How to Win at DraftKings & FanDuel DFS!
For the purpose of this article, I will be focusing on DraftKings DFS—where I spend most of my time—but the same general strategy and approach will work for FanDuel as well (or any other multiplayer salary cap based DFS platform). This information is aimed at newer players, players with limited bankrolls, or players that actually know a lot about fantasy football but still have not yet profited in a DFS season. If you are a pro who max-enters the Milly Maker each week, then this is obviously not for you (also, save some for the rest of us!)…
Here's the TL;DR for my short attention span people:
Play mostly single entry Cash Games with as large of a field as possible
Sprinkle in tourneys with smaller fields
Research player news, injuries and matchups to optimize all of your lineups for both
1. Cash Game Contests (includes 50/50s, Double-Up contests, and also 1-v-1) This is the heart and soul of winning long term. I start with at least 75% of my weekly bankroll dedicated to cash games vs. shooting for the moon in a bunch of tournaments. Instead of needing to beat a massive field of people with a ceiling-outcome lineup, you only need to beat half of them to secure profits. It's boring, it will never 10x or 100x for you, but if done right it should lead to slow and steady growth over the course of the season. Last year, I grew my bankroll exponentially by landing above the cash line in weekly cash game contests during 15 of the 18 regular season weeks.
You only need to finish in the top half in 10 of 18 weeks, and you're already in the black!
A large part of winning cash games—and also any tournament in general—is contest selection. CONTEST SELECTION IS HUGE IN DFS. Each week, as soon as DK rolls out their single entry large field 50/50 contests, I reserve a spot in almost all of them (you can reserve a spot even if you are not ready to submit an actual lineup yet). Some of them will fill up! The Single Entry part is the key. This means everyone in that contest—even the sharpest of the sharp professional players—can only choose one lineup to submit vs. spamming it with 150 unique lineups.
The other key part of contest selection is the size of the contest: in general, larger is better for 50/50s. You want tens of thousands of people if possible. That means more people that can make a mistake and miss an obvious free square due to pricing errors or injuries, more people that can make a bad lineup in terms of projectable ROI, more people that might just choose their favorite players and call it good, etc. This is especially true in the beginning of the year, when these sites get absolutely flooded by people who are excited to jump back into the fantasy football world. If you do the research and build out an optimal cash lineup early in the season, you should be able to start hot in these cash games full of casual players and really get a jumpstart on building up your yearly bankroll.
The final part of my cash game process that some will disagree with, but it works for me: I only use ONE cash game lineup each week. It's a bit boom-or-bust, but I know there is a lot of research and data backing my decisions, and my one cash game lineup is typically going to be the best combination of floor and upside to beat half of a pool of players in any given week. In terms of building out my cash lineup, there's usually 1 or 2 "free squares", so I will always lock those in and eat the chalk for cash games (ie: If a $4500 RB is suddenly the starter due to a last minute injury, that is essentially a free square, and I will lock them into my cash lineup without thinking about it). Let everyone else get cute and make the mistake of trying to find value elsewhere in their lineup. Cash games are not where you want to try and get contrarian to outsmart everyone else; you take the obvious values and move on.
2. Tournaments (includes GPPs, Single Entry, Multi Entry, etc.) This is where you can get different and try to shoot for ceiling outcomes that others might not see coming, while also skipping some of the obvious chalk (and free squares) that I mentioned above. Tourneys are where you can get contrarian and try to target lesser owned players and less obvious game environments to hit a big payday. They are a lot harder to profit in, but when things break right, you can 100x your entry or more.
The problem is most DFS players either strictly play tournaments, or spend way too much of their bankroll on them, and it's suddenly Week 4 and you're already out of funds.
Tournaments are flashy and they're a blast, but I will never have more than 25% of my weekly bankroll dedicated to them due to the volatility and high-variance outcomes. So, now that you know how to responsibly get exposure to tournaments, how do we make money on them?
Just like cash games, a large part of profiting in tournaments comes down to CONTEST SELECTION. When I am looking for tourneys to enter, I go the opposite route in terms of field size vs. cash games: I want smaller fields (maybe a few thousand people max for most of them), and ideally either single entry or a 3-max contest. This once again prevents most of the high stakes professionals from just overpowering you with 150 unique lineups from a super computer while you only enter a handful of your own. Outside of tossing a couple entries into the Milly Maker each week, I will never play a tournament unless I am able to max out the number of allowed entries. I want that level playing field in terms of general odds to win. Your 3 or 4 lineups you spent so much time researching and constructing for that 150-max tournament is almost always going to lose to at least 1 of the 150 lineups from the guy that does this for a living. Stick to the less flashy tournaments and you may just win one (and still get a really nice payout)!
3. Research, Research, Research. We have an entire world of information at our fingertips, so dig in when you have the time to prepare for the upcoming week: a podcast on your commute, an article or X thread while you're in the restroom after your commute, a radio show on your lunch break after your bathroom break after your commute, you get the idea. (No wonder work production tanks this time of year...)
By the time Friday or Saturday rolls around, there are always some obvious salary values on the board and potentially some free squares due to injuries or depth chart changes to help you craft the core pieces of your cash lineup. Beyond that, it's a matter of targeting the best game environments (Totals north of 50 are money!), and avoiding those that might be a trap (maybe that team that's favored by 2 TDs won't have to even try in the second half, or they maybe pull their starters early). You can also look up expected roster ownership to help you find additional obvious values on the board (if a WR is projected to have ownership north of 75%, you probably want him in your cash lineup). I like to lean into a lot of the high ownership for cash games, but then avoid it quite a bit for tournaments where you want to embrace being contrarian.
There's so much more that goes into my process from week to week, but this is a great high-level overview to help you get started with profiting on DFS this year.
Prioritize those cash games, build that bankroll, and take shots in tournaments where you can.
DFS is an absolute blast, and there's no reason why it can't also be profitable for you this NFL season!
Sports Gambling not legal in your state yet? Come play on these other DFS platforms with me instead! All of these apps are legally available in the vast majority of the country…
