Larejo is a mid-stakes tournament mastermind who specializes in outmaneuvering 150-max players with a small number of entries
Frequently this season, and in years past, a byproduct of writing this article is putting together the “Willing to Lose” lineup of the week. Some of this is due to the structure of how I try to navigate giving out strategies, part is due to my playing style of being “non-MME,” and leaning closer to SE/3-5 max most weeks. I think the other part of penning this piece over the years is also because I’m still chasing the week where I can get almost everything right in one content post.
If you’re reading this spot every week, you likely know by now how to interpret my words. Don’t take everything and implement it into one roster (let me make that mistake because I’m obligated to!) but do sift through my thoughts and pick out the one that resonates the most with your thinking. If on a typical week, I try to give at least three strategies and/or player blocks/picks, it’s overwhelmingly been the case that I’m somewhat right on one of those three. If I can get two, great. And if there’s a week where I can put it all together and go 3-3 or 3-4, that’s going to be the one. This last point is why I’ve been building the WTL lineup each week this season alongside writing the article. That lineup lives in a lottery tournament every week, and if nothing else, gives me a sense of being real with anyone reading this, that I’m sticking to my words and playing what I wrote about.
Zooming out for a second…having any sort of accuracy on lower-owned strategies is a win in my book. As with anything, you wouldn’t click on this article and expect I’d be nailing everything, just as you wouldn’t read this and assume the opposite…that I have no clue. Now that I hope I have your attention, Week 17 is going to be different. I’m going to walk through my exact thought process and build an eight-of-nine roster. Why? Because it’s Week 17. Why 2.0? Because if you aren’t tweaking your approach every single week, are you really trying? So, despite a roster build going against many of my own intuitions, I’m proceeding anyway. Here goes nothing…
Another cause and effect in my DFS play this season is the first look advantage I get in the Angles email. Since I’m not out there with a large lump sum in play on a given weekend, I have been burned too many times by placing my eggs in baskets that never had a chance. The Angles research has helped me isolate where and when to focus my attention, and for the majority of weeks, this is going to be with the teams and games where points will be scored. Implied totals aren’t everything but when you lose lineups because you stacked an offense projected to score less than 20 points, it hits differently than when you’re rostering Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson and they simply fall flat.
