The dynamic game of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) requires much more than simply knowing the sport for which we’re entering contests to be successful. We must be adaptable, precise, and open to learning from previous endeavors, the latter of which will be the primary focus of this weekly written piece. Game Theoretic methodologies will allow us to analyze and dissect the previous week’s winner of the largest and most prestigious Guaranteed Prize Pool (GPP) tournament on DraftKings – the Millionaire Maker. These same tenets of Game Theory, which can most simply be explained as the development of decision-making processes given our own skill and knowledge, assumptions of the field based on the cumulative skill and knowledge of others playing the same game, and the rules and structure of the game itself, will allow us to further train our minds to see beyond the antiquated techniques of roster building being employed by a large portion of the field. Approaching improvement through these methods will give us insight into the anatomy of successful rosters and will help us develop repeatably profitable habit patterns for the coming weeks. We’ll start by looking at the previous week’s winning roster, extract any pertinent lessons for future utilization, and finish with a look ahead towards the coming main slate.
Winning Roster
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Lessons Learned
Low-Owned Eruption >>>
At the end of the day, raw points are all that matters to us as DFS players. We win Guaranteed Prize Pool (GPP) tournaments by scoring more points than our opponents. But the path to scoring those points is a nuanced discussion that includes innumerable theoretical concepts that we quite simply don’t have the time to cover here. That said, it makes sense on the surface to say that an outlier score at low ownership is much more valuable than an outlier score at high ownership. To illustrate this assertion, let’s examine Breece Hall and DJ Chark from the Week 16 slate, two players that managed 95 percent-plus outcomes (as in, they would hit that score less than five percent of the time if we could play out that exact slate on an infinite scale).
Hall managed the second highest raw point total on the Week 16 slate, doing so at almost 27 percent ownership. You were not winning anything this week without his contribution. That said, you still had over one-quarter of the field left to beat even with his separator-type score. Compare that to the 27.80 DK point eruption from Chark at 0.2 percent ownership. Think of it this way – Hall helped a roster get to the cash line while Chark helped a roster get to the top 0.1 percent, where all the money is in these contests.
Be Quicker Than the Field
The psychological aspects of human decision-making are ever present in the game of DFS. The form of those tendencies changes depending on what part of the season we’re in, starting with the guise of certainty early in the year, morphing to newfound trends in the middle of the season, and taking on one final adaptation in the latter parts of the season where a hint of desperation is added due to the playoff picture. Said a different way, early in the season the field is slow to react to situations that are vastly different than the last time we saw teams play meaningful NFL games. After about Week 5 or Week 6, we begin to get a robust enough data set of new trends and team tendencies to make more informed decisions in DFS. Then, after about Week 14 or Week 15, we start to see another change in offensive and defensive tendencies that are primarily influenced by this desperation factor late in the year.
The clearest example in Week 16 of these changing psychological dynamics was the Cleveland Browns. Quarterback Joe Flacco came into the week having attempted 44 passes or more in three consecutive games. Wide receiver Amari Cooper left that first game after just five targets in just over a quarter of play. Over the subsequent two games, Flacco attempted 89 total passes, 44 of which were directed at just two players – Amari Cooper and David Njoku. That was good for a tidy 49.4 percent combined target share. Flacco + Cooper + Njoku was one of the great cheat codes of the slate, something that was not lost on DraftKings user papagates. Being quick to buck psychological aspects of DFS like recency bias, crowd think mentalities, and herd syndrome can do wonders to our bottom lines through these yearly changes.
Looking Ahead
Brock Purdy + Christian McCaffrey + Deebo Samuel
First off, Purdy is coming off his worst statistical showing of his short NFL career, throwing four interceptions with the lowest passer rating of his career prior to departing with another stinger. That could be enough to lower his ownership expectation against one of the worst secondaries in the league. As for the pass-catchers, the injuries to the team’s offensive line (most notable Trent Williams) could lessen the route participation rate of George Kittle while Brandon Aiyuk has seen an absurd 29.2 percent target rate against man coverage while dropping all the way to 20.7 percent against zone this season. That’ important because another psychological aspect is at play with a Washington defense that played man at a top five rate to begin the season before shifting to over 95 percent zone after Jack Del Rio’s departure. The 49ers’ highest target earner against zone this season is Deebo Samuel, seeing a target on 20.1 percent of his routes for a 25.5 percent overall target rate against zone coverages. McCaffrey is self-explanatory, but the field might not fully realize that the Commanders have allowed an RB1 score in seven consecutive weeks, with six of those returning top five production.
Chris Olave
Olave went seven consecutive games without surpassing 100 yards through the air before doing so in three of his previous four games. The Saints now get a matchup with a Buccaneers team allowing the third most DraftKings points per game to opposing wide receivers, primarily struggling to defend alpha-type perimeter receivers (most recently allowing a 6-90-2 line to Calvin Ridley) through heavy rates of Cover-1 and Cover-3 alignments behind one of the league’s highest blitz rates. Olave is currently priced in the “nebulous range” of player pricing, which typically sees lower ownership than the players priced above $8,000 and the players priced below $6,000.