Daily Fantasy Basketball Guidelines
The final lesson in this course will give you tips that I have learned playing daily fantasy basketball over the years.
Bankroll Management
Whether you are a professional DFS player or whether you just play every now and then for fun, everyone needs to develop proper bankroll management. It doesn’t matter if you are a winning player – if you do not have proper bankroll management, you can easily see your entire bankroll disappear quickly.
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You should never over-extend yourself in any single slate of games. My general rule of thumb is to play between 5-10% of my bankroll each night. That includes cash games and tournaments and it includes all of my action across the industry. If you set a strict percentage that you put into play each night, it will allow you to play more when you are winning – since the bankroll is higher – and less when you are losing. This will allow you to overcome those cold stretches, while also putting more dollars in play when you find yourself in the midst of a heater.
Now, when I refer to the percentage of bankroll, this doesn’t have to be the total number of dollars that you have in your account. I like to refer to it as the total amount that you are willing to allocate toward DFS. So, if you are playing $20 a night and you know that you will deposit more if you lose it; the $20 is not your actual bankroll. In terms of what percentage of your nightly amount in play should be allocated to cash games or GPPs, it really just depends on the player. Personally, I have most of my success in cash games, which is why typically play 90% cash games and 10% tournaments.
Start Lineups From the Bottom
As Drake says, “started from the bottom, now we’re here.”
This may seem backwards, but I always start my lineups with the best values on the board that night. Our goal is to create a lineup that is capable of out-producing their respective salaries and we can do that by having as much exposure as we can to the best values. The NBA has a very long season that is full of injuries. This opens the door for plenty of value plays on a nightly basis.
If you start with the best value plays, you can then easily fill in the mid to high-tier players. This is the preferred approach to starting with superstars and then working your way down. If you do that, you will quickly run out of salary and often times be forced into bad decisions because the options are limited due to salary cap restrictions.
Be Ready to Jump Ship
As I mentioned earlier, injuries are rampant in the NBA. There are by far more late scratches in the NBA than in any other daily fantasy sport. If you want to compete in this sport, you have to constantly monitor injuries, especially in the last half hour leading up to the start of the games.
With all of the prevalent late scratches in the NBA, we have to be able to adjust on the fly. If LeBron James is scratched right before tipoff, you have to be able to make quick roster decisions. A lot of times throughout the season, I will end up changing around more than half of my roster based on one or two late scratches.
Stacking in Daily Fantasy Basketball
In baseball, stacking makes a lot of sense because a player’s fantasy production is highly correlated with the fantasy production of the rest of his teammates. There isn’t a finite amount of production that can be had, as a team can score 20+ runs. In other words, hitters in baseball aren’t competing for production. Stacking in the NFL can also be beneficial when we pair a quarterback with one of his receivers. Once again, their production is highly correlated because every statistic that a receiver gets, his quarterback will also get fantasy points for.
The NBA is a different animal, though. The only time that statistics correlate is on assists. Sure, an NBA game can go into quadruple-overtime, but for the most part, there is a limited amount of production to be had in an NBA game and teammates are competing against each other for those statistics. For that reason, it’s generally not recommended to stack a team in daily fantasy basketball.
However, as with everything in daily fantasy sports, pricing can override any rule of thumb that set. While stacking isn’t a great strategy over the long run, if there are four or five players that are all cheap and they are all expected to out-produce their respective salaries, then you may want to consider stacking them. This happens every once in a while when we see a team get ravaged with injuries.
Throw Your Cash Game Lineup in a Tournament
Raise your hand if you have ever heard this:
“Player A is a cash game play, while Player B should only be used in tournaments.”
Or, “That’s a safe cash game lineup, but it lacks the upside needed to win a tournament.”
We always like to put every player and every lineup into a category, but cash games and tournaments don’t have to be mutually exclusive, especially in the NBA. With all of the value available in the sport, you are going to have times during the regular season when your cash game lineup is close to being the optimal lineup. When this happens, you don’t just want to finish at the top of your 50/50 contest, you want to get a significant return on your investment. For that reason, I always throw my cash game lineup in a few tournaments each night. That way, when those near perfect nights hit, you will be handsomely rewarded.
In Notorious’s Blueprint to Daily Fantasy Basketball, you’ll learn:
• An introduction to NBA DFS and why opportunity is everything
• How to use Vegas lines to gain an edge
• The biggest differences between FanDuel and DraftKings and why they matter
• How to handle each different position in NBA DFS
• Basic tips like bankroll management and general strategy
Want to keep reading? Purchase the course and learn from the best!
