What’s Needed to Win on DraftKings?
Every week, I get a bunch of emails with screenshots of DraftKings lineups. Is this lineup good? Would you change anything with this team?
Sometimes the answer is “no” because, well, the lineup isn’t any good. But the answer is almost never “yes.” That might just seem like I’m a huge douche, but the answer is never yes because a “good” lineup is completely league-specific; what works in a tournament doesn’t work in a head-to-head game, for example.
The first thing you should do as a daily fantasy owner is think about what you want out of your lineup, then base all of your decisions off of that goal. You can’t simply add players you like—even if they offer value—to your tournament team without any sort of justification behind them.
To give you an idea of why that’s the case, take a look at the typical DraftKings scores from last season in GPPs, head-to-heads, and 50/50s.
Interestingly, the average 50/50 score is one point less than the average head-to-head score, but the typical winning 50/50 lineup is three points higher. It’s not just variance because there are over 10,000 leagues in this data set.
I think this is actually evidence that some DraftKings users are approaching 50/50 leagues with a more high-variance mentality than heads-up matches, stacking a quarterback with his receiver, for example, or otherwise choosing riskier players. That’s driving up the typical cashing score, but (perhaps) decreasing the average overall score.
There’s probably a lot more we could read into that, but take a look at the average “in-the-money” score in a GPP—157 points. That’s 14 points higher than the average winning head-to-head lineup. A score of 157 points is nearly 20 points per player. And with DraftKings turning the kicker position into another flex spot, the average winning scores only figure to increase.
Ranges of Outcomes
When you create any daily fantasy lineup, you’re constructing a team with a range of potential outcomes—some good, some bad, some okay. The nature of that range depends on your player selection and the relationships you create within your lineup.
Basically, you’re looking to either increase or decrease the volatility of your lineup so that you can win certain leagues types. Here’s a sample breakdown of the probability of DraftKings scores based on whether you take a high-variance or low-variance approach.
When your team is low-variance, your score tends to inhibit a more narrow range of outcomes—or at least it has greater access to a moderate level of production. When it’s high-variance, the probability flattens out—less chance of a moderate score and a higher probability of either a really low or really high score.
Your goal is to figure out how to construct your lineups so that they come close to matching these curves; you want more variance in tournaments so that your team will have a high enough ceiling to cash, but less variance in cash games so that you have more access to a decent score that will beat the average lineup.
I’m going to get into this idea and other league-specific strategies more in future posts, but I just want to quickly run through the two main ways you can increase or decrease lineup volatility.
Player Selection
Certain players have more variance inherent to their games than others. Pass-catching running backs have proven to be more consistent than running backs who don’t catch a ton of passes because they aren’t reliant on a specific game flow for production; a pass-catching back like LeSean McCoy can be valuable even if the Eagles are losing, which gives him a high level of week-to-week consistency. Wide receivers who see short targets are more consistent than those whose targets are deeper, too.
There are certain positions that naturally have more volatility than others as well. Quarterbacks and running backs have proven to be the most consistent positions on a weekly basis because they see the most opportunities to make plays—and thus see their numbers regress toward the mean. That’s why smart players typically pay up for quarterbacks and running backs in cash games; you have a good idea of what you’re going to get.
Relationships
Second, the relationships you create within your lineup will alter its variance. We all know that pairing a quarterback with one or more of his receivers is popular in tournaments, and that’s because it increases the lineup’s upside (and downside). It flattens out the range of possibilities because the players are reliant on each other for fantasy production.
There are other such relationships, too. This week, I’m actually starting both LeSean McCoy and Zach Ertz in a cash game lineup. I would never do that in a tournament because they can “steal” touchdowns from each other, but I’m not as worried about a high ceiling in a head-to-head matchup. I believe those two players have a high probability of accounting for Philly’s touchdowns, and I think it’s unlikely they’ll both have poor games. By starting them together, I’m probably narrowing the range of potential outcomes for my lineup.
More to come on this concept, but keep it in mind this week as you play on DraftKings; always base your decisions on the goals for each lineup, the most important of which is how willing you are to embrace volatility.