How to Win Millions in NFL Best Ball with Underdog Fantasy's Best Ball Mania 3
This summer of 2022 NFL Best Ball offers the biggest fantasy football contests of all time. As of this writing, we have already had nearly $20 Million of total prize pools released across the NFL Best Ball space, and it’s only late June.
The largest contest, both this summer and of all time, in Best Ball is Underdog Fantasy’s Best Ball Mania 3.
Best Ball Mania 3 (or BBM3 for short) was released in early May with a groundbreaking $10 Million Prize Pool, and the largest top prize in Best Ball history – $2 Million. All this for just $25 per draft (150 max entry).
On top of that, Underdog is rewarding the drafter who scores the most regular season points in the entire contest with a cool $1 Million.
What are the other rules? How do we win this thing? Let’s dive in.
Payout Structure
Even more than the $10 Million prize pool or the $2 Million top prize, maybe the most remarkable aspect of Best Ball Mania 3 is that not 1, not 2, but 3 (!) millionaires will be crowned in just this one tournament. Even finishing in 2nd place will net you 7 figures.
Those are extremely fun numbers to see, but it’s also important to note the top heavy nature of the tournament. 40% of the prize pool goes to 1st place, 2nd place and the regular season champion. A “min cash” nets you just $35, or $10 of profit.
The final round is ultimately where we should set our goals, as that is where the majority of the money is made. Even making it to round 3 only guarantees you a total of $75 ($50 profit) on your $25 entry fee.
We’ll discuss more below about how we can capitalize on that to maximize our chances at the big bucks.
Round Advancements
If you have not played best ball on Underdog before (the format is also largely the same on DraftKings Best Ball), you may not be familiar with their Playoff format. The goal in this tournament is not just to have the highest scoring team over the course of the season. Of course, we want to have high scoring teams, but the format is a bit different than that.
First, we draft our squad in a draft of 12 total teams. That group is who we compete against during the “regular season”, or weeks 1-14 of the NFL season. We must finish in the top 2 of that group to make the Best Ball playoffs.
That takes us to round 2 where we compete against 9 other (10 total) teams that also advanced out of their round 1 draft group. We compete against that group in just week 15, and we must finish 1st that week in order to advance again.
Now we are into round 3, where again we are facing other teams that advanced from round 2. But this time we have 15 opponents that we must beat in week 16 of the season to finish first and advance to the finals in week 17.
Finally, in week 17, 470 total teams advance to the final round. We must defeat every single one of them in order to walk away with the $2 Million.
Strategy Overview
You can find anything and everything Best Ball strategy at our Best Ball partner site, Spike Week. The Spike Week team brings you countless strategy articles, Player Picks, and Innovative Best Ball Tools to help you crush your drafts. There’s even a 100% FREE discord community for you to talk strategy, get draft feedback and much more with other sharp best ball players.
But from a general strategy standpoint, BBM3 is very unique relative to any other contest in the fantasy football space. Despite the fact that it spans over the course of the entire NFL season, it’s much more like a DFS contest than your standard home fantasy league with your buddies.
As you saw above, nearly all of the money is in the final round, but only 470 teams make it there (about 0.1% of all teams). On the flip side, in order to simply make the playoffs, you just have to finish in the top 2 of your 12 team league. Just by random chance (and assuming average skill), you should advance about 16% of your teams out of that 1st round.
We know that we’ll likely get a fair clip of teams through that 1st round just by law of averages, but after that is where it gets difficult. Navigating our way through those 3 playoff rounds is tremendously tough. Of course we’ll need a little bit of positive variance, but we can also draft both teams and individual players in a way that gives us a leg up in those ever important playoff weeks.
The first thing we can do from an overall team or draft level is to Draft Like We’re Right. Essentially what this means is in every draft, depending upon which players we select in the first several rounds, there are going to be a couple things we need to simply assume have gone our way. When trying to finish 1st out of half a million teams and with only selecting 18 players, we can’t afford to hedge our bets.
So if we start out a draft with multiple running backs in the first few rounds, we don’t want to continue taking too many early running backs. We also probably don’t want to take too large of a quantity of running backs. That’s because in order for this team to be successful, we need those top running back picks to succeed, but we also need to make up for the fact that we did not select many, if any, high end players at other positions. Thus, we draft like we are right about those early running backs, and they have big seasons, and we make up for our lack of superstar wide receivers (or QB or TE) with a couple extra mid to late round WRs.
The other key thing we can focus on is targeting players that maximize our playoff upside. We know that so much of the money is won in that final week, so we want to be targeting the types of players who are excelling in those weeks. Often times that means some of the younger players or rookies, as they tend to grow into greater roles over the course of the season (as we saw with Amon-Ra St. Brown last year). We also see players with contingent value (frequently handcuff running backs) excelling then as one of their teammates misses time with injury (like Rashaad Penny last season).
Lastly, it’s also wise to think about minor correlations we can use to our advantage for Week 17. As you’ve heard me say too many times already, essentially all of the money is won in Week 17. So if we can draft strong teams without reaching too far on players or drafting poor structurally and add in correlations to players and teams that square off in week 17, we can use our NFL DFS stacking skills to give us a better shot at $2 Million in Best Ball. We’ve outlined some of the top week 17 games to target with stacks for you here.
If you’re looking to dive into some Best Ball drafts heading into this NFL season, make sure to check out Spike Week. Whether it’s the premium tools/rankings/strategy, the discord community or the daily live streams on YouTube, it’s a one stop shop to give yourself a leg up on your competition and crush your drafts.