Last year, I compared and contrasted the 2021 finalists from DraftKings’s Play Action tournament to those from Underdog’s The Puppy 2. In doing so, I tried to impart some basic lessons on how to play the 2022 best ball contests on the less popular DraftKings platform, differently than one ought to on Underdog. The main takeaways:
This article will serve as a follow-up of sorts, although this time I’ll be looking at the 2022 flagship tournaments from the respective sites: Underdog’s Best Ball Mania III and DraftKings’s $3.5MM (aka The Milly Maker). Best ball data from DraftKings is not publicly available, but luckily yours truly qualified for the finals so I had access to it in my contest history (I finished 125th, if you’re curious).
First, a quick reminder of the tournament structures of the two tournaments. DK’s Milly Maker had a field size of 837k and $5 per entry (150 max), with a $3.5mm prize pool ($1mm to 1st). Unlike BBMIII, the Milly Maker’s playoff structure remained the same each round. If you qualified, you were randomly sorted into a new 12 team group in which you had to place 1st that week to advance further until you advanced to the 969 entry final.
UD’s BBMIII had a field size of 451k and $25 per entry (150 max), with a $10mm prize pool ($2mm to 1st in the playoffs, $1mm to the regular season points leader). If you qualified for the playoffs, you were sorted into a 10 team group for Week 15. If you won that group, Week 16 you were in a new 16 team group that you also had to win to advance to the 470 entry final.
Now onto an examination of the roster constructions for the finalists of each tournament.
The most common lineup construction among the 470 UD BBMIII finalists:
