The PGA Tour heads to El Cardonal at Diamante in Los Cabos, Mexico this week (November 5–8) for the World Wide Technology Championship — and if you’re building DraftKings lineups, this is a putting and birdie-making week, not a driving week.
It’s a FedExCup Fall event with a $6 million purse and $1.08 million to the winner, with 120 players and a cut to the top 65 and ties after 36 holes. Defending champion Ben Griffin is back, looking to become the first repeat winner at El Cardonal.
The course: long on the card, wide off the tee, huge on the greens
El Cardonal is a Tiger Woods design, par 72, playing 7,452 yards. It has hosted this event since 2023, after El Camaleón at Mayakoba hosted from 2007 to 2022.
What defines it:
- Wall-to-wall Platinum Paspalum. Fairways, greens, tees and rough are all paspalum — and there is effectively no rough. The greens average about 8,300 square feet, among the largest on Tour.
- Very wide fairways. Landing areas run about 60 yards wide. The field hit 88.7% of fairways here in 2025, the highest rate of any Tour event that season. Driving accuracy, on its own, does not separate this field.
- A rare miss is expensive. When players do miss a fairway here, they find sand or native desert, not rough. Over the three El Cardonal editions, each missed fairway cost about 0.74 strokes.
- Four par 5s, all gettable. Holes 1 (582 yards), 6 (601), 14 (554) and 18 (585) all averaged under par in 2025. With a winning score in the -24 to -29 range, you have to cash the par 5s and pile up birdies.
- 48 bunkers, water on just one hole, and wind as the other defense. The early-week forecast is 10–20 mph winds Thursday and Friday, easing to 5–10 mph at the weekend, with highs of 83–84 degrees and low rain chances.
The winner profile: putting first, approach second
Here is the stat that defines El Cardonal: all three winners ranked 2nd, 4th and 2nd in putting average for the week.
The rest of the profile follows from that:
- Putting on paspalum is the separator. Griffin, Austin Eckroat and Erik van Rooyen all won more on the greens than off the tee.
- Driving distance is not essential. The three winners ranked 43rd, 55th and 60th in driving distance. Do not pay up for distance alone here.
- Approach and greens in regulation are consistently solid. The winners ranked 18th, 16th and 13th in GIR — not elite, but never a weakness — and the GIR leader or runner-up finished top-5 in each of the three years.
- Scrambling helps, but is secondary. The winners ranked 29th, 13th and 5th in scrambling.
- Birdie-or-better and par-5 scoring are structurally necessary. You cannot win at -24 to -29 without converting the par 5s and making birdies in bunches.
- Every El Cardonal winner closed with a 63, and every one was inside the top 5 at halfway and within 2 strokes of the lead after 54 holes.
Past winners at El Cardonal:
- 2025: Ben Griffin, -29 (259, a tournament record), beat Chad Ramey and Sami Välimäki by 2
- 2024: Austin Eckroat, -24, beat Justin Lower and Carson Young by 1
- 2023: Erik van Rooyen, -27, beat Matt Kuchar and Camilo Villegas by 2
Cut lines at El Cardonal: -5 (2023), -2 (2024), -5 (2025).
Course-history standouts at El Cardonal: Griffin (WON/T24/T23), Carson Young (T6/T2/9th), Matt Kuchar (T11/T30/T2), Beau Hossler (T17/T20/T15) and Justin Lower (T31/T2/T23, gaining 1.87 strokes per round across his 12 rounds here). Garrick Higgo and Sami Välimäki also have strong El Cardonal records.
One caution: Mayakoba history is a poor guide to El Cardonal. Mayakoba rewarded driving accuracy above all; El Cardonal’s forgiving fairways neutralize that. Kuchar is the exception who contended at both.
The contest and the DraftKings trends
DraftKings’ featured contest is the $150K Sand Trap, $50K to first. At the top of the salary board: Jackson Koivun $10,400, Ryan Gerard $10,200 and defending champion Ben Griffin $10,000.
An honest gap first: no flagship winning lineup for this event was publicly found. DraftKings does not publish the Sand Trap winners’ lineups in its previews, and no verified flagship lineup was found for 2023, 2024 or 2025.
The one partially documented winner is the 2024 $10K Birdie: Kenny.Skal71, 705 points, 77.31% combined ownership, built as 1x10k (Max Greyserman) + 1x9k + 4x7k, skipping the 8k and 6k ranges — and it had tournament winner Eckroat in it, as did all of the top 10 lineups that year. Its exact salary spent, full six names and cut record were not stated in the review, so do not treat those as confirmed.
The broader pattern, from 58 DraftKings Birdie winning-lineup reviews from 2023–2025 (a smaller contest, not a flagship), is still useful as a construction check:
- Spend almost all of it. 92% of those winners spent $49,600 or more of the $50,000.
- Stars-and-scrubs dominated. 44 winners were stars-and-scrubs, 13 balanced, 2 super stars-and-scrubs.
- Ownership centered around 77%. Mean combined ownership was 77.24% — chalk anchors plus low-owned differentiation, not nine low-owned names stapled together.
For GPP construction this week, that means:
- Pay for paspalum putting and approach, not for distance. A great driver with a mediocre putter is the wrong profile for El Cardonal.
- Weight birdie-makers and par-5 scorers. In a birdie fest, placement points matter less and birdies, eagles and streaks matter more.
- Use El Cardonal history as a tiebreaker, not a crutch. The sample is only three years, and recent form on paspalum greens plus approach play is the consensus predictive base.
- Keep winner equity in the build. In the only verified WWT winning-lineup case, every top-10 lineup had the tournament winner.
We’ll be building our World Wide Technology Championship lineups all week in the Discord → /discord/ — research, cores and final lineups, free as always.
21+. Play responsibly. Golf DFS is variance with a view — size your entries accordingly.