Introduction and Background
Salary cap fantasy sports games have been around for as long as I have been playing fantasy sports. For those of you who are a little bit older like me, you might remember the Smallworld / Sporting News salary cap baseball games from the 1990’s. That was my introduction to salary cap format games. Players would rise and fall in salary like the stock market on a daily basis. As players rose in salary, you could continue to keep them at your “buy in” salary, or you could sell them, at which point you were still limited by the overall cap. As players fell in salary, you could dump them penalty-free and start over with a new player.
From there, things expanded to many of the ESPN and Yahoo games of the early 2000’s, which largely functioned in a similar manner. While these games don’t have a direct bearing on the daily fantasy games we see today, they still show us how the salary cap has been a staple of fantasy games for a long time.
It’s easy to ignore the concept of the salary cap when it comes to making DFS rosters. After all, the old adage that “everyone is playing with the same salary cap” certainly does ring true. However, completely ignoring this fact eliminates one potential edge right off the bat. We are dealing with a hyper-competitive fantasy environment right now, and we need to search for any potential edge we can get.
It may seem like somewhat of a surprise, but there are actually ways we can optimally use the salary cap in daily fantasy sports. I will cover many of them in this article, from stars and scrubs approaches to balanced approaches to other different GPP approaches, before finishing things off with a discussion of the DraftKings “late swap” feature and the new FanDuel “drop your lowest score” feature.
Before we begin, it’s probably best to define a few terms that you may hear me use throughout these lessons. When we talk about a “loose” salary cap, we are talking about one that is not overly restrictive for that particular day or slate. There might be a lot of obvious value on the board due to injury news, or there might simply be a lot of under-priced players. In contrast, when we talk about a “tight” salary cap, we are talking about one that is overly restrictive because there is a lack of value on that particular slate, or perhaps there are just tons of studs that we want to pay up for on that slate. I will use the “loose” and “tight” salary cap distinctions throughout these discussions.
Learning how to optimally utilize the salary cap in DFS is not an intuitive thing. It’s not something that comes second nature to most of us. However, it can offer us advantages and leverage as we build our lineups… and in some cases even after lineups lock for the day. With that, let’s dive in to discuss some of the different roster construction types that we can use with our salary cap.
Are you ready to roll? Grab your favorite beverage, and I’ll meet you on the other side as we start to break down lineup construction types.
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