Lineup Construction: Cash Games and GPPs

by Derek Farnsworth (Notorious) Last Updated 2019-08-08 03:30:35 Premium Content Part of the product Notorious’ Blueprint to Weekly Fantasy Football

As with any daily fantasy sport, there is a big difference in how you should approach a cash game compared to how you should approach a GPP. It all boils down to the payout structure of each contest. In cash games, the goal is to be better than half of the field, because that’s the way the payout structure works. In GPPs, the goal is to place at the top one percent of entries due to the top-heavy payout structure.

While the approaches are different, that doesn’t mean that they are mutually exclusive. Everyone in the industry always says the same thing over and over: Use the safe plays in cash games and the upside plays in tournaments. But why do we have to sacrifice one to get the other? The way I see it is if a player doesn’t have both a high floor and a high ceiling, then I don’t want to target him anyway.

The difference between a cash game play and a GPP play shouldn’t be a player’s upside. It should be a player’s volume. High-volume players (at any position) who have high upside are going to be strong plays in all league formats, regardless of their expected ownership. Low-volume players rely on big plays for their fantasy production, which makes them better tournament plays than cash game options. Rather than separating my plays into safe and upside plays, I like to separate them into high-volume (cash & GPP) and low-volume (strictly GPP) plays.

I’m getting a little off track here: The point of this lesson is to walk you through my approach to building both a cash game lineup and a tournament lineup.