NFL DFS Bankroll Management: Week 4 Selection Guide
Hello Grinders. Week 4 is upon us, and once again, it’s time to take a look around the DFS industry and see what contests stand out. I’ve structured this Week 4 contest selection guide in such a way where I’ve highlighted the top contests across the major DFS sites based on a style of play. While I’m not able to cover every style of play, I hope this gives you some guidance as to which contests may give you the greatest bang for your buck.
One last thing I’ll mention is if you haven’t already, I highly recommend downloading the RotoGrinders browser extensions here. This will allow you to easily see Margin and Overlay for each contest. Let’s dive in!
Group 1 – Overlay Chasers
Last week I had mentioned that overlay is getting tough to come by. By Week 3, the sites had adjusted their contest sizes to reduce the chance of overlay. I did call out Yahoo as the one site I was monitoring because they made a dramatic change to their main GPP by changing it from a $10 buy-in to $15 buy-in, while also reducing the number of spots from 39,775 to 22,715. It turns out that the $15 buy-in did not deter people from entering, as it ended up filling 22,181/22,715 seats, or 97.6% of seats.
Yahoo is once again running the exact same contest at the same buy-in ($15) and same number of spots (22,715). If we see a similar trend as last week, this contest should come close to filling.
The other contest I had called out as a potential overlay contest was the DraftKings Play-Action GPP, which was a 20-max $3 contest with a massive 693.6K spots. Well, it turns out that it finished with 682.4K entries, meaning it filled 98.4% of the spots.
My takeaway is this – with MLB and NBA winding down and the NFL becoming the main sport in town, these contests are just going to fill and overlay is going to be incredibly hard to find. In fact, I will probably do away with this group moving forward as your best bet to find overlay is to stalk the lobbies before lock for the non-main slates and hope you can find a small contest that isn’t 100% full.
Group 2 – Top Heavy Chasers
There was an interesting thread posted on Twitter by csuram88 here about the DraftKings Mega Millionaire GPP this week where it’s a Milly Maker but requires a $4,444 buy-in. The appeal here is that there’s only 631 spots, and it’s a multi-entry tournament where you can fire up to 18 entries.
The noteworthy thing is that this contest is insanely top heavy, with the top 10 spots accounting for 62.18% of the pot. For some people this is a crazy contest to even consider, but I would argue this might be your best chance to becoming a millionaire overnight. Still, it’s not often we see such a top heavy contest and I thought this was worth highlighting.
Group 3 – Flat Structure Chasers
I know I keep mentioning it but it bears repeating – the DraftKings Slant GPP is one of the best GPPs out there week in and week out in terms of a flat payout structure:
You get 2x your money for a min cash, it pays out 20.98% of the field, where 1st place gets 10% of the pot and the top 10 gets just 31% of the pot.
Over on FanDuel, the 5-entry max Flea Flicker is a really solid tournament in terms of flat payouts. It’s only a $7 buy-in per entry, where 1st place only gets 5.71% of the pot and it pays out 25.5% of the field where you 2x your money if you min cash. The nice thing too is that there’s only 5,882 seats, so you have a realistic chance at a high finish as it’s not this massive tournament with hundreds of thousands of entries:
Group 4 – The Penny Pinchers
For the last few weeks I’ve been highlighting the FanDuel nickel contest where you can max enter 150 lineups at $0.05 a lineup for a grand total of $7.50. One contest I wanted to highlight this week was the DraftKings Tiers Dime Package where it’s just $.10 to enter, but it’s a 20-max contest so you’re only spending $2.00 with a chance at a $100 1st place prize.
I’ve noticed the Tiers contests are some of the softer competition as I don’t think enough people correlate their lineups. For example, in a Tier where you’re picking a quarterback, I don’t think people pick a corresponding wide receiver to stack with that quarterback in another Tier. Since this is a 20-max contest, there’s some merit to just hand building your lineups so that you can correlate the stacks and make your lineups tell a story.
One more contest worth calling out in this section is the DraftKings 20-max $3 Play Action (thanks Stevie for the tip on this one). This is the one we alluded to earlier in the Overlay section that has 634.1K entries, but it’s an extremely flat payout structure with 1st place getting just 6.25% of the pot and the top 10 getting just 14.03% of the pot:
The nice thing is it pays out 24.82% of the field and min cash is 1.67x your buy-in. But more importantly, it’s rare you can actually find a prize structure where 1st place is a $100K prize and the buy-in is just $3. Yes, the fact there are 634.1K entries in this tournaments means you’re going to have to YOLO a bit to find your way to the top, but there’s a lot to like in this one.
Group 5 – The Singles
Finally, the Single Entry tournament I wanted to highlight this week is DraftKings’ Spy GPP. It’s a $100 buy-in and is a little more top heavy than I’d normally like, but what caught my eye was that this had a 9.99% margin (which is lower than most tournaments). If you can tolerate the fact the top 10 get 41.2% of the pot, this is one of the better options in terms of low rake. It’s also just a field of 5,555 entries so it does pay to be contrarian and aim for the top.
Thanks for reading, and good luck this week. May variance be on your side.
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