SuperDraft Primer

>>>RotoMaven

Hey OWS Fam,

We’re extremely excited to announce a new chapter in the OWS journey! In our never-ending hunt for edges in the DFS world, we spotted an opportunity with SuperDraft. After discussions with their team, we discovered we could fill a void that wasn’t being addressed on their platform (more on this in Xandamere’s Primer below). If you’ve been a sub since inception in 2018 or joined OWS Free this year, you know our mission is to provide the knowledge to make YOU a better DFS player. Our ultimate goal is to supply our community with a consistent edge and produce profitable opportunities, aka “free money.” When we began the discussion with SuperDraft, we focused on finding a Win/Win that would greatly benefit the OWS Fam. Here is what it will look like for you ::

FREE CONTENT

OWS will be creating weekly NBA content focused on SuperDraft Strategy.

FREE MONEY

Free Money SuperDraft Link

(*New Users Only) Use promo code “OWS” on your first SuperDraft deposit. You will get a $75 instant match (on a $75 deposit or more) + you’ll receive up to $500 in a drip bonus (dependent on deposit amount).

FREE TRAINING COURSE

Head over to your profile and use the “email us” button to let us know you signed up with the “OWS” promo code. Choose any of the eight courses below, and we’ll add them to your account within 24 hours!

(PRO Tip :: Take any course on a test drive to see what will be most beneficial for your game. The first lesson is always Free)

Hilow’s Mid-Season Cheat Sheet

Having FOMO because you haven’t played NBA this year? No problem. Hilow created an update to his NFL to NBA Transition Course. In the update, Hilow goes team-by-team to provide a “Mid-Season Cheatsheet” that will help you get caught up to speed on the NBA season ::

Where to attack each team from a fantasy perspective
Overall statistics that stand out
Key Injuries
Snapshot of team pace and defensive ratings

SUPERDRAFT PRIMER

>>> Xandamere

There’s a new site in the DFS world this season called SuperDraft – maybe you’ve seen it – and One Week Season is going to start offering some content focused on it. Why would we do that? Well, because as we talk about a lot at One Week Season, every edge matters. If you’re looking to take DFS seriously and make money at it, finding edges is a critical part of success; whether that’s focusing on just sports or game formats that you excel at (like Showdown!) or whether it’s hunting overlay, edge equals profitability.

The SuperDraft Edge

So, why is there an edge on SuperDraft? There are a few reasons:

SuperDraft is a new site and they’ve raised a lot of capital (Caesar’s Entertainment invested in them this year), and they’re using that capital to aggressively acquire users; which means overlay. They’re intentionally posting tournaments that are larger than they can fill, so on any given day, there’s a 10-30% overlay in their big tourneys. The overlay is large enough that not only are you generally playing rake-free, but there’s also usually enough that every single lineup is +EV. For the mathematically inclined (as I write this): SuperDraft has an $18 NBA tourney with 1,933 seats and $30,000 in payouts posted. So, if the tourney only gets 1,500 entries (a realistic scenario based on what I’ve seen), that means that the expected value of each entry is $20 ($30,000 prize pool divided by 1,500 entries). In this scenario, every single lineup you enter has a positive expected value. Now, tournaments are top-heavy so you actually have to do well in them in order to realize this profit, but that kind of overlay is absolutely insane and impossible to find on the larger sites.
Their scoring format is different and the site is new, so most players (and perhaps more importantly, most optimizers) haven’t yet adjusted to it. I’ll get into this later when I get to the strategy section of this primer, but the roster construction is completely different than anything you’ve ever seen in DFS (there are no salaries!), so the approach you’ll want to take is different, and most DFS players will take a while to adjust to that.
The sharks are less prevalent. I’ve seen some big-name DFS players on SuperDraft, to be sure, but it’s not a major focus for them. Guys like Awesemo and Papagates have enormous amounts of money in play each slate on the big sites, so when there’s late news to adjust to, they’re going to prioritize adjusting on Draftkings and Fanduel; SuperDraft will be an afterthought if they have enough time. If a player is ruled out 5-10 minutes before lock, you’ll see that player only be a few percent owned on DK/FD, but he’ll often be 20%+ on SuperDraft because there just isn’t enough time for these big multi-site players to adjust everywhere (sidebar – this applies in Showdown as well!).

STRATEGY

The Differences

It’s one thing to point you at a site with a referral code and say “go play there,” but we want to equip you to be successful playing there, so let’s dig into the strategy. First, the scoring: it’s a mix of Fanduel and Draftkings. Steals and blocks are worth 3 points and turnovers are -1 point, which is like Fanduel. 3-pointers get an extra 0.5 point bonus and there are 1.5 point double-double and triple-double bonuses, similar to Draftkings. I don’t really adjust my overall strategy based on this – but why it’s important to note is that it means you can’t just take existing projections for the main sites and use them on SuperDraft. They have to be adjusted. Now, most projection services have underlying values for each stat (assists, rebounds, steals, blocks, % chance of hitting a double-double or triple-double, etc.) that they use to arrive at their actual point projections; which means a service that does this can fairly easily adjust their projections to SuperDraft’s format. But new sites can sometimes be a bit Wild West-ish as content providers scramble to support them, so personally, I would prefer using a projection service and optimizer that I know for sure has these underlying values and is correctly adjusting to SuperDraft scoring.

The biggest thing that impacts strategy on SuperDraft, however, is the “pricing.” There isn’t pricing. You can put any 7 guys on your roster. What SuperDraft uses instead is a multiplier that is applied to each player’s raw score to come up with their SuperDraft score. So, on the slate I’m looking at as I write this, Nikola Jokic’s multiplier is 1. He has the highest raw projected score on the slate, but all you’re getting is that score. Draymond Green, however, has a 1.5 multiplier; his raw score is multiplied by 1.5 to get his SuperDraft score. This seems simple and straightforward and it is in some ways; it makes it a lot easier for casual players to play on SuperDraft because you don’t have to worry about a salary cap when constructing a roster, you can just pick 7 guys who you think will have good games and away you go, but it has absolutely enormous implications for strategy. Let’s dig through them:

60+ SuperDraft Points

Everyone on your roster needs to be able to get 60+ SuperDraft points: On DK/FD, you can have players who put up much lower scores if they can deliver strong point-per-dollar scores, but on SuperDraft, you’re going to need strong scores across the board because you’re not constrained by salary. Make sure to only target players who have 60+ point upside. It’s common to see rosters in SuperDraft with players who just don’t have a realistic shot at those kinds of games, and those rosters are basically just dead in the water. The most common mistake people make here is playing the same “value” plays as they do on DK/FD. Guys who are minimum-salary on the other slates and might be able to get you 25 raw points; that isn’t going to be good enough on SuperDraft as 2x is the highest multiplier they offer.

Studs Overrated/Overowned

Studs with low multipliers are overrated/overowned: Guys like James Harden and Luka Doncic often have a multiplier of 1, meaning you’re just getting their raw score with no bonus. While of course Harden and Luka CAN put up games of 70+, those games are pretty rare, and generally, those big-name guys are going to be much higher owned than they should be (i.e. they might have a 10% chance of a real smash 70+ point game, but be 30-50% owned). This ties into the next point…
* PRO TIP :: Use the OWS GPP Ceiling Tool to find the % Chances

Size Matters

Slate size matters a whole lot more: On a smaller slate with fewer games to choose from, the high raw score you can get from a low-multiplier stud is more valuable. This is especially true at the guard and forward positions, where you need 3 of them, and locking up a nice 55-60 points from a Giannis or a Harden can be a strong play on a 4 or 5 game slate where there are fewer opportunities for huge outlier performances from weaker but higher-multiplier players. On a large slate with more games to choose from, that means more opportunities for higher-multiplier guys to have really huge games that push them past the 55-60 range you can expect from guys like Giannis and Harden.

Position Eligibility

Positional eligibility is incredibly important: On SuperDraft you get 3 guard slots, 3 forward slots, and 1 center slot. A fair number of NBA centers have forward eligibility (which seems to have no rhyme or reason – Embiid has forward eligibility, as does Myles Turner, but Clint Capela does not, etc.), which gives some flexibility here, but the decision of who to stick in your center slot is the single most important decision on each roster…because you only get 1. With 3 guard spots, it’s easier to use a guy like Harden and figure “he’ll get me 60, and that’s fine, and then I can still chase more upside with the other 2 spots,” but with 1 center spot, if you miss the guy who goes bonkers, you can be screwed. This is exacerbated by the ability of many centers to generate a lot of blocks. Think very carefully about how you want to allocate your center exposure.

Correlation

You need to think even more about correlation: On FD/DK we’re chasing strong point per dollar performances, which means it’s easier to stack multiple guys from one team if they’re strong values (i.e. a depleted team with only 8 or 9 active guys for a game) because if those minimum-salary guys get you 20-25 points you’re feeling pretty good about them. But on SuperDraft, the highest multiplier is 2x, which means if you’re going for 60+ SuperDraft points from every spot, you need at least 30 raw points from your 2x multiplier guys. This is where the “there’s only one basketball” adage comes into play; if you need 30 raw points from a 2x multiplier guy, and you need 40 raw points from a 1.65 multiplier guy, it stands to reason that you can’t play too many guys from one team together, it’s just harder for them all to rack up the scores that you need for a tournament.

Optimizer Rules

I use some common rules to control for this in an optimizer when building multiple lines:
- On small slates, I’ll generally max 3 players from any one team. On large slates, I generally max 2 on most teams (and then maybe open it up to max 3 for one or two teams that are filled with exceptionally strong plays).
- I’m more restrictive on SuperDraft with groups – as in, max 1 of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, max 1 of James Harden and Kyrie Irving, those kinds of rules. I generally don’t want 2 studs from the same team paired together. Or, the other team has some compelling plays, I’ll do rules like if a roster has both Harden and Irving, it must include at least 1 play from the other team coming back.

OWNERSHIP

Without salaries, ownership gets more concentrated: It’s common to see the highest projected plays be 50-70% owned in tournaments on SuperDraft, whereas on Draftkings and Fanduel we very rarely see this concentration of ownership. This opens up more opportunities to take a game theory-based approach to tournament play on SuperDraft. It can be rather terrifying to bet that a guy who is clearly the strongest play on the slate and is going to be 70%+ owned will fail, but if you make that bet and you’re right (you won’t always be), you can set yourself up for some huge wins. As the saying goes, it’s not how often you’re right, it’s how much you win when you do. That said, SuperDraft’s tournaments are smaller than those on DK/FD, which means you don’t have to go crazily off the board in order to win. It’s common to see tournament wins from rosters that don’t have a single-player under 10% ownership, which is rare on DK/FD.

Multiplier Puzzle

SuperDraft is still new and they’re refining their multiplier model: Multipliers can change pretty significantly from slate to slate so you need to watch for that carefully. A few slates back, before the All-Star Break, Nikola Jokic had a 1.2 multiplier, which is almost never the case for one of the NBA’s top studs. He was obviously extremely highly owned, but with a 1.2 multiplier in a good matchup, it was really hard to see how he could fail to end up being a smash play. Each slate on SuperDraft is kind of like a puzzle that needs to be solved; look through the multipliers and figure out where the “value” is on each slate.

Start Times

SuperDraft often has different start times for its main slate: DFS players often get in the habit of thinking about a slate holistically. “The good plays on the main slate today are X, Y, and Z.” But SuperDraft often starts its main slate a bit later than DK/FD does, which means a game or two can be left off of it. People who approach it from that perspective can be thrown for a bit of a loop having to reconsider who they like. SuperDraft, I think, does this intentionally to attract players, because it makes it a bit easier to play on their site if you also play on DK/FD.

Thus ends our Primer on SuperDraft. It’s a great site and I’ve been playing there since a few weeks into the season and enjoying that it has a completely different format from what the other sites offer. As with any new site, these are fresh grounds and there is a significant edge to be found. If you believe every edge matters, you should be playing there, without question, and I hope this primer helps you get started. As always, feel free to find me in Discord or on Twitter @xandamere to talk through strategy!

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