Consistency in DraftKings Cash Games
One of the most important aspects of daily fantasy sports play for a newcomer to understand is that the “best” lineup is relative; it depends on a number of factors, the most important of which is the league in which you’re playing.
In cash games—head-to-heads, 50/50s, and three-man leagues—your approach should be far different from what you want to do in tournaments. The goal for a lot of daily fantasy pros in cash games is minimizing risk; you want a steady stream of consistent points.
Positional Consistency
In a past article, I explained why emphasizing consistency can work out in cash games. Basically, you’re trying to narrow down the range of possible outcomes as much as possible, taking a low-variance approach that will result in as many possible scores near the mean (with that average of course being as high as possible). Here’s how it might look in terms of a range of scores on DraftKings.
We want our cash game lineups to come close to resembling that blue line. We can do that by fielding a consistent lineup.
One way to create more consistent lineups is to pay more money for the most consistent positions. I researched the weekly consistency for each position using, looking at the top 12 quarterbacks, tight ends, and defenses, and the top 24 running backs and receivers in terms of end-of-year points. Here’s how often those players finished within those ranks on weekly basis.
For week-to-week, you can use the RotoGrinders’ Consistency Tool to research how consistent a player has been performing.
Top-12 quarterbacks have around a three-in-five chance of finishing in the top 12 at the quarterback position in a given week. The exact percentages here don’t matter as much as the fact that quarterback and running back are the most consistent positions on a weekly basis. That makes sense when you consider how touches are distributed in a typical game; quarterbacks and running backs see more relevant plays than the other positions, and thus have greater week-to-week consistency.
Because of that, sharp fantasy players typically “pay up” for those two positions in cash games. By going with elite or second-tier players at the quarterback and running back positions, you can narrow down the range of potential outcomes for your team, giving you greater consistency and increasing your win rate in cash games.
Player Types
One of the reasons I sort players into buckets and analyze them like that is because I think individual player evaluation can sometimes be misleading. It’s really difficult to determine an individual player’s consistency because there’s a lot of variance in those results. Even a player who has been in the league for four years and played every game, for example, has just 64 games to study. The difference between 50 percent startable weeks and 60 percent would be around six games, which is pretty flimsy. We especially can’t trust individual consistency for rookies or second-year players.
I’ve tried to break down positional consistency even more by categorizing players within their positions. Here’s what I’ve found.
Mobile quarterbacks are perhaps slightly more consistent than pocket passers, but it’s close. At the least, mobile quarterbacks have as much week-to-week consistency as pocket passers. It might seem like players like Colin Kaepernick or Cam Newton would be more volatile from week to week, but their ability to provide points on the ground gives them a higher floor.
At the running back position, pass-catching backs are much more consistent than those backs that don’t see a lot of targets. That has to do with game flow; pass-catching backs can provide production regardless of the score, whereas someone like Alfred Morris can become irrelevant if things don’t go his way in terms of game flow, which makes him a more fragile player on a weekly basis.
For receivers and tight ends, there is a correlation between the average depth or their targets and weekly consistency. Slot receivers who see very short targets have more consistency than players like Vincent Jackson who are typically utilized more downfield. A player like Antonio Brown is the ultimate combination of upside and a high floor because he sees a large number of screens, so his reception count is high (and consistent), but he’s also used a lot down the field.
So there you have it. If you want to narrow down the range of possible outcomes for you lineups in cash games, you should generally pay more for quarterbacks and running backs. No matter how you allocate your money, be sure to target specific player types at each position—most notably, pass-catching running backs (especially on DraftKings—a full PPR site) and receivers who are utilized a lot on underneath routes.