Selecting the Right Showdown Captain in Different Game Profiles

Kevin Cole (colekev)

Created 2 years ago, Last Updated 1 year ago

In other primer article on total Showdown roster construction, I went through the methodology for how I’m using historical matchups to inform future DraftKings showdown strategy, and what those historical matchups tell us about optimal total roster construction in four different game profiles: All, Shootouts, Slugfests and Blowouts.

There is also another primer piece that walks through how the Showdown format works, and give an aggregate view of early season performance, comparing the roster construction of top-0.1% of entries to the field.

Please read those articles to be prepared to digest what I’m going to go through in this article, which is going to narrow the focus to specifically what the optimal CPT selections have been in the different game profiles.

The CPT position is the biggest unknown in the format. Obviously you want a position with upside to take advantage of the enhanced scoring at the position, but you also don’t want to throw too many darts at positions that typically don’t provide enough absolute scoring to make them worth the selection.

The best way to determine how to parse the CPT decision is to dig into historical samples.

Methodology

I’m using the same methodology to project optimal lineups and optimal CPT selections. This involves taking a sample of 200 random games since 2014 that fall into four categories: 1) All, 2) Shootouts (50+ combined points scored), 3) Slugfests (Less than 40 combined points scored), and 4) Blowouts (15-point margin of victory). for each category, I take the random 200-game sample and calculate the top-5 optimal lineups.

We don’t have the historical salaries for these contests, so as a proxy I use the average salaries by position for each of 2018’s completed Showdown contests and apply those to historical the historical matchups. In this way, all historical games are see as having roughly average salaries in comparison to what we’re likely to see in upcoming contests.

Once we have the optimal CPT selections from the historical contests, we can total the individual positions that compose those lineups to get an idea of how to construct optimal lineups in the future.

For each upcoming game, I’m going to find the optimal CPT selections from the most similar historical contests, as I’ve done for a handful of Showdown contests already this year.

The graphs and tables below give you an idea of how to construct CPT selections, not just based on matchups that fit an exact game, but for different game profiles. This can be particularly helpful if you think the game profile for an upcoming contests is very different from the expectations of the market.

There isn’t one way to create optimal Showdown lineups, but being informed about how a large sample of games have played out in the past will give you an edge on players who are guessing or are over-reliant on recent contest results for projecting the future.

The graphs

All Games

Shootouts

Slugfests

Blowouts

Tables

Here’s where we lay the optimal allocations side-by-side for the different game profiles, so you can see which positions by rank and Favorite-Underdog are best suited as CPT.