Best Ball: The Big Eliminator Deep Dive

Earlier this offseason, I wrote about my strategy for attacking “The Eliminator,” a contest that combines best ball scoring with guillotine leagues and requires no team management or waiver wire transactions.

The original tournament has been closed for some time now, but our friends at Underdog Fantasy recently launched a similar contest called “The Big Eliminator.”

As you can probably guess by the name, the entry fee is significantly higher, up from $10 to $100, with fewer total entries. That limits users to five total drafts as opposed to the original 55. Although the total prize pool has shrunk, the weekly payouts are much bigger, as follows:

You’ll notice the advancement structure is the same for the first three weeks with minor tweaks to account for the smaller number of entries beginning in Week 4. The initial payout is also pushed up a week and allows you to at worst break even in Week 7 and return a profit from Week 8 onward. One of the glaring differences in this tournament is Week 12, where the pod expands to a 23-person group, with over 78% of the field moving on (18 of 23 per pod) and locks up a hefty $1,500 payday. 

This makes stacking a bit more critical. You’ll notice the players with the highest win rate up to that point of the season appear on a lot more rosters, giving you a slight boost by working in some correlation. Stacking in The Eliminator isn’t nearly as important as Best Ball Mania or most of the other contests. However, I still prefer at least one teammate paired with my quarterbacks and will use correlation as a tiebreaker. With that said, I still want to be mindful about not going too heavy on an individual team, where a single dud can put an end to your season. I’m also ignoring game stacks entirely and focusing more attention on proper roster construction and bye weeks. Things really get fun in championship week where the final remaining teams get randomly paired into an all-or-nothing head-to-head contest, with $50k to the winner and a fat $0 to the loser.

For the most part, my strategy doesn’t differ much from the first article, but I’m much more likely to “get my guys,” and reach if I have to due to the higher buy-in and limited number of bullets. With four-figure payouts beginning as soon as Week 11, I’m giving a slight boost to teams/players with earlier bye weeks until the real sweat begins. As for managing exposures, there isn’t a right or wrong way to handle the situation, and it ultimately comes down to risk tolerance. I’m more of a gambler, which means I’m not going out of my way to diversify my portfolio even if it means rostering multiple players at a 100% clip, especially those I feel are mispriced by the market.