Daily Fantasy Basics

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.

There are two main types of lineups in DFS – cash lineups and tournament lineups.

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!

There is a third type of lineup that we’ll mostly focus on. It’s a 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. You can read more about all the different ways you can differentiate your lineups here.

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.

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.

If you keep the above things in mind, you’ll make better lineups. It takes a lot of research each week, but don’t worry, we’ve done all that for you! When you get our player recommendations for each week we’ve already gone through all the steps above. Thinking about these things will give you your own instincts for which of our recommendations you want to use and how you want to structure your lineups.