Dummy Grid 2.24
JMToWin is a high-stakes tournament champion (Thunderdome, Luxury Box, Game Changer, Wildcat, King of the Hill/Beach, Spy, etc.) who focuses on the DraftKings Main Slate
OWS Fam ::
This is not a complete list of all the good plays on the slate
This is, instead, a look at the player pool I’ll be fishing
The Grid ::
Bottom-Up Build
:: covered in-depth in the Angles Pod (it’s highly recommended that you listen to the breakdown of the roster in order to see the thinking behind it, and in order to understand what we’re talking about when we look at a “bottom-up build”)
Blue Chips
:: my “Tier 1” plays: the plays I feel confident leaning into across different types of builds; these players have a high ceiling and a low likelihood of price-considered failure
Build-Arounds
:: games, offenses, situations, or scenarios I’ll be looking to build around across my rosters
Building Blocks
:: unique player pairings that can be used as foundational building blocks for tournament rosters
Bonuses
:: players who don’t fit into the categories above — either Upside pieces who don’t have the floor to be Blue Chips (and are not being focused on within my game-focused builds) or players who may not have a strong shot at ceiling, but are worth keeping in mind from a “role” perspective
Beta
:: a new category for 2024! — these are players who are not going to be “featured” on my tighter builds (i.e., one could show up on a tighter build, but they are not being prioritized as such), but who I will be mixing and matching across some portion of my MME builds
Bottom-Up Build
Full breakdown (of what this is, and what the thinking is behind these players) can (and should) be found in the Angles Pod (on the One Week Season podcast feed).
Bottom-Up Build
DK Salary Remaining :: $6.0K
Daniel Jones
Jaleel McLaughlin
Kyren Williams
Brandin Cooks
Malik Nabers
Terry McLaurin
Mike Gesicki
Andrei Iosivas
Colts
Join The Bottom-Up Build Contest On DraftKings!
Buy-In:
Free
Rules:
Build with a salary cap of $44k or below!
Prizes:
1st Place = 150 Edge Points + Rare Blue Name Tag in Discord
2nd Place = 75 Edge Points
3rd Place = 40 Edge Points
*1 Edge Point = $1 in DFS courses on OWS
<< Join Here >>
*must use an OWS avatar (found on your profile page) to be eligible to win
Blue Chips
Kyren + Kupp
Surprise, surprise.
Check out the Building Blocks section for my breakdown of this combo (and of these plays individually).
“Light Blue” Chips
Build-Arounds
Building Blocks
“Kram em In”
Kyren + Kupp
Story:
“They do what they do.”
Why It Works:
In games Kupp missed last year, Kyren + Puka combined for scores of 42.3 // 61.1 // 20.7 // 65.0.
In games all three played in together last year, Kyren + “top wide receiver” combined for scores of 30.5 // 55.6 // 48.1 // 47.1 // 45.8 // 57.6 // 55.4 // 51.8.
That’s 12 games Kyren played, and across those 12 games, “Kyren + top Rams WR scorer” would have gone for roughly 4x the combined salary of Kyren + Kupp this week five times(!), while going for roughly 3.5x two-thirds of the time, and while disappointing only twice in 12 games. Quite simply, this provides one of the best “salary allocation to floor/ceiling outcomes” setups we will see all season, and the fact that this game is being played against an Arizona team that 1) does not have a strong defense, and 2) is expected to keep this game competitive throughout makes it massively +EV.
How It Works:
Kyren and Kupp will be two of the more popular plays on the slate this week, but pairing them will be a tremendous way to differentiate. Most Kyren rosters won’t get the Kupp score, and most Kupp rosters won’t get the Kyren score, allowing you to move ahead of all those rosters if both of these guys hit together. Similar to our Achane/Tyreek setup last week: this isn’t enough to “win you a tourney all on its own,” but it’s a great way to get a head start on the field.
POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE:
The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.
Typically, we include two or three additional Building Blocks…but given that this block will absolutely dominate my roster-building process this week, I’ll remain authentic to the way I’m seeing the slate and move on from here.
Bink Machine
A look at some of the rules I’ll be applying in the Bink Machine this week.
“If Pittman”
I don’t expect to have Michael Pittman this week, but I talked about this setup in my DFS Interpretations, so I wanted to illustrate what this would look like. In short: In order for Pittman to hit, he almost always needs volume (i.e., he’s not a big-play threat so much as he’s a compiler). And in order to see volume, he’ll almost certainly need the Packers to be scoring points. Therefore, if I’m playing Pittman, I want to also account for the players on the Packers who might be creating a game environment that forces the Colts to stack up passing volume.
This rule says, “On 100% of rosters that have Michael Pittman, play one of these other three guys.”
Kyren // Kupp Rules
Let’s say I wanted the following setup:
- Kyren + Kupp go on 40% of rosters together
- 20% of rosters have Kyren solo, and he’s allowed to be paired with one of the cheaper pass catchers from this team as well (but he doesn’t have to be)
- 20% of rosters have Kupp solo, and he’s allowed to be paired with one of the cheaper pass catchers from this team as well (but he doesn’t have to be)
- On the 20% of rosters that don’t have Kupp or Kyren, I want to have one of the cheaper pass catchers from this Rams team (essentially saying, “I don’t think the Rams fail against the Cardinals; so if both of the expensive guys are underwhelming, that almost certainly means one of the cheaper guys is hitting”).
This will be a really cool set of rules to look at.
Here’s how I would build them.
Firstly, I would set minimum/maximum exposures (the last two boxes in each image below) at appropriate levels on each player:
With Kyren + Kupp being played together on around 40% of rosters and each being played solo on another 20%, this puts each guy at 60% total ownership. They are set at 58% to 62% to give the optimizer room to work.
Johnson // Robinson // Parkinson will account for 20% ownership on the rosters that don’t have either Kupp or Kyren, and among the 40% of rosters that have only ONE of Kupp // Kyren, I want to leave room for these guys to also be rostered, but I don’t want them rostered on all. Add up the three cheapies, and they will account for “at least 36% ownership,” and “as much as 46% ownership.” This means somewhere around half of my Kupp-only // Kyren-only rosters will add a cheapie from the Rams, and the other half will not.
Next, we move over to the rules, and we start with a “Kram Em In” rule that says, very simply, “On at least 38% of all rosters, include both players from this pool.” (Note: we put 38% here instead of 40% in order to give the optimizer some room to work. We’ll provide this room throughout our rules.)
Next, we want to make sure that our Kupp + Kyren rules do not include one of the cheapies.
The following rule says, “On 100% of rosters that include both Kupp and Kyren, make sure that only two players from this pool (Kupp and Kyren) are used.” (This could also be accomplished in the Team Stacks section by putting ‘Max Flex’ at 2 for the Rams, which would prevent the optimizer from ever building a roster with three non-QBs from the Rams together.)
This now ensures that we’ll have “at least 38% of our rosters” with both Kupp and Kyren, and that none of these rosters will include a third skill position player from the Rams.
The next thing we want to do is make sure we have some Kyren rosters without Kupp, and vice versa. We’ve already established that Kyren and Kupp will each be on 58% to 62% of total rosters, and that at least 38% of our rosters will have the two of them together. So now, we need to establish a rule that excludes these pairings on some builds.
These rules each say, “on at least 30% of my (Kupp/Kyren) rosters, include only ONE player from this pool” (or, in other words: exclude the other guy). Thirty percent of Kupp rosters is around 18% of my total rosters, and the same goes for Kyren, creating exactly what we’re looking for here.
Lastly, we need to make sure that ALL of our rosters with no Kupp or Kyren have one of the Rams cheapies.
This can be done in a couple ways.
First, we can change the “Team Constraints” to say that every roster has to include at least one piece from the Rams.
Instead, we could build a rule that says “on 100% of rosters, include at least one player (and as many as two players) from this pool.”
And if we want, we can sharpen this final piece by creating a rule for each “cheapie” that says they cannot be paired with another “cheapie” from this team.
Put it all together, and roughly 40% of rosters will have Kyren and Kupp together, roughly 20% of rosters will have Kyren without Kupp (and around half will include a cheapie), roughly 20% of rosters will have Kupp without Kyren (and around half will include a cheapie), and all rosters without Kupp or Kyren will include exactly one Rams cheapie.
Bonuses
If Building For Single-Entry // Three-Entry Max
This is my narrowest pool, which means it’s the pool likeliest to change a bit as I move deeper into builds. If it changes throughout Saturday night, I’ll add an update in this space.
If I were building for single-entry // three-entry Max, my tightened-up player pool would be:
QB ::
Kyler Murray // Matthew Stafford || Jayden Daniels // Daniel Jones || Brock Purdy || Anthony Richardson || Justin Fields
RB ::
A Wrap ::
I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!
-JM
