FanDuel Single Entry Series: Week 1 Recap
The FanDuel Single Entry Series, presented by RotoGrinders, has generated a lot of excitement in the DFS community, due to its unique format and the irresistible opportunity to win a live final seat without spending oodles of cash in the process.
Over 51,000 unique users participated in at least one contest this past week, which focused on the $1 buy-in level. Because we don’t often get multi-day competitions like this in Daily Fantasy Sports, I thought it would be interesting to analyze each weekly winner’s top four lineups and see what sort of strategies and trends emerge as we go along.
Now that Week 1 is complete, and RG member sysear has earned a trip to Nashville, let’s break down his journey to the top of the leaderboard.
Monday, June 27 – 291.8 points, finished 16th out of 24,094
sysear got off to a terrific start, as Kris Bryant’s three home runs propelled him to what would end up being his highest score of the week, 291.8 points. sysear chose a full Cubs stack, two Rockies hitters playing at home, Logan Forsythe leading off against a lefty, and Brett Gardner as a low-owned option that he liked for his final hitting spot. The real key to this lineup, though, was the pitching choice. For only $7400, Danny Duffy returned 54 points, which allowed enough cap space to fit in the pricey bats of Rizzo, Bryant, and Gonzalez. To top it all off, Duffy was only 3.7% owned.
Tuesday, June 28 – 222 points, finished 76th out of 23,878
sysear changed up his approach on Day 2, opting to forgo stacking in lieu of picking his favorite hitters at each position. Notice though, that the two Cubs and two Dodgers he selected were hitting consecutively in the batting order, and this positive correlation between teammates is a smart tournament strategy. As a result of not stacking more than two hitters from the same team, four of the hitters in this lineup had less than 6% ownership, and seven of the eight were used on less than 15% of rosters. Jose Quintana still posted a solid score for his price despite not picking up the win. Quintana’s opponent, Kyle Gibson, cost only $5600 and was a terrific value, tallying 54 fantasy points. Only 0.9% of rosters included Gibson.
Wednesday, June 29 – Friday, July 1 – High of 114.9 points across 5 slates
Wednesday and Thursday included two slates apiece, but the Friday slate included 13 games. sysear suffered through a poor three day stretch here, which just goes to show you the high variance of baseball, specifically in large-field tournaments. With two big scores already in the books, I think sysear was wise to build high-risk, high-reward lineups at this point, which is exactly what he did. Twice his lineup construction consisted of two pairs of teammates. On the early Wednesday slate, he had three pairs of teammates. Another of his strategies was to try two 3-man stacks in the same lineup. With the larger Friday slate, he chose to go with a full Minnesota stack. The lesson here is that with his hot start, it made sense to stack hitters, or use pairs of hitters from two different teams, with the expectation that another score over 200 points would put him in a really great position to take down first place.
Saturday, July 2 – Early Slate – 258.4 points, finished 114th out of 13,215
In my opinion, this was the most crucial slate of the week. The Minnesota Twins put up 17 runs and 29 rosters surpassed 300 points. sysear only had two Twins (which makes total sense when you take a second to really think about it), but they accumulated 66.5 fantasy points. The full Toronto stack turned in a huge day, and no one on this team was a dud. Verlander was outstanding, as was Danny Duffy, who scored 56 points at a salary of $8000. This team didn’t include Max Kepler (54.9 points) or Rajai Davis (49.4), but still posted a very solid score and kept sysear in contention for the top prize.
Saturday, July 2 – Late Slate – 200.1, finished 413th out of 15,527
Sysear missed out on C.J. Cron (72.5 points) in his Angels stack, but the low-owned Carlos Perez did enough to churn out another 200 point lineup for sysear. With a high over/under, the Red Sox were a popular stack, but the opposing Angels were not. The strategy to load up on both offenses in the same game paid off handsomely here, as Perez and Mookie Betts carried this squad and gave sysear his fourth total of 200 or more points.
Sunday, July 3 – High of 116.1 points out of two slates
Holding the lead heading into Sunday’s final two slates, sysear stuck to the same roster construction techniques we saw throughout the week, choosing a full Angels stack on the early slate, and rostering four Dodgers on the culminating four-game slate. Neither team came close to matching his top four scores of the week, so he finished with 972.3 points, 22.7 more than the closest competitor.
Final Thoughts
Although the short slates didn’t produce the highest fantasy outputs in Week 1, we can never know that ahead of time, which is why tenet number one in a format like this is to play every slate, which sysear did.
Each slate is of course different, but sysear never deviated from playing at least two hitters from the same team in all of his lineups. His scores clearly illustrate the high-risk, high-reward strategy of stacking hitters in MLB tournaments, but he needed four awesome totals to reach the top of the leaderboard, and that’s exactly what he got.