Week 7: DraftKings Optimal Lineup

by Derek Farnsworth (Notorious) Last Updated 2014-10-21 20:12:10

Welcome to another edition of the DraftKings Optimal Lineup breakdown. It’s always fun to look at the best possible team each week and we can also learn from it as well. Let’s take a look at this week’s optimal lineup and see what we can take away from it:

Week 7 DraftKings Optimal Lineup

Many people see the optimal lineup each week and immediately look at the contrarian plays in the lineup that no one would ever target. They tend to focus on the outlier rather than on the stud players that made the lineup. When I look at an optimal lineup, I look for stud players as well as players with favorable matchups. I like to see optimal lineups that feature players that had fairly predictable outings. That’s exactly what we saw this week.

Russell Wilson was facing one of the worst pass defenses in the NFL (24th vs. QBs before this week as shown in our Defense vs. Position Rankings), Matt Forte leads all RB’s in receptions and had a decent matchup against the Dolphins, Ronnie Hillman and Demaryius Thomas were both facing a decimated 49ers defense, Doug Baldwin saw an obvious increase in production after the Percy Harvin trade, Sammy Watkins has shown his fantasy upside, and Golden Tate was one of the most popular plays of the week.

The point that I’m trying to make is that you don’t have to take a ton of risks in your tournament lineups in order to have that high score needed to take home some of these massive first place payouts. If you look at this week’s optimal lineup, the only off-the-board player to make the lineup was Gavin Escobar. There are so many lineups in these big tournaments that are dead money each week because people use a full team of contrarian plays that have little to no chance to succeed.

Noto’s Week 7 Lineup

It was a war of attrition this week. There were land mines at every turn and unfortunately I wasn’t able to avoid them all. Jordan Cameron and the Seahawks D/ST combined for a whopping 0.5 fantasy points. Luckily, the rest of the team was able to pick up the slack. Golden Tate had a terrific performance with 34.4 fantasy points and each of my three RB’s scored at least 18.7 fantasy points. Those four players put my team on their backs and carried me to a good enough score to cash in all double-ups.

Reviewing your lineup is a fun way to look back and see what could have been, but hindsight is always 20/20 and it doesn’t help you get any better as a player in DFS. The key to improving each week is to always strive to learn as much as you can each week. I learned two lessons this week. The first lesson is to use recency bias to your advantage by not falling into the trap of chasing points. I was debating between Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick all week and eventually decided on Kaepernick as he was coming off of a much better game. I should have targeted the much more consistent Wilson who was coming off of a rare bad fantasy outing.

The second lesson is that each week’s lineup puzzle is unique. There is not a set lineup strategy that is going to work each and every week. What I mean by this is that it’s not always a great idea to pay up for a QB, target cheap RB’s or cheap WR’s, pay up for defense, or handcuff your QB to his WR. Each and every week we have a new puzzle to piece together and it’s important not to get caught up in setting certain “rules” when creating your lineups.