Sonic is a Milly Maker winner and large-field tournament mastermind who focuses on mass-multi-entry play
My weekly process:
After doing all of this, I ask, “Who are the players at QB and TE that are most capable of breaking the slate?” and “How owned are those dudes?”
We can often overcome a 4-5x outcome from an RB or WR due to of the sheer number of combinations of other players at various prices. But when a QB or TE smashes, it’s more likely that you had to have them.
In smaller field contests, we can safely ignore a lot of the lower-owned players that “could” smash because only a few opponents in your contest will roster that player and the odds of those lineups having eight other strong pieces are very low. In a tournament with 100,000 entries, however, a 1.5% owned player will appear in 1,500 different rosters, increasing the odds of him destroying your Sunday considerably.
You’re never going to cover every player that could possibly hit 5x. Football is just too random. My obsession every week is to identify the contrarian plays with upside and mix them in with the obvious good plays. DFS is hard, but if we’re mindful of what tournament-winning rosters look like, we can prevail.
We’re always hunting for those high-ceiling combinations to add to our existing game stacks. It’s better to aim at getting four things right instead of trying to hit a nine-way parlay. I’ll lean on a handful of core secondary stacks that will be finessed into lineups whenever feasible.
Josh Allen is my favorite quarterback play on this slate and I’m not alone. JM and others have professed their love for Buffalo Bills stacks and will be attacking aggressively.
Dalton Kincaid ($5300) will be the 2nd highest-owned tight end at upwards of 23%. Since people usually employ stacks, it’s safe to say that Kincaid will appear in a very large percentage of Josh Allen stacks. There will be approximately 10,000 Allen/Kincaid stacks in the Millionaire Maker.
I’m going to execute a simple price pivot and replace Kincaid with Schultz ($5400 and 4%). This will naturally lead me to add Gabriel Davis ($5300) to my stack, and in this construction, the player most likely to be sacrificed will be the 23% owned Christian Kirk ($5700).
So as a GPP degenerate, which one looks more appealing to you?
Allen/Diggs/Kirk/Kincaid – $27,900 and 65% total ownership
Or…
Allen/Diggs/Davis/Schultz – $27,600 and 20% total ownership
Yes, the chalkier stack is more likely to produce a better median outcome. But is that group 3.25x more likely to hit for a tournament-winning ceiling?
This one might make me look foolish this week, but thinking about tournaments inthese terms may provide an edge in a DFS environment where edges are increasingly difficult to come by.
This game has an over/under of 34.5. No one in their right mind is going to look to this game for upside.
Hold my beer.
WHAT IF New England comes off the bye with a plan to increase Mac Jones’ completion percentage by targeting the biggest mofo they have? Tommy DeVito has been looking deep in the direction of Darius Slayton. With Slayton sidelined, what if rookie Hyatt breaks out against New England’s depleted secondary? This cost and ownership allow you to roster all the expensive chalk you may desire. Four catches and a TD from each would be pants off.
