Hey y’all, I want to first apologize for abandoning this weekly article earlier this season. I had moved across the country and gotten a new job and I was unable to give this series the time I think it deserved. I moved out to Colorado where sports betting is legal, and I found myself drawn to prop bets more than DFS.
Ironically, playing through DraftKings Sportsbook, I found myself earning free DFS entries with a few of my bets. Using some of my strategies from earlier in the season, I cashed in every single one of these free contests I got. I quickly realized I learned some important things from my dive into DFS earlier this season, and I wanted to compile them into one last DFS article. So, here is my Beginner’s Guide to NFL DFS.
Getting Started:
- Find the contest that works best for you. For me, I started with cash games because they are “less risky”. I also started avoiding single-game “Showdowns” because they’re more variance based, and I struggled to account for this variance.I settled on the Sunday early and main slate classic contests, but that’s me. If you enjoy Showdowns, do them. Don’t enter a contest you don’t enjoy just because you want to play DFS; that’s an easy way to lose money.
- Salary is everything. Salary allocation is where the strategy of DFS comes from, so if you’re creating a lineup just based on projected points or another points-based metric, you’re doing it wrong. I found the most success when I divided projected points by salary to give me a “points per $1000” metric that I used to compare players.
- Make sure you’re on top of the most recent news. DraftKings and FanDuel have extensive formulas to determine salaries and a lot of thought and effort go into the prices. Because of this, initial salaries for the week are meticulously made, but they do not change throughout the week.Again,they do not change once they’re out. This means that the perfect lineup you set on Wednesday can be completely out of contention before the games even start.
- Betting lines matter, or more specifically expected points do. Expected points can be determined by taking half of the game’s total and adding half of the line for the favorite or subtracting half of the line for the underdog. More expected points = more points scored in the game = a higher likelihood of your player scoring fantasy points.
Strategy:
- Elite WR > everything else. This is the strategy I found most successful and continues to help me win money. I define elite wide receivers by those with the highest WOPR. WOPR stands for Weighted Opportunity Rating and is a weighted combination of the share of team targets a player receives and the share of team air yards.I built my best lineups by combining WOPR with my projected points per $1000 metric, choosing the top 3 wide receivers, and building my lineup from there.
- Use expected points from betting lines to find values at RB and QB. You want players that are more likely to score touchdowns, and expected points derived from betting lines is an easy way to figure this out.
- Do not spend a lot on a D/ST. On DraftKings, I always made sure my defense cost less than $3,500 and usually tried to make them even cheaper. I used expected points here again, usually looking at the cheapest 5-8 defenses and picking the team with the least amount of expected points against.
- There’s value at TE until there isn’t. This is another area where I found WOPR to be helpful. I almost always was able to find a player with a high WOPR and a cheap salary to fill my TE spot. I say almost always because some slates didn’t include those cheap tight ends and I found myself paying up for Travis Kelce a few times.
General DFS Advice:
- Look back and study your lineups after the week is over. DFS is a rapidly changing game and you will lose more times than not. It’s important that you learn from every loss. Sometimes, it’s just bad luck and variance. Other times there is a lesson you need to learn from your lineups.Earlier this season, I skipped on Davante Adams because I thought he was too expensive. That week, Davante Adams was pretty much required to cash after scoring 30+. I learned to never skip out on a WR just because I thought they were too expensive.
- You’re not as good at predicting game script as you think you are. Trying to predict game script is where some of my worst lineups came from. You can predict a game script to an extent, but do not make it the backbone of your lineup.
- Volume is king. Just as with seasonal fantasy football, you want the player that gets plenty of touches. Don’t get cute and try and predict an efficient player to continue to be efficient.
These are just some of the tenets I learned during my first year of DFS. I ended up finding an extremely successful and profitable strategy that can be found here. Thanks for following along this season, and you can continue to follow me on Twitter @BpoFSU. Hopefully this will help you earn some beer money!
