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?”
We’ll start with the obvious, which is the fact that this is a 13-game slate. With International games, double MNF games, bye weeks, and late-season Saturday games, these 13-game slates have become extremely rare.
But in addition to this slate having 13 games on it, we have several game environments that stand out well above the others, and we have several other teams with high scoring expectations.
These latter two factors have apparently led me to a much tighter player pool than I typically have. Without realizing this as I was creating my player pool, I don’t have nearly as many names in my pool as I typically do.
In short: a larger-than-normal slate; but with certain spots standing out well above the others, it’s a larger-than-normal slate that organically pointed me toward a smaller-than-normal pool.
That’s definitely unique.
And that’s definitely a setup I’ll gladly take.
It’s a big slate, and there are some really elite-looking spots with great offenses in high total games. That doesn’t mean they’ll hit, of course, but the setup looks good.
The big thing about the size of the slate is that means one of two things will occur. Ownership might spread out because of the extra games, which might mean “good plays” are relatively lower owned compared to a more condensed slate. Or, ownership might stay concentrated on the “good plays” despite there being more other spots that we could attack, leading to opportunities to be contrarian at lower than normal ownership. I’d guess it’s more likely the former – most of the time on big slates we see ownership spread around more, and so if you’re a “play the best plays” kind of DFS player that’s an advantage to you – getting to play the “best plays” at lower ownership is better than playing them at higher ownership!
I would also say it’s a week to avoid middling plays. Especially to folks who play a lot of entries in MME, it’s really easy to let your player pool inflate because of “what if” plays – guys who COULD hit for a solid game, and while we recognize they aren’t the likeliest guys to do so, they could and it’s tempting to give ourselves exposure. On a really big slate there are a LOT of plays like that. This is also a slate with a couple of very, VERY appealing game environments – so if you’re chasing those middling plays, not only do you need them to hit but you probably also need multiple elite game environments to fail in order for the mid-tier “hits” to lead you to tournament wins. Could it happen? Of course! But it’s a pretty fine needle to thread.
First off, we have the game with the highest game total of the season on this slate. Second, it’s a 13-game slate, much larger than the 10 and 11-game slates we’ve grown accustomed to the previous six to eight weeks. Finally, pricing is tight, with so many key studs we want to jam in and not much in the way of projectable value outside of Woody Marks.
Let’s break this down a bit.
The higher game totals and larger slate mean the optimal score is going to much, much higher than in recent weeks. The tight pricing means we are likely allowed more leeway away from optimal to win GPPs, with true optimal likely including numerous players that hit true outlier production at minimal ownership. This leads to two distinct expected behaviors from the field: (1) people are likely to accept too much variance in search of scores closer to true optimal than are needed to win GPPs, or (2) others are not going to build with enough exposure to risk for the high chance that higher scores are needed to ship GPPs. We’ll discuss more of what this means in the End Around and on The Slate podcast on Saturday.
The Lions and Rams game profiles to me as the Game of the Year. It reminds me of the Lions game against the Bills in Week 15 of 2024 where both teams ended up going over 40 points and littering the leaderboards. The timing is perfect as such a big slate allows ownership to be spread thin and people to let FOMO take over and spread out their focus. This game, along with BAL/CIN and BUF/NE are so clearly the spots that are going to post big scores that I feel like I am seeing the slate very clearly and love how things set up.
We often have “Value Plays” as a question in The Oracle as we look for specific spots to target. This week, however, there is a huge pool of games/teams/players which means simply asking “which cheap guys do you like?” isn’t going to be of much use to our subscribers. Instead, it feels like this week will be decided primarily by Roster Construction. We can make this question a binary one to make sure our answers are more direct. Which of these roster constructions do you think is most likely to be optimal when the games end on Sunday?
