When considering contest selection in DFS, there are a couple of prerequisites to consider:
Pre-Req #1: What is your bankroll? For the week, for the season, etc. As a best practice, I’d recommend you cap your weekly exposure to 10% of your season bankroll. For example, if you’ve got $2,500 you’re willing to put into play over the course of the NFL season, I would shoot for $150 -$250 in play each week. Any more than that and you are at risk of going broke or having your play change to a more cautious approach/style. Playing with fear, aka not to lose, is a detrimental mindset, and will likely hinder you from a winning lineup.
Pre-Req #2: What is your goal for the season? Are you playing for fun? Trying to grind out a profit? Trying to hit a big score or have a life-changing win? Being honest with yourself and setting a realistic goal should determine the types of contests you enter.
I want to start by saying that DFS is hard, so much so that a vast majority of players, (probably around 80-90%), are lifetime losers. In order to combat the turnover of players going broke, sites like FanDuel and DraftKings have large advertising budgets to continue to attract new players. One of their key marketing strategies is advertising the ability to turn $20 (or even $5 this week) into $1 million, with their weekly Milly Maker contest. However, in order to win a tournament like the Milly Maker, you have to beat a full city’s worth of entrants, hence why these types of tournaments are referred to as “lottos”, as it’s essentially like playing the lottery. For point of reference, DraftKings’ flagship contest for Week 1, a $5 Milly Maker, will have over 832,000 rosters if it fills. To put that in perspective, that would be just slightly smaller than the population of New Orleans, the 50th-largest city in the US as of 2025!
With that in mind, why make it even more difficult on yourself to be a winning player by playing poorly structured contests? When sorted by prize pool, almost all of the larger-field contests on DraftKings for week 1 have very top-heavy structures, which essentially means, it will take a top .1%, (not 1% but 0.1%) finish to return a strong ROI on your entries. My advice is to avoid those type of contests. Below I’ll outline what you should be looking for and the tournaments to consider at different buy in levels.
So, what should we look for when choosing a contest?
Whether you are playing for fun or to grind out a profit, my recommendation is to seek out contests with the flattest payout structures. Ideally, no more than one eighth (12.5%) of the total prize pool goes to first place. The best GPPs (guaranteed prize pool contests) for sustainability as a player, are structured with 10% to first and 1% of the total prize pool (a tenth of first) awarded to 10th place. Unless there is a decent amount of overlay, I would highly advise against playing in contests like the Milly Maker, where 25% of the prize pool, or even 40% in the $100 Milly Maker in Week 1, goes to first place. It’s unsustainable to play in those types of contests week in and week out, and a leading cause to why many players end up losing players.
Looking at Week 1, what DraftKings contests would I consider / play in?
Weekly exposure: Up to $50
Contests to consider:
