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.
It is finished. (Or will be after this). The regular season comes to an end this week and always provides a unique challenge and opportunity for us.
What strategies do you see for your approach to this week in particular that may not work out every year but you believe, over time, give you the best chance to take advantage of the uncertainty that Week 18 provides? Also, do you have a particular type of contest that you prefer on this unique slate?
My strategy is to not play this slate, and my preferred style of contest is none…
Which I mention because I do think that if you feel your edge is lower than normal this week, you should consider doing the same.
That said :: there are some DFS players for whom the edge is greater this week; and if that’s the case for you, you should embrace that.
Since I still spend as much time with this slate as I do with any other, and prepare content, etc., I’ll also give an answer that I might give if I were playing…
I think one of the main pitfalls of this slate is treating it TOO differently than other slates. We’re still looking for good plays that can put up big raw scores.
We say all the time that DFS is not a game of “picking players.” But to take that a step further :: a sharp player pool will rarely be enough to win you a tourney; but a bad player pool will be enough to lose your money.
Don’t get so caught up in the uniqueness of this week that you end up with a sub-optimal player pool. Stick to the basics, regardless of what this week throws at you.
I’m just going to note something here that we have some history on, which is the history of Milly Maker tournament wins in the final weeks of the season. Now, keep in mind that the Milly Maker almost always has some off the board plays because of how big the tournament is – you don’t HAVE to go off the board to be successful in DFS, you just have to choose your contests wisely. But, in the final weeks of NFL seasons, we generally see lower cumulative ownership take down Milly Makers.
Last year’s Milly Maker winner in Week 18 had a fair bit of chalk – specifically a ~40% Bijan Robinson and a ~32% Michael Carter. The lowest owned play was a 5.5% Jakobi Meyers. It was a weird lineup for a final week! In 2023, the last week was won by a Ravens stack (They scored 56 points) and it had both Wan’dale Robinson and Darius Slayton with no other Giants(or Rams, for that matter). This roster only had 2 players over 10% ownership, and they were ~11% and ~12%. That’s more like the Week 17 stuff we’re used to seeing – but what’s worth noting is it didn’t have any rando backup/bench players on it.
I could go back farther, of course (but it’s a very manual exercise). The point is – we generally see more weirdness in the last week because teams do weirder stuff. We try to predict what teams are going to play starters and what teams are going to care, and we’re generally decent at that, but what we can’t always predict are things like…
We know less than we think we do. We can still play good plays. We can still find teams that are likely to care the whole game and play hard. Just recognize that the chalk is more fragile than normal.
This slate honestly has a much different feel than a “normal” Week 18 main slate in that there are almost no teams playing for anything meaningful like playoff seeding. What we do have is a ton of teams with limitless uncertainty regarding personnel – who will be playing, how long will they be playing, and how does that influence offensive game plans? Those are the big questions to sort through this week. We have some clues around the slate, but a lot of it also comes down to variance, how we manipulate that variance in our favor, and how we marry our acceptance of variance to the contest we are playing.
As you might have guessed, I will be leaning into that variance on this particular Week 18 main slate, looking to take some shots in the $25 DK Milly Maker. I think there are bound to be more mistakes made by the field this week and I want to position myself in the best spot to make the most money when (or if) I get things right.
From a macro perspective, we must add another layer of the player evaluation equation this week, and I think JM summarized that really well in his journal on discord. The example he gave referenced Puka Nacua, assigning percentages to the chances of him both hitting ceiling and playing a full allotment of snaps.
I am basically the inverse of JM on this question. I think there are massive edges on this slate, and I believe I am uniquely skilled at exploiting them, which makes this my favorite slate of the year. There are a lot of landmines out there for people to find and if you don’t know how to navigate things or limit your player pool effectively, it becomes hard to win something. This basically takes out such a large portion of the field that it makes the path to the top feel easier for me. I believe I have a better read on most situations than almost all DFS players and also love the volatility that Week 18 presents, which makes everyone uncomfortable. It really is the best week of the year.
This is a week where there is likely to be very spread out ownership and almost every game has a very wide range of outcomes. That leaves us in a spot where it is easy to spread ourselves too thin and/or end up trying to account for every spot, which we know is a -EV way to play that actually hurts our chances of binking something. With that in mind and a focus on keeping our eye on the ball, what are your favorite stacks and/or player blocks to target this week?
