pack.
Ok so cool, I have all these random cards, so what was my next step?
To try to sell them, of course, since I had 0 plans on actually participating in this thing.
A few clicks later and I am on the marketplace, searching up prices for these things.
“Rory is worth $40?! SOLD!”
I go to my collection and start trying to list my cards when I notice that…I can’t. Apparently, these NFTs are part of a special “Starter” set, which are effectively bound to my account exclusively.
Womp womp, no $40 windfall for me.
At this point, I am ready to call it a lost causeand just pretend these things never existed. I already did that to my Joe Mixon NFT half a year ago, why not these dudes too?
However, before I get a chance to close my browser, I was hit with an idea.
The Start of an Experiment
For a long time, I had been looking for something to do fantasy wise between NBA and NFL (since I do not play MLB). I had been having a good NBA year thus far, so I had a few dollars to play around with, so what if I could do something a little more fun with these cards rather than letting them collect digital dust on the digital shelf?
The thesis of my experiment was simple: Can someone who knows nothing about professional golf, a little about NFTs, and a lot about other daily fantasy sports, be profitable at Reignmakers PGA?
I would start with this free pack (and some amount of additional seed money), then use the resources I had available via my other DFS tools and communities to attempt to grind out a profit by the end of the PGA season.
Small risk for a (probably small to negative) reward.
With a new found goal, I booted up a spreadsheet and got to work.
