A Comprehensive Guide to NFL DFS Strategy

All contests have the same structure in one sense — all contestants buy in, creating the overall prize pool. However, before paying out this prize pool, DraftKings and FanDuel take a cut. This small percentage (typically larger than we’d like!) is called the rake. The effect of the rake is different for cash contests vs. GPP contests, and we see the effect much clearer in cash contests.

Cash vs. GPPs

Cash contests refer to head-to-heads, 50/50s and double-ups, where the goal is to slowly build a bankroll. Cash contests are the DFS equivalent of betting spreads, totals or player props around -110 odds. Guaranteed prize pools (aka tournaments) refer to all other contests, where the payouts are far top-heavier. While most of this article will focus on strategy for GPPs, it’s worth touching on cash contests a bit. Specifically, what I believe most people get wrong about cash.

Why I Don’t Play Cash

Cash contests are often referred to as “bankroll builders,” but for most DFS players, they’re anything but. The argument for them is simply constructed — GPPs are higher risk and higher reward, so theoretically you can decrease your risk by playing some (or mostly) cash contests.

I have two major objections to this argument. First, cash contests are difficult to win. They’re easier to win in the sense that you will cash more frequently (because a larger percentage of the field cashes), but we should be interested in winning long term. Virtually everyone playing NFL DFS, particularly cash contests, is using a projection source of some kind. Optimal lineups spit out from one source to the next are extremely similar if not identical most of the time, making it tremendously difficult to gain an edge over the competition. Here’s the real problem, though — to win long term in cash, an edge over the competition is insufficient unless it’s large enough to also overcome the rake. Since there’s little strategy in cash beyond playing the best plays, finding that edge is nearly impossible for most DFS players, especially the novice players who are most often told to play cash to control their risk.

The second major objection is to the idea that cash games lower risk. Risk can never be totally isolated from reward. Let’s say you want to play $100 per week in DFS. If you play $50 in cash and $50 in GPPs, your potential earnings are only a little more than half as much as they would be if you played all GPPs. So then you might say “OK, I don’t want to hurt my upside, so I’ll just play $100 of each.” Well, silly goose, now you just doubled your risk! Instead of being able to lose $100, you can now lose $200. 

This is why I don’t play cash and recommend novice players steer clear of it. Unless you have good reason to believe your edge in cash is enough to overcome the rake, the more effective way to control risk is to invest less money. You can even do so while raising your ceiling through the use of satellites, but we’ll get to those in a bit.

Different GPP Contest Types

Contest types can become even more specific. There are single-entry contests, 3-entry, 20-entry and 150-max contests (as well as some others in between). We often simplify into just two categories, single-entry and mass multi-entry. One argument I sometimes hear for playing multiple lineups is that it gives you more chances for that big win. I’m not against running multiple lineups each week, but I do think this claim is mostly false. 

Suppose you have $200 to spend in Week 1. My favorite contest is the $200 Double Spy, a single-entry with 277 entrants and $10k to first. You play this contest but after Week 1, you decide “one lineup isn’t enough, I want multiple chances for a big win,” so you switch to the $75 Goal Line (3E) for a total of $225. Since the contests are similar in size, your top prize has just decreased from $10k to $4k. So for the same ceiling, you need to play a larger contest. But then you need to beat more people. You may have more chances for the big hit, in the sense that you have three lineups instead of one, but does that actually mean that you have a better chance of getting a big hit? I’d argue not. At the end of the day, it’s probably a matter of personal preference, or… fun. If you simply think it’s more fun to play three lineups and sweat three lineups than to play and sweat one, I can’t argue with that!

Finally, we have satellites. Satellites provide you the opportunity to win tickets into larger dollar contests. For example, In Round 3 of the Open Championship, I spent $37 and won a $4,444 Milly Maker ticket for Week 1 of the NFL Season. These satellites are an incredible way to keep risk low while unlocking immense ceilings. Worst case scenario is I fail to win the satellite (which happens more often than not) and lose $37. In that case, I wouldn’t enter the $4,444 in Week 1 and would stick to my usual $200 SE. By winning the ticket, I now have a free entry into a contest with a million-dollar top prize. And the coolest thing is that you can do this at any stake level. You can spend $9 to try and win a $555 ticket or as little as $0.25 to win a $20 ticket. Whatever your stakes, there’s a satellite for you that can help you scale up to larger stakes without putting more money at risk. 

Personally, my favorite contests are small, top-heavy single entries (200-300 entrants) and slightly smaller satellites (75-150 entrants).

Satellites and My Personal Contest Preferences

The commonality between all GPP types, whether SE, 3E or even 150-max is the top-heavy payouts (satellites are even more extreme since only first-place wins most of the time). It should come as no surprise that the $5 Milly Maker is absurdly top heavy… a true lottery style contest. 25% of the overall prize pool goes to first place alone. There are 952,000 entrants and first place gets 25%! While this is predictably the most extreme example, the other contests follow suit. My personal favorite, the smallest Double Spy, is less severe:

20% is paid out to first, but it’s just a wee bit easier to beat 276 other people than 950,000. My favorite way to evaluate how top-heavy a payout is to look at how much of the prize pool goes to the top 1% of finishers. In the Milly Maker, it’s north of 50%. Here, it’s 38.2% (10k + 6k + .77 * 4k divided by 50k for anyone not skimming through this part. It’s OK, I wouldn’t blame you).

“OK, but surely the cheaper single entries are flatter payouts, right?” Wrong. Even the $12 Fair Catch, with only 10% to first place, pays out 35.1% to the top 1% of finishers. The $75 Goal Line referenced in the last section is one of the flattest payouts I’ve ever seen, but it still pays 25.6% of the overall prize pool to the top 1% of finishers. In other words, the payout is less severe, but not different enough to change the optimal strategy in any way. Our only goal is to maximize the chance of a top 1% finish. That’s where all the money is.

How to Shoot for the Stars (Top 1% Finishes) — The Big Three

Stacking

The first tool at our disposal to help reach the tops of leaderboards is correlation, which we get through stacking. A stack refers to a QB paired with one of his receiving options, usually a WR or TE. Game stacks also include an offensive player on the opposing team who would benefit from the game being high-paced and high-scoring (like if they trade go ahead touchdowns multiple times in the fourth quarter). Finally, adding an additional pass-catcher to the primary stack turns it into a double stack. Double stacks are best utilized when the QB is less mobile and therefore more reliant on passing production, while mobile QBs whose ceilings are largely tied to their rushing production should typically only be single stacked.

Game Theory

Next, we have game theory. Game theory is the concept that our optimal choices depend on our expectations of what our competition is doing. Imagine if in Week 1, you use a 30% rostered Tyreek Hill (I’m just making up this ownership projection). If he has an excellent game (the type of game where everyone immediately knows he’s going to be in the winning lineup), you gain an advantage over the 70% of people who didn’t use him. In the $200 Double Spy, that would mean you still have to beat approximately 82 others to win first place. If, however, he were only 5% rostered, you would effectively eliminate 95% of the competition, leaving you with only 12 others to beat. The lower rostered a player is, the more valuable he becomes if he plays well. Of course, this is a delicate balance since his lower rostership often implies that he’s less likely to succeed than those more popular than him. This is where the GPP Scores help us the most — identifying the players who are simply under-rostered. 

Correlated Leverage

Finally, we have the more advanced concept of correlated leverage. Correlated leverage exists when a chalky (popular) player we’re pivoting away from is inversely correlated with the contrarian player with pivoting to. A perfect example of this came in the 2022 season when a low-rostered Tony Pollard erupted against the Vikings while CeeDee Lamb and Dalton Schultz failed as the most popular players at their respective positions. That week will forever be known as Pollard Week at FTN. Like stacking, what we’re trying to do here is decrease the number of things we need to be right about. We were right about Pollard, which also made us right about fading Lamb and Schultz. Similarly, if we play and are right about Terry McLaurin in Week 1, we would also likely be right if we played Jayden Daniels.

Bonus Strategy Concepts

Finally, we’ve picked up a few extra tricks over the years. In my Chalk Report series from the last two seasons, we tracked the success and fail rates of all chalky plays at all positions. We learned:

• Mega-chalk WRs (the really popular ones) smash at a higher rate and fail at a lower rate than all other players at all other positions and are therefore the best chalk there is.
• On the contrary, cheap TE chalk is the worst chalk there is. Outside of Trey McBride, who quickly emerged as an expensive TE, cheap TE chalk failed at a high rate and rarely if ever punished you for fading them.
• Chalk stacks in a contrarian way are always sharp. This can mean also using a low owned QB paired with a chalky receiver. Or using a popular QB but skipping his WR1 in favor of a less popular WR2. Sometimes, it’s as simple as using a chalky stack but including a contrarian player on the other team to make it a game stack.

This last one also reinforces a reason why stacking is so powerful. Suppose you love Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase one week. You build out your lineup and notice that Tee Higgins would fit as the final piece, turning your stack into a double stack. This is often a time to remember that we’re not playing fantasy football, we’re playing DFS. If you choose Higgins, your stack has more paths to success. Imagine if Burrow throws for 300-plus yards with four TDs, but Chase only goes for something like 5-80-1. Good, but not great. But maybe Chase had an underwhelming game (given Burrow’s success) because Higgins went for 120 and 2 TDs. Once again, double stacking is decreasing the number of things we need to be right about. In this case, it turns “Burrow and Chase, not Higgins” into “Burrow and Chase or Higgins,” which is much easier to be right about.

These guidelines plus the GPP Scores are all we need.

Final Thoughts

Like many of you already have and like the rest of you soon will, I have fallen in love with NFL DFS. Contest sims, introduced around the industry last year, threaten the ability of those unwilling or unable to pay for these tools to compete. Ultimately, this then threatens the game of NFL DFS as a whole. This is why we created the GPP Scores. The GPP Scores use data from our own sims to not just give all users the chance to make great lineups, but to even give them the ability to leverage the sims themselves. Because here’s a dirty little secret about contest sims — as much as they help certain DFS players, they also make DFS players as a whole more predictable. A more predictable field of competitors is a field of competitors that I can’t wait to compete against. Here’s to an incredible 2024 season!