Daily Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheets: What They Are & How They Can Help Your Lineups
Fantasy baseball cheat sheets aren’t just helpful for drafts in season-long leagues. They also can be incredibly useful in daily fantasy MLB contests on FanDuel and DraftKings.
In the simplest sense, daily fantasy baseball cheat sheets consolidate each day’s top plays in a way that’s not only organized, but easy to use in your lineup-building process.
Cheat sheets do most of the research and hard work for you. You can glance at your cheat sheet and quickly see the MLB players who should be on your radar, what types of game formats they should be targeted in (e.g. cash games vs. GPPs), and how they compare to other top plays at the same position. A great daily cheat sheet should also be tailored to a specific DFS site, since scoring, rosters and positional eligibility might vary. This will help you spot the best values and gain an edge no matter where you’re playing.
If you’re interested in diving right in, click here to check out our DraftKings MLB Cheat Sheet or our FanDuel MLB Cheat Sheet here. (Incentives subscription required.) Otherwise, read on for more details about how cheat sheets can help your daily fantasy game.
What are daily fantasy baseball cheat sheets?
As mentioned above, cheat sheets roll up the top players to target each day into one location. With just a glance, you can see who top-ranked DFS experts think might be that night’s best picks and compare them to other players at the same position.
How can a cheat sheet help me win?
The primary purpose of a cheat sheet is to provide you with the top players at each position in a format that’s not only easy to understand, but also easy to use as you build your lineups. To clarify, a DFS MLB cheat sheet is NOT a full lineup that you can copy, paste and play. Instead, they can help you see which players fit into your specific lineup strategy that night.
For example, if an MLB cheat sheet tells you that an affordable 2B makes a great “punt” option, you can feel more comfortable plugging him into your lineup in order to roster an expensive stud OF who you’d otherwise be unable to fit into your squad, but is projected to be one of the top performers and worth squeezing in. So really, cheat sheets aren’t just telling you who to target; they’re helping you fit better players into every position in your lineup.
If it’s not a lineup, then what does a cheat sheet look like?
Here at RotoGrinders, we break down the top selections in our daily MLB cheat sheets into four categories so you can find players that fit specific criteria throughout your research. These categories are:
1) Elite – These are the top picks of the day. Whether a player is expensive or cheap, if they’re labeled “elite,” than our experts think they are extremely likely to pay off their value.
2) GPP-only – Players of all price ranges who have a chance to explode and surpass their value, potentially drastically, but who also have a chance of falling flat. In other words, these are your “boom-or-bust” options each day.
3) Punt – Sometimes you just want to find a cheap filler so you can fit the best studs into your lineup. This category will point out cheap players that are in good enough situations that they can provide some filler points and save you cap space.
4) Contrarian – This category will list the top outside-the-box players who we expect will not be highly owned in tournaments.
Additionally, at RotoGrinders, we use color-coded highlighting to communicate news & other potentially valuable situations. Red indicates a player’s been scratched. Yellow indicates a player that carries injury-risk & warrants monitoring their status. Blue indicates a player to monitor, and if a certain player on their team is benched, then that player propels into elite value territory.
Here’s a peek at what our daily fantasy baseball cheat sheets look like each day:
Are cheat sheets just for new, inexperienced players?
Cheat sheets can be a useful tool for fantasy team owners of any level. Cheat sheets are criteria-based, not rankings-based, so even if you’re sharp enough to target the right players on a given night, you might not necessarily be targeting them in the right game formats. Are you needing to find a cheap player with a high floor, or looking for a high-ceiling option that other gamers might not be on that night? A cheat sheet will allow you to sort by these criteria and identify potential fits.
What do you think? Ready to add cheat sheets to your DFS MLB research arsenal? Sign up for a free, 7-day trial subscription of our premium Incentives content and see how they can help you build better lineups!