The Greatest “Cheat Sheet” In DFS
Each week in The Oracle, OWS team members will take on the key strategy questions from that week’s slate :: sharing their thoughts on how they plan to approach these critical elements from a roster-construction, game theory, and leverage perspective.
A weekly staple of The Oracle, what makes this slate particularly unique?
The biggest thing that makes this slate unique is the thing that makes this slate unique each year :: Thanksgiving ends, and most of the field has to suddenly remind themselves that, oh yeah, there’s another slate this weekend!
DFS content providers are true grinders, but Thanksgiving is a family day for them as well, so most sites are getting up content late this week (and I can tell you from looking around the industry in the past that most sites are putting out sub-par content for the weekend on this week as well!). Players who are usually thinking about the slate by Wednesday or Thursday were probably just starting to think about the slate on Friday this week. All of which comes together to mean that the field is just simply not as sharp on this week as they might typically be.
Of course, we also have the shape of the slate (five teams implied to score 25-27 points, and most of these offenses priced up with clear bumps in the way to ascending to tourney-winning status — all to go with several lower-priced teams/games with potential to take off); but truly, the biggest edge of all on this week is just simply finding a way to execute your normal process, and finding a way to dedicate your normal level of focus by the time you start building rosters.
Well to start with it’s relatively small – only 10 games because of 3 games on Thanksgiving plus another on Friday. But there’s another bit of weirdness on this slate, which is close spreads. As I write this on Friday just 2 games (TEN/WAS and TB/CAR) have spreads larger than 3.5 points. That makes this slate look very attractive for game stacking…if you can find the right game! There are a lot of games with totals ranging from “reasonable” to “high” that Vegas projects to be close, and those are the best kind of games to target for game stacks – the kind of games where, if things break right, they can very easily turn into back-and-forth shootouts. I think PHI/BAL and LAR/NO stand out the most due to their totals, but LAC/ATL and PIT/CIN aren’t far behind and then there are several others that could surprise to the upside. It should be really easy to find interesting game stack opportunities this week.
This slate is a stark departure from what we have grown to know this season. We have numerous quarterbacks that are capable of putting the slate out of reach, median game totals are up, and there are numerous game environments that can develop into something you had to have. All of these things combine to push back against the tight player pricing, meaning we’re likely to require 205-215 points to ship major GPPs this week. That should fundamentally alter how we go about constructive rosters for this slate.
I see some things at each position that feel unique this week::
QB – There are about 8 QBs priced at $6,100 or below who seem like they have very viable paths to being tournament winners. Each of them has some combination of potentially explosive scoring environments, stud pass catchers to carry them, rushing ability, or relatively cheap for their ceiling pass catchers to stack them with.
RB – Feels harder this week than it has in many weeks. Chase Brown is underpriced, but in a really tough matchup and should be extremely highly owned. Alvin Kamara’s spot is good, but he’s very expensive and we just saw him get yanked by Taysom. The rest of the RBs with clear lead back roles seem to have iffy situations this week and/or have struggled in recent weeks.
WR – I think the top-5 WRs by salary are in spots where a massive spike week would not be surprising at all. Given how the NFL season has gone with passing and scoring, two or three 35-point games from the WR position would be very unique.
TE – Only one tight end over $5,000 (Trey McBride) and that player is coming off his best game of the season. Minnesota’s blitz-happy defense should force the ball out quickly and it wouldn’t surprise if McBride has a similar game to last week. If he can just find the end zone, he could lap the position by 10+ points.
In my “Morning GPP Thoughts” in the Inner-Circle Discord channel on Thanksgiving, I mentioned how condensing your player pool is, in my opinion, the biggest struggle for most DFS players. Yet, on a three game slate we are forced to condense our player pool to only six teams and things naturally get pretty condensed. Obviously this is reflected in ownership on those slates, but my point was that you can put together a winning GPP score for a main slate from a smaller sample of games and trying to “cover every base” is generally a losing strategy. Sure enough, the winning GPP scores in the big Draftkings tournaments were over 200 points and on Fanduel it was around 180 points – both roughly in the range of what winning scores have been on a lot of main slates this season. There were only 3 games. DFS slates are just accumulations of games. What I am getting at here is there are a lot of weeks where if you just built lineups for main slates from 3 games it would feel uncomfortable but you could definitely still compete assuming you pick the games well and you probably gain an advantage and are unique just by doing so. So lose the FOMO on the main slates and narrow your player pool, one way or the other. This happened without shootouts (all three games had total points of more than 40, but less than 50 points) and without huge individual performances (no QB got to 30 points and no RB/WR/TE got to 25). This wasn’t an anomaly, either. The Afternoon Only slate last Sunday had winning scores at or just under 200 points with only one player reaching 30 points and game point totals of 22, 48, and 48.
With all of that in mind, I thought a fun exercise would be for each of us to pick the three games we would choose to build exclusively from that we think would give us the greatest chance of finishing near the top of the leaderboards on this slate. Fire away!
