MLB $500K Grand Slam Special Review: Tuesday, April 26th
The Grinder review series will provide the reader with a breakdown of the exposures of “top of the leaderboard” players, the top single-entry lineup, and a comparison between all single entry lineups and professionals for large slate and massive prize pool GPPs.
Today we looked at the $500K Grand Slam Special [$100,000 to 1st] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $150.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
With just a single lineup and a Coors stack, Al_Smizzle managed to hit 190.45 points for a 54th place finish. Like the others who managed GPP goodness this slate, Johnny Cueto was key to rounding out Smizzle’s pitching as he went for a complete game shutout with 11 Ks.
Assani managed to one-up Smizzle with a 19th place finish resulting from only three bullets. While he didn’t hit on Cueto in any of his lineups, David Price stepped up for him with a generous 14 Ks in 8 innings en route to a win. Aside from the well documented Coors stack, Assani dialed in on Brandon Moss, while also hitting on his cheap option in Danny Santana to differentiate himself. Without owning any player owned under 10%, he demonstrated that you don’t need to necessarily stray too far from the chalk in these smaller high buy-in GPPs in order to place well.
Like many others, bcalicore fell victim to a relatively poor fantasy outing by Kershaw in over 84% of his lineups (26% overall cash rate). While this may have tanked many otherwise great stacks he put together (0% Kershaw in his 4x top-100 lineups), his moderate exposure to David Price and the Pirates allowed him to salvage his results. bcalicore’s higher than average ownership of Brandon Moss and Andres Blanco is what catapulted him above the rest.
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
Johnnygood was able to take down 1st place with a single entry. His lineups consisted of several minimally owned batters while avoiding chalk at pitching. The meat and potatoes of his lineup, the 1-5 Pittsburgh batting rotation playing in Coors, was highly owned, but he managed to differentiate himself at almost every other position. With a duo of medium to high priced pitchers, johnnygood scraped the bottom of the barrel and stumbled into two gems (C.J. Cron and Johnny Giavotella) who put on a clinic against Jered Weaver. While he did whiff on Joey Rickard, the other value was able to give him a 0.55 point margin to take down the $100k.
Single-Entry vs. Al_Smizzle/Assani/bcalicore
Out of 3700 entries in the Grand Slam Special, 754 of those entries were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the exposures of Al_Smizzle, Assani, bcalicore, and 25 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
