The GPP Scene: FanDuel Live Final Recap
Hey grinders! Welcome back to the GPP Scene! This is normally an article series where I break down the results of my own tournament play, but I thought it would be interesting to tackle an analysis of some of this year’s big live events. Hopefully this analysis will help all of us become better tournament players moving forward. Let’s get right down to business!
FanDuel once again held their live final in Las Vegas, with a field of 90 entrants vying for a $1,000,000 first place prize. Like I did last week with the DraftKings recap, I will probably refer to it as the “live final” because I cannot seem to remember the acronyms these days. There have been way too many live finals over the last few years now that it has become impossible for me to keep everything straight. The acronym for this year was the FanDuel “WFBC”, but I will stay with live final as that seems to be the safest route.
Looking through the field of 90, I was surprised at the number of big name MLB players in the field. Since FanDuel offered more low-dollar buy-in qualifiers than DraftKings, I expected to see quite a few names that I wasn’t familiar with. That wasn’t the case, as familiar DFS experts like rayofhope, ehafner, and McJester had multiple entries into this tournament. Like the DraftKings live final, there was a Coors Field game on the FanDuel slate. Contestants certainly went into the night hoping there wasn’t a repeat of the previous year, where a water main break caused a surprise postponement of the game in Colorado on the night of the FanDuel event. Let’s take a look at the ownership percentages and roster construction for this tournament.
Ownership Percentage Breakdown – Hitters
The following layout shows the highest owned hitters at each position:
C – Salvador Perez – 20%
1B – Eric Hosmer, Paul Goldschmidt, and Joey Votto were all between 13-15%
2B – Wilmer Flores – 22.2%
SS – Alcides Escobar 31.1%
3B – Todd Frazier – 26.7%
OF – Michael Cuddyer – 33.3%
OF – Juan Lagares – 25.6%
OF – Yoenis Cespedes – 23.3%
Three things stood out to me here. First, I was surprised at the level of ownership of some of the Royals hitters. They did have a good matchup against a young Boston pitcher in a game with a high total, but it’s rare to see such high percentages attached to the Royals offense. Salvador Perez rewarded his owners with a home run, but Alcides Escobar had a tough 0-for-5 night resulting in -1.25 FanDuel points. It was a tough break for those who took him, as only two Escobar owners finished in the top 20 (6th and 20th place).
The next thing that stood out was the lack of a highly owned player at first base. No player was over 15% owned, and Goldschmidt was the key to most winning lineups on this night. He had four hits and two home runs, piling up 18.75 fantasy points in the process. Goldschmidt was in the lineup of four of the top five finishers in the FanDuel event. Lastly, people often talk about the need to go contrarian in live finals. That notion was somewhat dispelled here, as the winning roster had all three outfielders listed above along with Goldschmidt. As opposed to focusing on being “contrarian,” the best method is to focus on your own roster construction and build what you think is the best team possible, especially in a field of less than 100 players.
Ownership Percentage Breakdown – Pitchers
This is where the FanDuel live final slate took a different turn compared to the slate for the DraftKings live final the week before. There were very few pitching options to consider here, and only three pitchers found themselves with a high ownership percentage:
Carlos Rodon – 30%
Sonny Gray – 21.1%
Joe Ross – 20%
It’s no surprise that a lot of players decided to go cheap at pitcher, as this was a prerequisite to fitting in a lot of the hitters in Coors Field. I was surprised to see Rodon’s ownership that high at 30%. However, he performed very well for his owners, allowing.just one earned run while racking up eight strikeouts in seven innings. He was not able to earn a victory, but the performance more than paid off his cheap $6,800 salary tag. In fact, Rodon was on seven of the top ten rosters in this tournament. Ross was on the other three, and he equaled Rodon’s 14 fantasy point performance, though his salary was $500 more. Most of the players who faded Coors Field opted for Sonny Gray at pitcher, and he was actually the worst of the bunch with just nine fantasy points. Throw in the fact that the Coors Field game ended up with a 14-to-9 score and most of these lineups finished near the bottom of the field.
Coors Field Analysis
Since there was a very high scoring game at Coors Field, I was interested to see the breakdown of finalists who opted for hitters from this game. Here they are, broken down by the number of hitters (out of eight) that the finalists took from the game in Colorado:
8/8 hitters = 0 of 90 lineups (0.00%)
7/8 hitters = 3 of 90 lineups (3.33%)
6/8 hitters = 2 of 90 lineups (2.22%)
5/8 hitters = 2 of 90 lineups (2.22%)
4/8 hitters = 13 of 90 lineups (14.44%)
3/8 hitters = 13 of 90 lineups (14.44%)
2/8 hitters = 14 of 90 lineups (15.56%)
1/8 hitters = 13 of 90 lineups (14.44%)
0/8 hitters = 30 of 90 lineups (33.33%)
Not a single finalist did a full stack of the Coors Field game, which I found somewhat surprising. In addition, only 7.78% of the field had five or more hitters from the game in Colorado. I expected that to be a higher percentage, when you consider that players in this game were highly owned overall (mainly the Mets). The sweet spot appeared to be taking four of your eight hitters from this game, as the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 9th place finishers all opted for taking half of their hitters from the game in Colorado. One third of players decided to fade the game entirely, and two of them managed to finish inside the top ten. This was mainly attributable to big offensive performances from Toronto and Arizona, as they scored 15 and 11 runs, respectively.
Winning Lineup Breakdown – User “rayofhope”
It was another amazing night for the best daily fantasy duo in the industry. Teammates Cory Albertson and Ray Coburn (rayofhope) won their second million dollar prize in the last year in this event, having also won a Millionaire Maker NFL tournament on DraftKings last fall. As I mentioned above, they didn’t force a contrarian lineup into the tournament. The winning lineup had the highest owned pitcher (Rodon), one of the highest owned first basemen (Goldschmidt), the second highest owned shortstop (Troy Tulowitzki), and the three highest owned outfielders (Cespedes, Cuddyer, and Lagares). In fact, only two players on their roster were under 10% owned. One of them was a key to victory, as Anthony Rendon put up a great all-around performance including a double, a home run, a pair of walks, a stolen base, and two runs batted in. The 13 points from the 6.7% owned Rendon were enough to put Cory and Ray over the top of the field.
In closing, just take a look at the top ten from this tournament. Rayofhope was your winner, lovesbases came in 2nd, ganondorf came in 3rd, FanDuel mainstay zzzimsleeping came fourth, comox_warrior finished fifth, daily fantasy celebrity Tommy G came in sixth, bcalicore came in 9th, and Rotogrinders’ own Jeff Collins and Cal Spears finished eighth and tenth! The only relative unknown in the top ten was user mppe12. It was a loaded field, and the cream certainly rose to the top of the leaderboard. Congratulations to all the finalists, as everyone walked away with at least $10,000 added to their FanDuel accounts.