DFS eBook

HOW TO CREATE WINNING CASH AND TOURNAMENT DFS LINEUPS FANTASY FOOTBALL

BLUEPRINT SMARTER | FASTERÂ | STRONGER www.fantasyfootballblueprint.com

BLUEPRINT PHILOSOPHY You're busy. We get it.

Our journey started with building a better cheat sheet for our season-long leagues. We didn’t have time to read emails every day, join multiple sites, or do mock drafts. And we didn’t want to fuss with magazines and piles of paper during our draft, we just wanted a single cheat sheet that had all the data we needed. It didn’t exist, so we built one.

Then we started playing daily fantasy and, like all new players, it took some time, but we got good.

And now you can too. All of our experience, our best strategies, laid out in this book. If you like this, you go into even more detail with our weekly picks and analysis service where you'll get to see how we apply these concepts in real life every week.

INTRODUCTION

When you first start playing daily fantasy sports it can be overwhelming. In season-long you just draft the best player available on your cheat sheet, but DFS introduces player salaries.

It’s similar to an auction, you can have any player you want if you’re willing to spend your budget for him.

But how do you know how much players are actually worth? Where should you spend your money? And where should you try to save money? Let’s jump into some DFS basics and see if we can answer these and many other questions.

LINEUP BASICS

DFS contests are typically broken down into two main categories: cash and tournament.

Cash contests have varying entry fees and if you win, you usually get paid close to what your entry fee was.

Tournaments also have varying entry fees, but a lot fewer people win, and you can get paid an amount ranging from around your entry fee to many, many times more than your entry fee, even a million dollars in some cases.

Cash lineups are geared toward contests where you’re playing a limited number of opponents. This could be head-to-head’s, double-up’s, or 50:50’s.

Typically, when building lineups for these contests you want players that have a high floor, meaning even in a bad week they typically will not be a complete bust and they’re generally pretty consistent. They may not have potential to score two touchdowns and get 100 yards in a week, but they’re also not likely to get you zero points. This is contrasted by tournament lineups where you want players that have boom-or-bust outcomes because you need to beat thousands of other people.

In tournaments, you want players that have a high ceiling. These players have a lot of week-to-week variance, meaning in one week they might score two touchdowns and get 100 yards, but the next week they may get no touchdowns and only 30 yards. To win a tournament – or just to cash in a tournament – you need all your players to have above average performances; you need all your players to have a boom week, so to give yourself a chance at this you’re willing to take on the risk that the player may end up with a low point total. If you’re not first, you’re last!

Then, the blended lineup where you have players who have a high floor but also have a high ceiling!

Think of elite RBs who get 20 carries a game. Even if they don’t have a great day, they’re “probably” not going to ruin your lineup. And if they do have a great game, then you’re well on your way to cashing in a tournament. These, of course, are well known players and are likely to be popular picks each week, so if we use these players we have to find other ways to make a unique lineup. We'll talk more later about all the different ways you can differentiate your lineups.

So how do we pick players? How do we know much players are worth? One common way to value players is using a projected points per dollar metric. You can find this in the ‘Value Rankings’ section of our daily fantasy content. We use our base projections and the player salaries to rank players in order of most bang for your buck. For example, a QB whose salary is $9,000 and is projected to score 20 points would have a points per dollar projection of .002. A QB who is $8,000 but is also projected to score 20 points would have a points per dollar projection of .0025.

Basically, the QB who only costs $8,000 is more valuable and would rank higher in our value rankings.

Your goal when building a lineup is to maximize the value of the money you spend. These value rankings are a good starting point when building cash lineups.

When building tournament lineups, we’re looking for players who have potential to be near the top of all players at their position in a week, so we don’t just want to understand their base projection, we want to understand how many points they could potentially score if all things go right for them. We can use the player’s salary to get a sense of whether we think the player can perform well enough to help us win.

When we’re playing in tournaments we’re typically shooting for a lineup that scores over 180 points, which happens to be three times the total salary you have, $60,000 (on FanDuel). When evaluating a player, as a general rule, ask yourself if you see a way this player can score three times his salary. If you want to pick a player for $4,500 do you see a way that player can score 13.5 pts? If the player is $7,000 do you see a way that player could score 21 pts? This will give you a general sense of whether that could be a tournament winning player or not.

We can use our value rankings as a starting point, but we have to look deeper to understand the best-case projections. This is where Vegas projected point totals come in to play.

OPPORTUNITY

When trying to pick players who have potential to be a top-scoring player at their position, we want to find players who have lots of opportunity. Our starting point is looking at Vegas point totals. If the sports betting guru’s in Las Vegas are setting the over/under on a game’s point total at 48, that’s a game where we can expect lots of points to be scored and, in turn, can expect some individual players to have big games. We want to find those players.

There are other ways we can use Vegas information.

For example, if the point spread is small and the over/under is high, the game is more likely to be a shootout with both teams scoring a lot of points. If the point spread is really high there is blowout potential and you may lean toward playing a team’s RB rather than WRs. You can also use individual player props to help get an idea of a player’s ceiling. If a WR’s prop bet is over/under on 8 catches and 80 yards there is a good chance that player’s best-case scenario could be a tournament winning performance. But if a WR’s over/under is set at 3 catches and 40 yards, there likely isn’t a reasonable chance that player can be the top scoring WR of the week.

Another way to find opportunity is looking at usage metrics like number of snaps played and number of targets. It sounds obvious but if you have a player who only plays half the snaps in a game they’re probably not as likely as others to have a performance that could win you a tournament. Or if a WR plays the entire game but only gets three targets a game, they’re not likely to win you a tournament.

This information is helpful when paired with our next topic, regression.

When finding players for a specific week, the general public chases points. If a player did well last week that same player will be heavily owned this week. But that ignores the idea of regression. If a player scores a TD in three straight weeks, but we expect that player to score eight TDs over the course of the entire season, then that player is likely to have a few games where he doesn’t score a TD. And the opposite is also true. If the player has been on a cold streak for a few games but is still a good player and has a good season-long projection, then we can expect a few strong games coming.

These are the types of players we want to target. We want to find players who have a good chance of seeing positive regression. When others are scared away by a couple bad weeks that’s when we can find our biggest advantages.

GAME THEORY

If you keep all the above in mind, you’ll make better lineups. But there is still a lot more to know. Enter game theory.

Last year, while watching Antonio Brown’s entire career as a Patriot, someone asked, “How are you so good at FanDuel?”

Game theory!

If you’re new to daily fantasy sports there is one key thing you must know. It’s not enough to just build a good lineup, you have to build a unique, good lineup.

That’s where game theory comes in.

The original game theory concept addressed zerosum games, in which each participant’s gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of the other participants. Basically, if someone else is doing bad, then you’re doing good. An example in fantasy football – you have a team’s QB and your opponent has the team’s RB. Every time the QB scores a touchdown, that’s good for you and bad for your opponent, because the QB took away the RB’s opportunity to score points.

But, in DFS you don’t know who your opponents will be playing, so you have to make assumptions. You have to try to figure out who the most popular plays each week will be. Sometimes it’s easy… when the New England defense is playing against the Miami Dolphins, you can reasonably predict that they’ll be the highest-owned defense. Similarly, when the Saints are playing the Rams one week after Christian McCaffrey went for 42 fantasy points against them, you can be sure Alvin Kamara will be the highestowned RB. 40 to 50% of the people in tournaments may even have him! Most DFS players also like to chase points, meaning if a player does well one week, they’ll be highly owned the next week.

So, what do you do with this information? You want to avoid these players (usually) and instead target good players who just had a bad week. Sometimes the matchup is so good – or the price is so good – that you’ll go right along with everyone else and use that player. But, more often, we need to find a way to differentiate our lineups. So if we use the highestowned player, or several highly-owned players, we’ll want to add some players that we think will have low ownership. This doesn’t mean we try to hit a homerun by playing a backup TE or 4th string WR; we still need to have players who have the potential to be a top-scoring player, but who just aren’t as popular.

Another way to differentiate your lineup is by not using that highly owned player at all. Instead, look for a player who has a similar projection – or, really, a similar chance of being the top scoring player at the position. Maybe there is a player who is slightly more expensive, so people are bypassing him for the cheaper option. Maybe there is a player who is facing a tough defense so people are shying away, but forgetting that the offensive player is still an elite player capable of scoring a lot of points. Think of an elite WR playing against a top cornerback or an elite RB playing against a good defensive line.

If you choose not to play the highly owned player you can also differentiate and, thinking about game theory, gain leverage on the field by picking a player that is competing with that player for points. In the example above, if half the tournament field will have Alvin Kamara you might instead choose Michael Thomas. If the Saints score their points through the air, then every time Michael Thomas scores that’s good for you and bad for all those people who have Alvin Kamara. Every time Michael Thomas scores you’re gaining a huge advantage over 40 to 50% of the field because you’re moving up the leaderboard while they stay put. You may also decide to avoid the Saints all together, hoping the game is more of a defensive battle with lots of field goals.

UNIQUE ROSTERS

When you’re thinking about differentiating your lineups by playing less popular players, you should remember, it’s really the ownership percentage of your nine-player roster that matters, not just the ownership percentage of your individual players.

If you have a RB who is owned by 40% of the players in the tournament, but you have a TE who is only owned by 1% of the players, that combination is still a pretty unique combination. But, if you have a RB who is only owned by 10% of the players in the tournament and that same TE, then you really have an advantage over the field. If that 40% RB is a bust and your 10% RB does well, then you’ve leap-frogged 40% of the people in the tournament.

That leap-frogging is the secret to tournament success.

You can’t expect to win a large tournament when your score is moving up and down right alongside thousands of other people.

Another way to differentiate your lineup is through roster construction. There are basic correlations – for example, pairing a QB and WR, because if the QB has a good game there is a high likelihood that the WR will also have a good game – but there are less popular correlations that you can also take advantage of and even anticorrelations. In our first game theory example, we noted that a QB and RB take opportunities away from each other, so they’re anticorrelated. Normally, you don’t want to pair a QB and RB from the same team, but if that team has a very high projected point total, then there is opportunity for both players to do well, giving you a unique lineup that other people will be afraid to use, because it’s not correlated.

You could also build a lineup that uses multiple correlations. Most people are getting pretty good at using a QB and WR together, but don’t always think about the other team. If that QB and WR pairing has a good game, that means they’re probably out to a big lead and the other team will be passing to try to catch up, so you should also pick a WR from the other team. Or, if the game script is different, maybe your QB and WR have a good game because they were the ones trying to catch up, so the other team will be running the ball more and you can pair that team’s RB with your QB and WR. This is called stacking a team or game.

If you really want to make a stand you can over-stack a team or an entire game. The idea here is that you might have a few highly owned players but you’ll differentiate your lineup by getting more players from one team or game than most people will pick If you think a game will be a shootout, you can start the QB, WR, and TE (or another WR) from one team and also the RB and WR from the other team.

That’s just one example, but you can stack a game in many other ways. Try to think about what the game flow will be and what the two teams are likely to do and you can come up with a few different scenarios to build your lineup around. These types of full-game stacks won’t hit very often, but when they do they give you a big advantage over everyone else and leap-frog you to the top of the leaderboard.

When you over-stack a team or game you’re also making daily fantasy sports easier for yourself.

Think about it this way…

If you pick players from nine different teams, that’s potentially nine different games that you need to correctly guess the game flow for, then you have to hope your specific players are the ones benefiting from the game flow. But, if you stack a game – or use two or three mini-stacks in your lineup, you only need to get the game flow right for a few games. You still need your specific players to perform well, but you’ve put the odds in your favor.

An example of this might be starting a QB and WR from one team and a WR from the opposing team (stack 1) then picking a RB and DEF from the same team (stack 2) and, if there is another really attractive game, you might be able to take your third WR from one team and your TE from the opposing team (stack 3).

Stack lineups. Stack cash.

If you use these game theory concepts correctly, you’ll narrow the potential player pool quickly and it will be much easier to build your lineups. If you pick a game and take the QB and WR from one team and a WR from the other team, then you’re just picking from the WRs in that game and then you’ve only got one other WR to pick and, at this point, your available salary will be limited and you’ll be picking from a smaller pool of players. It’s hard to pick the best WR out of 96, but if you’re only trying to pick the best WR out of the 12 you have enough salary for, it’s much easier.

Think about these concepts as you build your lineups and as you look at other people’s lineups and our weekly stack recommendations. You’ll get better at building your own lineups just by learning to notice these correlations, anticorrelations, and leverage plays when you’re looking at other lineups. These ideas will become second nature and you’ll start getting excited to see the ownership percentages of your players. It’s pretty fun to open your lineup at 1pm and see that your favorite player on your lineup is only owned by 2% of the tournament field. It’s even more exciting when you see an RB or WR (that you don’t have) bust when they’re owned by 40 to 50% of the field! That effectively cuts the tournament field in half giving you a much greater chance of cashing, particularly if your own low-owned players do well.

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PATENTED, MATRIX CHEAT SHEET SEASON-LONG CONTENT ADVANCED DAILY FANTASY ANALYSIS