FanDuel: Secrets To Winning Daily Fantasy Football
If you are gearing up for the upcoming Football season, and fantasy football is a part of what you do, then you are likely familiar with daily fantasy football, which allows you to choose your own roster based on the week’s matchups and a monetary budget. Players are assigned different price tags based on projected output, and it’s up to you to construct the best possible roster while staying within your budget. All the features that drag you down in the season long game are no more… no injuries, no trading, no scouring the waiver wire and no commitments, plus you can roster whomever you want whenever you want as long as you are willing to pay. There are several sites you may play on, all with their own unique features or settings, but FanDuel was the first on the block to break through, and was the traditional go-to site for DFS players. As the player pool has increased exponentially over the last few years, winning has become more difficult, so here are a few tips to help you on your way to playing daily fantasy football on FanDuel.
As a quick disclaimer, know that there are several variables that need to be accounted for when constructing your line up and it’s almost impossible to cover all of them with a single roster, but regardless the goal is to extract as much value as possible from each player despite how much they cost, by analyzing data and following your own feeling on how a player outcome may turn out.
Understand FanDuel Settings
It’s important to understand the scoring and positional settings of any fantasy platform before you compete, so that you can make intelligent decisions on how players will perform and the points they will earn for their respective performance. You can compare settings relative to other sites, or you can just focus on FanDuel, either way a clear understanding is a must. On FanDuel, the biggest difference in the positional settings is that FanDuel forces you to roster a kicker, while other prominent sites like DraftKings use that roster spot as a “FLEX” position to factor in an additional WR, RB or TE. You may feel tension with one setting versus the other, but ultimately if you choose to play FanDuel, you must consider the kicker position. More details below.
There are two major point differentials between FanDuel and Draftkings that will be unpacked as well. FanDuel only gives .5 of a point for receptions, and deducts 2 full points for each fumble.
What does this mean? It means that that pass catching RBs have less value, as do WRs that catch a lot of balls but don’t gain a lot of yards OR score a lot of TDs. If you are debating between two RBs on FanDuel, and one of them has a case of fumbleitis, your decision just got much easier. You simply can’t afford turnovers in the form of fumbles by anyone on your FanDuel roster.
Understand FANDUEL Games That Can Be Played
There are predominantly two types of games a DFS player will buy into and they are GPPs and Cash Games which are your 50/50 games and your double up games. GPPs (Guaranteed Prize Pool) are your tournament games. This is the game where you typically pay a nominal amount to enter a roster into a tournament with many other gamers, and a certain percentage of top scorers will receive a cut of the total purse. For example, FanDuel may host a tournament for 250,000 entries, at $5 per entry. Where the top 1000 lineups get paid with the winning lineup getting $100K and payouts issued incrementally all the way to $5. This is a risky way to make a living as only a small percentage of entries get money back, even though big amounts are dangled in front of the user on the front end. But tournaments are fun, it’s entertaining submitting qwirky rosters hoping that they will hit, and you will be rewarded with cash for your creative, diligence and fantasy football acumen. It’s highly recommend that you build one cash game lineup per week, and enter it into as many 50/50s and double ups as your bankroll allows. These games reward skill, thoughtfulness and conservatism and if done right will provide you with the resources to fund your tournament play. A 50/50 with 100 lineups at $5 per lineup will pay $9 to the top 50 scores and nothing to the bottom 50. If you roster a lineup, with high ceiling, high floor players projected to get good volume and purchased at a reasonable price that line up only has to be better than 50% of the lineups out there. This is where your research pays off, and you decide which high-end players you want to roster, and which value picks you want to make.
FanDuel’s cash game options are straightforward and user-friendly. There is nothing fancy here just get your roster set, and choose how many games you want to enter it into. There are games for as low as $1.
Can’t Forget About Kickers
FanDuel won’t let you forget about Kickers, and all the kickers in the NFL are appreciative. The K position is a true X-factor, and should be approached with the utmost of care. There are dozens of variables that go into a kickers performance in light of game-flow, and as much as non FanDuel players want to avoid that uncertainty, many FanDuel gamers maintain, that a kickers performance has projected them into barrels of money because they have taken down big GPPs while riding the leg of the kicker they strategically chose. Remember at any position you want to get 2.5 times the stated dollar amount reflected in fantasy points. For example if a player cost $10,000 they need to get you 25 points or higher on draft day to get adequate value. Kickers provide the best opportunity to crush this threshold as a Kicker that costs $4500 only needs score 11.25 fantasy points. That’s two 40-yard field goals and three extra points for a kicker on a high-powered offense making multiple trips to the red-zone and playing in good weather conditions. The question is are you able to identify which kicker every week has the best chance at achieving this output. Predicting kickers as cumbersome of a task as that is, could be the difference between being in and out of the cash.
There is money to be won on FanDuel and success to be achieved, one simply has to pay attention, come up with a consistent approach and factor in the variables that will determine the winning rosters versus the ones that just come close. Good Luck gamers.