GrindersU UnderGraduate
Course #2 – Lesson #1 – H2H Play
Written by Notorious
When you first enter the wonderful world of daily fantasy sports, there are a few things that you need to understand before hopping in leagues and making teams. A big factor in your success is to understand the different types of gameplay and your different options as to how many opponents that you want to face. Today’s lesson is going to be on head to head leagues.
How it Works
A head to head game is the most basic game type in all of daily fantasy sports. The name pretty much says it all, you are going to be playing against one other person where the team with the highest fantasy point total will win the entire prize pool, essentially it is a winner take all league between you and one other person. To find these type of leagues, use the filters of the daily fantasy website that you play on and set it to head to head under the league type.
Head to Head Strategy
Once you start to understand the different types of game types, you can decide which type is best for you. In a head to head match, you only have to beat one other person for you to win your league. In contrast, when you enter large field tournaments, you potentially have to beat hundreds of opponents, so the strategy in each should be a little different.
In a head to head match, you want to create a team that is going to put up a good amount of fantasy points, but you only have to beat one other person so you don’t want to construct a team that is full of too many risks because an average score could beat your opponent in a head to head matchup. Whereas, in a large field tournament, you are going to need to construct a team that scores more points than potentially hundreds of other lineups, in this case, you want to take more risks because you need to put up a huge score in order to win.
An example of this in baseball is when you are comparing two different pitchers. Pitcher A may have a better matchup and is a much bigger favorite as far as the Vegas odds are concerned. Let’s say he averages 6 strikeouts per 9 innings. Then you have pitcher B who has a much tougher matchup and isn’t favored in the Vegas odds but he averages 9 strikeouts per 9 innings. Typically, in a head to head format, you want to take the safer play which in this case would be Pitcher A. There is less of a chance for pitcher A to blow up and a greater chance of him picking up the win, making him the safer play.
Hand Picking Opponents
Now that we have the basics covered on how a head to head matchup works, the next step is for you to decide who you are going to be playing against. One of the biggest problems that new players have in daily fantasy sports is that they get matched up against some of the best players in the business and they end up losing their bankroll quickly and then decide to never play again. There is nothing more off putting to new players than to get smoked by a guy that they see has thousands and thousands of dollars in winnings.
Most new players do not realize this, but it is fairly easy for you to hand pick your opponents. This is a critical key to success for new players because they can find other players that are on the same experience level as themselves. On almost every daily fantasy sports website, you can see who is in the head to head leagues; it will say their username somewhere in the draft lobby. All you have to do is a quick search on that player and you can easily see their experience.
The easiest ways to research an opponent are to:
1) Click on the player’s name from the draft lobby, some sites like FanDuel have it set up to take you to their profile when you click on the name. This will show you the player’s total amount of winnings they have had on that site.
2) If you can’t click on their name, go to the site leaderboard and do a quick search for that player’s name, this will bring up his winnings as well.
3) Go to RotoGrinders homepage and do a quick opponent search at the top right hand of the page.
These are three very quick ways to research your opponents that will definitely pay off for you in the long run. If you find an opponent without a lot of experience, join their leagues. You will be much better off than just blindly joining leagues and getting matched up with some of the top dogs in the industry.
Multi Matchup Blockers
As you start to get the hand of daily fantasy sports, you will most likely start to join more leagues each day. If you are a player that prefers the head to head format, you will usually like to diversify your opponents. Nothing is worse than joining 20 head to head leagues and having one of the big sharks in the industry come in and take all 20 of those matchups. You didn’t join 20 different leagues to only have one different opponent; you joined that many leagues to play against 20 different people.
This is where the multi-matchup blocker really comes in handy.
Every single one of the top daily fantasy sports websites has one of these, although they can be called different names. What this tool does is only allow an opponent to join one of your head to head leagues per buy-in level. So if you want to join 20 different $11 head to heads and you have this tool turned on, each player can only join one of your leagues. This is a great tool that should be used by all players that want to diversity their opponents.