Building A Winner 13.25

Tony focuses his DFS play on FanDuel single-entry and 3-max contests. He thrives in unique formats and positional twists, always looking for hidden edges that others overlook

This article is designed to complement Mike’s weekly Fanduel Player Grid and other OWS Fanduel scroll content by giving you my view on the slate from my perspective as a Fanduel player who focuses on smaller-field, SE/3-max types of tournaments. My usual process is to build a handful of unique lineups for these types of contests each slate and a majority of my weekly DFS bankroll is dedicated to them.

As you will see as you go through the article, based on the week at hand, I find what I think is the critical starting point I want to use for my rosters. This could be a certain game environment, a specific position or positional dynamics, extreme chalk pieces, or low-owned stacks that I am interested in. Each week is unique, so the “Starting Point” for each week will be dynamic and the rest of my thoughts will build from there, helping you see how I am building my lineups and allowing you to form your own thoughts.

Starting Point

• As mentioned across several OWS channels over the past week and a half, this is one of the busiest weeks of the year for DFS, with what amounts to three main slates in just eight days. I think it’s important to acknowledge what a great job all the contributors, editors, and everyone else involved in the process do, fitting so much quality work in around unusual travel schedules and other breaks in their usual routines. Great job OWS team!
• While my own content schedule wasn’t impacted this week, I was eager to take advantage of some of the team’s great resources and focused plenty of early-week attention on my own Turkey-day lineups, again focusing most of my play on SE/3-max contests. While I didn’t land on the perfect combination of players together in a single lineup, I felt good about my play and player pool overall.
• Because of my attention to Thursday’s slate, I got a later start looking at this Week 13 main slate than I would on a “normal” week and I’m admittedly not as far along in my process as I’d be most weeks. I’ll use this week’s article to walk through my initial thoughts as much as anything and the first thing that jumped out at me was that there were no games projected to be close and high-scoring affairs like we were spoiled with on Thursday. The FD main slate includes 10 total games, with seven early kickoffs and three in the late afternoon. Despite no teams on bye this week, the combination of the Thanksgiving games, the Bears/Eagles playing on Black Friday, and the usual SNF and MNF games pulls some significant teams, players, and overall talent off of this main slate:
  • At QB we are missing: Mahomes, Dak, Burrow, Lamar, Hurts, Dart, Maye, among others. There just aren’t as many high-ceiling QB options to consider as there are on many main FD slates.
  • At WR there are no Lions, Chiefs, Cowboys, Bengals, Eagles, etc. to consider as core pieces or in-game stacks. We have no Bears, Packers, Broncos, Patriots, or Giants to consider as cheap WR values.
  • While we’re obviously missing some strong RB and TE options, too, I do feel like these positions seem more like a “normal/usual” week’s talent pool, to me, than QB or WR do on this slate with a mix of high-end options and mid-priced values.

Running Back Approach