The Greatest “Cheat Sheet” In DFS
Each week in The Oracle, OWS team members will take on the key strategy questions from that week’s slate :: sharing their thoughts on how they plan to approach these critical elements from a roster-construction, game theory, and leverage perspective.
A weekly staple of The Oracle: “what makes this slate unique?”
One thing that makes this slate unique is that I forgot to enter my Oracle answers on time…
But in addition to that (and more relevant to you), I could see this slate being defined by:
1) Quarterbacks priced below $6k (either getting you enough points to keep you on track for a tourney win while opening salary to spend up in other places, or even just getting you enough points to be the quarterback you needed to play this week).
2) Players who score 30-40 points.
Generally speaking, the more bets we can have in one spot, the more we turn the math in our favor. Trying to get a bunch of onesies right is not the most mathematically sound way to make money in DFS over time. But to me (and of course, I could be wrong! — so take this as just one person’s approach to the week), this looks like a week in which we’ll see several players scoring 30 points, and in which we may even have one or two guys going for 40+.
Putting these things together, I’ll be focusing on lower-cost quarterbacks this week, while looking for unique ways to pack as many “potential 30+ scores” onto a roster as I can. It won’t be surprising to me if winning rosters this week feature four or five guys who score 30+ — and if that ends up being the case, I want to make sure I gave myself the best possible chance of pulling as many of those 30+ scores onto a roster as I could.
We have some really cheap and somewhat dubious value (though there are a lot of viable value plays so at least 1 of them is highly likely to get there!). We have a lot of high-end guys in great spots (and no clear one “best” high-end play – at least to me – which means that while a lot of those guys are pulling ownership, none of them is likely to get to truly massive chalk status). We have multiple environments one could build stacks around, both on the premium end and the cheap end. Let the games begin!
This slate has a similar feel to the one we saw last week with one key difference – we have a bunch of potential value pieces at running back in Week 11. But like last week, we don’t feel great about many game environments despite numerous games with elevated game totals, there are numerous players we want to be spending up for (particularly at wide receiver and tight end) but we don’t have clear paths to access multiple of them together one a roster, and we’re seeing some seriously fragile chalk develop. Also like last week, this leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling when building rosters as there aren’t many places for either projectable certainty (top tier point-per-dollar projections) or directional certainty (high likelihood of a team succeeding). As a game theorist, slates like this one are my favorite to build for (also like last week).
I think there are a bunch of cheap QBs in solid enough spots that through volume or matchup they post a very good score for salary.
I also think there are like 7 or 8 RBs from $5,400 to $6,100 that have a good enough talent/role/matchup combination that we almost certainly get 2 or 3 of them scoring 20 to 25 points. At TE, McBride, Kittle, and Gadsden both have nice ceilings for price at TE. And spending up at WR gives a lot of paths to ceiling with all of JJ, Chase, Puka, and JSN in position to go nuclear.
All of those contextual aspects of this slate make it so I will be surprised if winning lineups aren’t primarily made from sub-$6k QB plus a couple RBs from that $5,400 to $6,100 range plus a bunch of stud pass catchers. All of this above is a good example of the “macro approach” type of stuff I reference a lot. Similar to when we talk about being directionally correct on a team scoring a lot of points.
This week we have an 11-game slate with FIVE of those games having game totals between 46.5 and 49.5. No games have implied totals above 49.5, while the other six are all a step or two below this “Fab 5” group. We know that targeting the right game environment is often the key to a slate and that while hitting on the “smash” players for a given week is important it is also usually a necessity to find the right game to play multiple players from. With that in mind, which game from this group is your favorite game environment bet to make?
