Event Overview

The PGA Tour heads to Memorial Park Golf Course in the heart of Houston, Texas for the 2026 Texas Children’s Houston Open. A regular-season full-field cut event, the tournament advances the top 65 and ties through 36 holes and carries a $9.9 million purse with 500 FedExCup points on the line. Defending champion Min Woo Lee returns after capturing his first Tour victory here last year at 20-under par, holding off Scottie Scheffler and Gary Woodland by a single stroke. With the Masters just two weeks away, several high-profile players will use this as a final competitive tune-up. DFS Dashboard ran simulations per player using our two-stage bimodal mixture model to identify the edges worth targeting across all salary tiers.

Cut Rules

The Texas Children’s Houston Open follows standard PGA Tour cut rules: the field of 135 players is reduced to the top 65 and ties after 36 holes. Players who miss the cut receive no DraftKings points for the weekend rounds, making cut probability one of the most important filters in lineup construction. At Memorial Park, the cut line has historically settled around even par to 1-under, though firmer overseeded conditions and wind exposure can push it higher in any given year. For DFS purposes, rostering players with sub-50% cut probability is a significant risk – those players need to deliver elite Thursday-Friday scoring just to survive, and the variance drag on lineup ceiling is substantial. Our model applies a hard 50% cut probability floor before any lineup building begins, eliminating the bottom of the field and focusing construction on players with a realistic path to all four rounds.

The Course: Memorial Park Golf Course

Memorial Park is a par-70 layout stretching 7,475 yards, redesigned by Tom Doak with player consultant Brooks Koepka in a $15 million renovation that returned PGA Tour golf to this historic municipal venue for the first time since 1963. Unlike traditional resort courses, Memorial Park is a public facility that hosts roughly 60,000 rounds per year, meaning the turf endures heavy traffic and the greens carry subtle, well-worn character. The course was overseeded last fall for the spring date, transitioning to rye-over-Bermuda conditions that play firmer and faster than the pure Bermuda setups seen when the event was held in the fall – conditions that more closely mirror what players will face at Augusta National.

Doak’s design is defined by its green complexes rather than bunkering – Memorial Park has only 19 bunkers, far fewer than most Tour stops. Instead, contoured short-grass runoffs surrounding elevated, undulating putting surfaces punish imprecise approach shots. The course demands second-shot precision over raw power; players who control distance and trajectory with mid-to-long irons have a structural edge. Broad fairways off the tee invite drivers, but the real scoring separation happens on approach, where missing to the wrong side of a green leaves treacherous up-and-downs from tight lies. Strokes Gained: Approach is the key predictive stat at this venue, and players with strong course history at Memorial Park have historically repeated their success year over year.

Anchor Selection: Premium Tier ($8,300+)

Every lineup in our build starts with two or three anchor players priced at $8,300 or above. These are the players our model identifies as having the highest projected ceilings and the scoring upside to carry a lineup into cash or GPP contention. Because they consume the largest share of the $50,000 salary cap, anchor selection is the single highest-leverage decision in the build. Choose poorly here and no amount of value in the lower tiers can compensate.

The table below lists all 17 eligible anchors after applying our 50% cut probability filter. Review their projected points, cut probability, and critically their 10X, 11X, and 12X PTS/$ probabilities – these multipliers represent the likelihood a player returns 10, 11, or 12 times their salary-implied value, which is the threshold for tournament-winning upside at each price point. Select 2-3 players from this group to anchor your lineups.

High Floor, High Upside: Best Value Targets

After locking in your premium anchors, the remaining roster spots need to balance two things: a reliable floor that protects against a missed cut disaster, and enough ceiling to differentiate your lineup in large-field GPPs. The players below represent the best of both worlds – they all carry a cut probability of 50% or higher, giving you a reasonable floor, while simultaneously ranking among the highest 12X PTS/$ probabilities in the player pool. These are the names our model flags as the most efficient upside plays on the slate.

The 12X PTS/$ column is the critical number here. It represents the probability that a player returns 12 times their salary-implied point value – the kind of performance that wins tournaments outright and vaults DFS lineups into top-heavy prize pools. A player like Mac Meissner at $7,000 with a 26.16% chance of hitting 12X offers massive leverage: if he delivers, you’ve effectively bought a tournament-winning ceiling at a bargain price, freeing salary for premium anchors elsewhere. Pay close attention to ownership percentages as well – several of these players project under 5% ownership, which means their upside comes with built-in contrarian value.

Tier Breakdown: Probability-Based Player Groupings

To build our lineup populations, we grouped all non-anchor players (salary below $8,800) into tiers using 12X PTS/$ probability bands. Starting with the highest-salaried player and working down, we accumulated players into each tier until the combined probability of at least one player in that tier achieving 12X PTS/$ reached 70%. At that threshold, we closed the tier and started a new one. This means that in every tier below, there is approximately a 70% or greater chance that at least one player will deliver a tournament-winning return relative to salary.

This approach ensures that every tier carries meaningful upside. When we assign four distinct tiers to each lineup, we are structurally guaranteeing broad exposure to 12X outcomes across the salary spectrum. You do not need every player to hit – you need one player per tier to break through, and the probability math is designed to make that likely. The Tier Salary listed for each group equals the highest individual salary in that tier and is used during lineup construction to ensure combinations fit within the $49,000-$50,000 target range. Actual lineup salaries will come in at or below these tier-based totals once individual player salaries are applied.

Building Your GPP Lineups

For GPP (guaranteed prize pool) contests, we recommend entering at least 3-4 lineups to maximize player diversity and increase your exposure to different outcome paths. A single lineup locks you into one scenario; multiple lineups let you cover a broader range of the probability space while still maintaining a coherent structural approach. The goal is not to spray random combinations but to systematically vary your anchor pairs and tier assignments so that each lineup offers a distinct route to the top of the leaderboard.

How to Construct Each Lineup

Start by selecting 2-3 anchor players from the Premium Tier ($8,300+) table in Section 2. These players fill the P1 and P2 slots (and optionally P3 if you choose three anchors). Next, fill the remaining roster spots by selecting exactly one player from each of four distinct tiers from the Tier Breakdown in Section 4. The key rule: each tier can only be used once per lineup. You are picking one player per tier, not loading up on a single tier. This ensures your lineup has structural diversity across the salary spectrum and broad exposure to 12X outcomes at every price point.

The total lineup salary must land between $49,000 and $50,000. When selecting tiers, use the Tier Salary (the max salary in each tier) to estimate whether your combination fits. Since actual player salaries will be at or below the tier salary, any combination that works at the tier level will work at the player level.

Example: Min Woo Lee + Jake Knapp Lineup

Below is a sample lineup shell using Min Woo Lee ($9,900) and Jake Knapp ($9,500) as anchors. With $30,600 remaining, we slot in Tier 1 ($8,700), Tier 2 ($8,000), Tier 8 ($7,000), and Tier 9 ($6,900) for a tier-salary total of exactly $50,000. You then pick one player from each tier column to complete the lineup. Every combination of one player per tier column produces a valid lineup.

To complete the lineup, select exactly one player from each tier column (P3 through P6). For example, you might choose Shane Lowry from Tier 1, Sam Stevens from Tier 2, Denny McCarthy from Tier 8, and Jesper Svensson from Tier 9. Any combination of one player per column produces a valid lineup that fits within the salary cap. Vary your selections across your 3-4 lineups to maximize player diversity and avoid overexposure to any single outcome.

Cash Game Strategy: High-Floor Core Lineup

While GPP strategy rewards differentiation and contrarian thinking, cash games (50/50s, double-ups, and head-to-heads) demand the opposite: you want the safest possible floor. The winning approach in cash is to stack your lineup with the highest-owned players who carry the strongest probability of making the cut. High ownership in cash is not a liability – it is a feature. When the field is constructing similar lineups, you simply need to be on the right side of the cut line and let the weekend rounds accumulate points.

We calculated the optimal core lineup by filtering for only players with a 75% cut probability – the highest tier in our model – and then optimizing for maximum combined ownership within the $49,000-$50,000 salary window. The result is a six-player lineup where every player is both highly owned and highly likely to make the cut. This lineup is designed to be the chalk play: the safest, most popular, highest-floor construction available on the slate.

The table below lists all 25 players who carry a 75% cut probability, sorted by projected ownership. The six players highlighted in green and marked with a checkmark form the optimal core lineup: Min Woo Lee, Ryan Gerard, Keith Mitchell, Sam Stevens, Sahith Theegala, and Taylor Pendrith. Together they total $49,900 in salary and 101.6% combined ownership – meaning this is the most popular six-player combination the field can build at this cut probability threshold.