Monkey Knife Fight NFL Strategy: The Big Game
Monkey Knife Fight offers a unique take on daily fantasy sports. Instead of competing against fellow competitors, players compete against the house in a series of prop bets from across various sports. It’s very entertaining and an excellent way for those with knowledge and understanding of DFS to win by betting on props.
As you might’ve guessed, Monkey Knife Fight has plenty to offer for the Big Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.
Rapid Fire 2/3 Picks
The first Monkey Knife Fight prop suggested is called a ‘Rapid Fire 2/3.’ From the available props, you pick three for your card. If you get any two of those three right, you win.
Fantasy Points: Garoppolo (+8.5) vs. Mahomes
Fantasy Points: Kelce (+2.5) vs. Hill
Fantasy Points: Kittle (+0.5) vs. Williams
For this first one, let’s go with Jimmy Garoppolo (+8.5) versus Patrick Mahomes in fantasy points, Travis Kelce (+2.5) versus Tyreek Hill in fantasy points, and George Kittle (+0.5) versus Damien Williams in fantasy points.
The big thing here for the play of Garoppolo versus Mahomes is the matchup for both quarterbacks. San Francisco’s offense will be going against Kansas City’s defense, and that should benefit Garoppolo in the passing game. On the other side, Mahomes, for as good as he is, will have to battle with a very good 49ers defense. No one can truly shut down Mahomes and this Kansas City offense, but San Francisco packs one heck of a defense that can get after the quarterback up front and cover guys well in the secondary.
For picking Kelce over Hill, it comes down to how San Francisco will play these two players and their abilities. The 49ers should very much want to avoid giving up the big plays that Kansas City can break, which means putting a little more focus on shutting down Hill. If Kelce wants to eat in the middle of the field on shorter route, great. San Francisco should want to give that up more than give up a big play to Hill. Those plays will add up for Kelce, though, and then there’s a lot of touchdown upside for the big, athletic tight end.
We like Garoppolo in the passing game, right? So then where is he going to go with the ball? How about to Kittle, who is an incredible tight end and gets to go up against a Kansas City defense that gives up a lot of receptions to opposing tight ends. With Williams, his matchup is much tougher, both in the run game and the pass game. If Williams wants to run, the 49ers defense is very good against it. If Williams goes out in the passing game, San Francisco has some very good linebackers that can cover.
Lastly, if you check out the RotoGrinders GridironIQ tool for this game, the projections line up with the picks we’re making. Mahomes isn’t projected to get 8.5 points more than Garoppolo, Kelce is projected to outscore Hill in fantasy points, and Kittle is pegged to do better than Williams.
Passing Yards: Garoppolo (+72.5) vs. Mahomes
Receptions: Kelce (+0.5) vs. Hill
Rushing Yards: Williams (+36.5) vs. Mostert
For this second Monkey Knife Fight prop, we’re going with two that are similar to the first ‘Rapid Fire 2/3’ card we laid out in that we’re backing Garoppolo against Mahomes and Kelce against Hill. Only this time, we’re looking to back Garoppolo’s passing yards getting +72.5 and Kelce’s receptions getting +0.5.
Looking at the various sportsbook odds and lines and player props, Mahomes is sitting around 300 passing yards and Garoppolo is around 240. Just doing the match tells us that the gap there is 60 yards, not 72.5. That’s a 12.5-yard edge and we’ve already discussed how we like Garoppolo in the passing game.
For Kelce against Hill in receptions, we can again gain some nice information by looking at the lines sportsbook have posted. Both are at 5.5 receptions at most places, but it’s the over that is juiced for Kelce and the under that is juiced for Hill.
Although the running matchup is worse for Williams than it is for Mostert, 36.5 yards is a lot and we all know how much San Francisco likes to work in different backs. If Tevin Coleman plays, great, that could take away some touches from Mostert. Even if he doesn’t play, Matt Breida is good enough to get some run in this game, which also takes away touches from Mostert. Furthermore, when Mostert is in the game, he’s almost no threat in the passing game, whereas Williams is definitely a threat to be thrown to. That means that the Chiefs defense can key in on Mostert a little more.
More or Less 2/3 Picks
When doing Monkey Knife Fight’s ‘More or Less’ option, you have to pick if a player will get more or less than a posted line. Think of these like you would any normal player prop that has an over/under line. It’s the same thing. The ‘More or Less 2/3’ option is just like the Rapid Fire 2/3 option in that you only need to get two of three picks right to win.
Fantasy Points: Mahomes Less Than 25.5
Fantasy Points: Garoppolo More Than 17.5
Fantasy Points: Hill Less Than 18.5
You can sense a theme here, right? We’re a little bit higher on Garoppolo than we are on Mahomes. It’s not so much that Garoppolo is going to outperform Mahomes in every statistic, but Garoppolo has the better matchup against the opposing defense, as we stated before, and he should have a much better game than many expect. Simply put, we don’t feel Garoppolo will be as far off of the performance of Mahomes as some of these lines suggest based on the matchup.
A similar sort of thinking is applied to how we view Hill, and it makes sense if we’re lower on Mahomes in general because Mahomes will be the one feeding Hill the ball. If we think Mahomes’ output will be less than what people expect, we can correlate that to Hill as well.
Fantasy Challenge Picks
With Monkey Knife Fight’s ‘Fantasy Challenge’ game, you can select three players and then bet on how high you think their combined fantasy points total will be. You can increase the amount you win by picking a higher total as a goal, too, which gives you some more upside.
Travis Kelce
George Kittle
Raheem Mostert
Two players we’ve already pointed out that we think will perform well are included in this card, Kelce and Kittle. They’re the two very good tight ends, with Kelce playing for the Chiefs and Kittle on the 49ers. Both should be able to put up a big amount of fantasy points on Sunday. The third player we went with is Raheem Mostert of the 49ers. Because we selected the Fantasy Challenge 5x option to quintuple our money, we’ll need these guys to combine for 68.5 fantasy points, which is just under 23 fantasy points each. That’s a doable average across these three players, especially when you factor in the upside each of them present individually. Monkey Knife Fight does utilize a full PPR format, which benefits us a lot in this scenario.
Rapid Fire 2/2 Picks
It’s not in the video, but another ‘Rapid Fire 2/2’ option we like involves keying in on the commonalities we can find between our two Rapid Fire 2/3 cards. Just remember that in the Rapid Fire 2/2 option, you have to pick two and get both right to win.
Fantasy Points: Garoppolo (+8.5) vs. Mahomes
Fantasy Points: Kelce (+2.5) vs. Hill
Now, both of these are options from the first Rapid Fire 2/3 card, but if you look at the second Rapid Fire 2/3 card you can see that we’re on the passing yards for Garoppolo against Mahomes and getting 72.5 yards. We’re also on the receptions for Kelce against Hill and getting a half of a reception there. Yards and receptions equal fantasy points, so these two picks here for the Rapid Fire 2/2 can correlate well with our Rapid Fire 2/3 cards.