High Stakes Scene: DS Heavy Hitters Championship: Game 3
Editor’s Note: The “High Stakes Scene” is a recurring series giving you an in-depth look into the highest stakes games in the Daily Fantasy world. Our first “High Stakes Scene” featured top-ranked STLCardinals84 providing in-depth analysis into his head-to-head matches vs. BrettFavre444. From there we’ve expanded to cover more of Daily Fantasy’s best across the industry. Full details on the current $100,000 Heavy Hitters Bracket match can be read here. We hope you enjoy the coverage.
What’s up Grinders, we are happy to bring you another edition of the High Stakes Scenes. In this edition, we will be covering DraftStreet’s $100,000 Heavy Hitter Series. This is a 16-man bracket with some of the biggest names in the industry competing. We are down to the final 2 entrants as both BirdWings and vegetable_lasagna outlasted their opponents to make it to the Championship. This series is a best of 7 and we will cover each game as the series moves on.
BirdWings vs. vegetable_lasagna
Game 3: vegetable_lasagna 66 – BirdWings 65
Thoughts on Game 3:
Heading into Game 3, vegetable_lasagna was up 2-0 which was a recurring theme throughout this Heavy Hitter Series. He got off to a 2-0 lead in every single series in the tournament which is truly impressive considering the level of competition. Game 3 was an extremely close game that came down to the wire. A couple of unlikely steals ended up being the difference, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
First, let’s break down the pitchers. Both BirdWings and vegetable_lasagna took Matt Cain and Justin Verlander. Both were cheap on DS and in decent matchups. The only difference in pitching was Yu Darvish vs. Cole Hamels. Darvish put up 21 FP’s for vegetable_lasagna, but BirdWings ended up getting 17 FP’s from
Hamels at a much cheaper price tag. At the end of the day, pitching was a big factor in Game 3.
Now let’s break down the batters of each lineup. Once again, we had a fair amount of overlap as both DFS players had Justin Morneau, Chris Johnson, Corey Dickerson, and Shin-Soo Choo. This is not surprising considering the Braves and Rockies were playing in Coors and Choo had a nice matchup against a RHP at home. That left 5 differences in hitters.
Vegetable_lasagna went with Evan Gattis, Aaron Hill, Derek Jeter, Alex Rios, and B.J. Upton, while BirdWings went with Yadier Molina, Howie Kendrick, Troy Tulowitzki, Rajai Davis, and Justin Upton. BirdWings had the lead late thanks to a solid outing from Tulo, but vegetable_lasagna got 2 SB’s from an unlikely source to give him the 1 point victory. 39 year-old Derek Jeter had only stolen 1 base all season long, but managed to steal 2 on Wednesday night to put vegetable_lasagna over the top and give him a commanding 3-0 series lead.
Analysis of Game 4 will be up soon!