DraftKings Millionaire Maker Trends Through Week 8
Sometimes we need to think about other ways to win in DFS other than simply playing the best plays. Looking at trends of top lineups is one route to take to do just that. One of the easiest tools to become a better tournament player is studying the trends of lineups that win or nearly win.
I’ve been keeping track of some trends for the DraftKings Millionaire Maker for the first five weeks and wanted to share some of those here in a simple format for you to understand. These are all trends from the top 10 lineups each week.
If you want to follow these yourself with a little excel work, you can create your own trends to follow by either downloading the CSV from DraftKings, or just make it easy on yourself by using ResultsDB here on RotoGrinders to gather information.
Flex Usage
In Week 8 we saw just two WRs make it into the flex, as we had one user who ran the same lineup with a TE in the flex three times and managed to get those into 3rd-5th place in the Milli-Maker. We now have 45 RBs to just 28 WRs in the flex eight weeks in, with just seven TEs making it on to the top 10 teams each week.
Average Ownership by Position for Week 8
Week 8 saw the highest AO of the season at RB, as both Conner at 32.5% and Gurley at 23.6% owned were on multiple top 10 lineups and Hunt at 38.3% owned made his way on to three of the top 10 teams. I have been stressing all season in these reviews how we don’t need to fade the highly owned workhorse RBs, and we saw them basically all come through for us this week yet again. All three of the highest owned WRs failed to have week-winning performances which led to that position having its lowest AO of the season.
Average Ownership Through Week 8
By now I think we have a big enough sample to start understanding some optimal lineup construction thoughts. Lock in the workhorse/high owned RBs while mixing it up at the other positions has been the optimal construction nearly every week. I talk about this every week in here and also on the Premium GPP Final takes show, which is on at 11:20 AM on Sunday mornings for premium members.
Stacks for Week 8
Simple two-man team stacks reigned supreme this week, with Goff/Gurley and Mahomes/Watkins leading the charge. As I mentioned above, we had a slight anomaly with one user running the same lineup three times in 3rd-5th, which also happened to be a no-stack team led by Cam Newton. I don’t make non-stack teams, but using an underpriced Newton in that fashion is probably one of the better QB choices to attempt this type of lineup.
Stacks Through Week 8
Team Stacks now outnumber Game Stacks 42-33 on the season with just 5 non-stack teams making the Top 10 all season. We haven’t seen a 5-man game stack make the Top 10 since Week 2 and just three Game Stacks have made the Top 10 over the past two weeks. I eliminated five-man game stacks from my builds for Week 8 based on the trends I have seen and had my best MME week of the season on DraftKings. I’m not sure if I will always do this, but when you notice strong trends you have to adjust.
Bust Rates of Top 3 Highest Owned at Position Through Week 8
With all three of the highest owned WRs coming up short this week, we now have WRs coming in with a massive 62.5% bust rate on the season. I want to note that the Bust rates here are simply just me deciding if a player had a good enough performance relative to others on the slate to allow them to appear in a high placing lineup. This week I labeled A.J. Green as a “bust” even though he scored 18.6 DK points, as that simply was not enough to get you a very good lineup this week, considering he was the 11th highest-scoring WR.
Low Owned Plays (Sub 5%) Per Lineup
Low Owned plays jumped back up in Week 8 and we now sit on 2.51 low owned plays per Top 10 lineup on the season. In theory the low owned plays could have jumped even more this week as Larry Fitzgerald (5.2%) and Sammy Watkins (5.1%) were excluded from my calculations. I talked about both plays on the Premium GPP Final Takes show Sunday morning and mentioned how strong the mid to low tier was at WR this week. If you are playing all the chalk in the large field GPPs, you have almost no shot at winning.
Week 8 Winning Lineup
Congratulations to LolololoLola (I think I spelled that right) on winning $1,000,000 this week with just TWO ENTRIES. A Rams three-man stack of Goff/Gurley/Reynolds with high owned RBs and low owned WR’s takes it down. If you think about this lineup, it makes a ton of sense and it’s amazing that Watkins/Fitz/Evans were as low owned as they were in what were really good spots for all three to have good games.
Hopefully this can help you look at the way you make your teams in a different light and help you make lineups more correlated with what the top lineups are actually doing.