Postseason Shootout | RealTime Fantasy Sports

An Introduction to Daily Fantasy Sports

Fri Jul 30 5:51pm ET
By DANE GALLOWAY
Contributing Writer

Play the studs or find value?

Instant gratification has led to many innovations in today’s society. My favorite product of this trend is daily fantasy sports (DFS). Rather than testing your knowledge over the course of a full season of NFL, MLB, or NBA leagues, we provide paid contests (as well as a couple of free contests where you can win money) for a single day of games. These daily fantasy contests are an enjoyable way to prove your takes as correct and provide a good opportunity to make some money. For this article, I will focus on standard NFL DFS contests. We also provide contests for baseball, basketball, golf, hockey, and single game NFL contests. Let’s dive into the basics.

The Game

The main objective to playing in a daily fantasy contest is to construct a lineup that can score more points than the rest of the other lineups in your contest. A slate is the group of games included for a contest’s scoring. For a slate with multiple games, you must build a lineup with:

1 Quarterback
2 Running Backs
3 Wide Receivers
1 Tight End
1 Defense
1 Flex (Running back, wide receiver or tight end)

Each player you pick for a position will earn points based on our standard points per reception scoring system. Building a lineup with all the best players in the league would be ideal, but that would be too easy. The lineup you create has a salary cap of $50,000. Each player you can select has an assigned salary based on their level of fantasy production. This means you have about $5,555 to allocate per position. It turns out daily fantasy sports is also a math equation.

The lineup you create can be submitted into one of our daily fantasy contests. Our featured tournaments last year ranged from $1 to $20 for the entry fee and have anywhere from 40 to 500 total entrants participating. We offer other contests of smaller sizes as well as head-to-head contests against one other person’s lineup. You can win prizes from how well your lineup performs. Depending on the contest, finishing in the top 25 percent to 10 percent will earn you a payout. The better you finish, the more you make, with first place prizes being as high as 100 times your entry fee. There is money to be made in our daily fantasy contests; having a game plan for your lineup and selecting the best contests for your lineup will allow you the best chances of winning.

The Strategy

What is the best way to build our team with a $50,000 salary cap? There may not be a perfect answer to this question, but that’s the fun of DFS - it is not a solved game (tic-tac-toe is an example of a solved game). While there is no correct answer for your lineup, there are many ways to optimize your chances of outscoring your opponents.

We first must identify which players project the best to produce fantasy points as compared to their salary cost. This is a never-ending dance in the art of fantasy sports lineup construction because player salaries change week to week as do player opportunities. Player salaries are set early in the week and will not change until the next week of contests. If Christian McCaffery were to be ruled out the day before kickoff Week 1, his backup, Chuba Hubbard, would be a fantastic play at his salary. Backup players are usually priced at the minimum $3000. The volume a backup that is pressed into a starting role gets can make them huge difference makers. Watching the injury report up until kickoff is vitally important for making the most informed decisions for your lineup that you can.

Other important factors to identify when choosing players are their opponent for the week and the weather. The Browns had multiple home games last year with winds so strong that it was near impossible for teams to complete a pass. Making solid picks for your team requires a degree of research. That research is even more important with game matchups. A player playing a bad defense is obviously in a better spot to score than a player facing a stout defense. Taking your research to a deeper level will bring us even more impactful data that we can use to determine correlations.

Every NFL team has specific strengths and weaknesses. Last year, the Detroit Lions gave up the most yards per pass attempt but were middle of the pack in yards per carry. While their defense may seem bad overall at first glance, knowing how to attack a matchup will lead you towards finding better production.

My favorite correlation in DFS is in team and game stacks. One great explanation I have heard to explain why we should care about correlation is that it limits the amount of things you have to get right in a lineup. If you think Dak Prescott is in a good spot Week 1, pairing him with his top wide receiver CeeDee Lamb or Amari Cooper in a lineup would logically make sense. And this has proven to be a correct way of thinking for many seasons now. Correlating players is not limited to quarterbacks and receivers, either. All players on a team’s offense are correlated to a degree. Running backs have shown to be correlated to their teams own defense/special teams due to teams running more when winning. And player scoring can also correlate with players on the opposing offense. The faster a team scores, the faster their opponent gets a chance to score. Picking players from both sides of a high scoring game gives you a better chance of getting a high score from the players involved. Now you are simply trying to find the game that you think will be the highest scoring.

However, the best picks are not always the right picks. Let’s think about the main objective in entering a DFS contest. You are trying to outscore the other lineups in your contest. Notice how I haven’t been saying you’re trying to build the best lineup possible. There is no bonus money won for outscoring second place by 50 points as compared to beating them by a tenth of a point. Other entrants in your contest will be doing research as well. There will be many times when players are in obvious spots where they can smash. Decisions must be made on whether you’ll go with the field and take that player or bet on everyone else being wrong, putting your lineup ahead of the rest. The key to consistently winning in these top-heavy payout contests is not to be right the most often, but to be the most right when you are right.

This dynamic of weighing how popular a player will be in a contest (this is referred to as ownership percentage in DFS) depends on the type of contest you are in. If you are playing a head-to-head contest, it makes much more sense for you to go with players that project well in good spots. There is a chance your opponent has a very similar lineup to you but making the correct pivot on a player or two is all the difference you need to win. In one of our 500-man contests, you are incentivized much more to get different than the field. Finishing in first place in this contest will provide significantly more return on your entry fee than your victory in a head-to-head (you get 1.8 times your entry fee if you win a H2H). There will be players in spots that are too good to pass up. We call those “locks.” In order to sustain success in DFS, you are much better off shooting for a couple of big wins throughout the year than building lineups that are a safer bet to make the minimum amount of money back and lack the upside of a riskier lineup.

Game theory is a topic I could discuss for hours in person, but it’s an awful lot of words to type that I feel are deserving of their own article in the future. For now, study up and get ready for a fun season of NFL DFS contests.

An Introduction to Daily Fantasy Sports

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