One of the reasons that overall leader Eamon Murray fared so well in week 18 was that he used one of his three remaining transfers to add Hunter Mahan to his Eamo's Heroes 3 team.
That leaves most of the managers chasing Murray with a dilemma.
Nineteen of the top 20 now employ Mahan. A form-line of T17, T13, W, T8, T6, T5, T22 and a price of €0.6m make him a compelling "hold", but if you mimic what the leader is doing then you're not going to catch him! It's as if Murray laid an awkward snooker with his transfer last week.
For the record, José Filipe Lima was the player sacrificed.
The chasing managers either have to ditch Mahan and hope his form dips or come up with a few clever buys of their own.
The fields for the FedEx Cup play-off tournaments get progressively smaller and it may pay dividends to look to Europe, where many of the lower-priced players are likely to be active in the closing five weeks of our season.
Markus Brier, Robert-Jan Derksen, Soren Hansen, Steve Webster and Stephen Gallacher all cost €0.8m or less and all feature in the top 10 of our value-for-money standings. A few of those, a springer from the pack and an €8.0m splurge on Tiger Woods seems like a good strategy to us.
You'll need a bunch of transfers to make it happen but three of the top 50 have yet to enter the market.
Michael O'Hare (33rd with Harey's Heroes), Andrew Bailey (40th with Kendal 1) and Kevin Dowling (47th with Monty's Madmen) are the mangers with 10 transfers in hand and some hard thinking to do.
golfmasters@irish-times.ie
