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.
We have a four-game “main slate”, multiple two-game slates, and four showdowns to choose from this weekend. Which “slate” are you most interested in and why?
This is probably an obvious answer, but the showdowns! I love big showdown contests (and I cannot lie), and four separated island games gives us some nice prize pools to go after. I also don’t hate the 4-game slate, but personally I’m not a big fan of 2-gamers…when going that small, I’d personally rather just play Showdowns where I only need to worry about 1 game at a time.
I am the yin to Xandamere’s yang. I absolutely love the fact that DK gave us the full four-gamer as the “main slate” and sprinkled in some solid contests for the two-gamers on Saturday and Sunday. I want to be taking my heaviest swings on the main slate while using the one-day-only contests to layer heavier theory into my portfolio this weekend. To say I am stoked about the slates this weekend is a vast understatement. And the best part is, there’s something for everyone! X is a showdown grinder and MME player, I’m typically a SE/3-Max player, and Mikey is somewhere in between. I bet you get answers from all three of us that are excited to attack this weekend in some fashion. Find the area that excites you the most and hammer the edges this week!
I probably won’t be playing any Showdowns, which is usually the case for me, but it does seem like the games on this slate are such that Showdown could be a profitable approach for those who regularly play them. There are a lot of ambiguous situations in backfields, receiver rooms, and even with tight end usage for a couple of teams. That seems like it would create a lot of opportunities in the single game format to exploit things and build unique, +EV lineups. Again, not my area of expertise but I will probably be throwing in a few showdowns for fun.
I prefer the four game slate, as four to seven game slates are in general my favorite. That being said, the biggest issue I see for large field tournaments on that slate is that the best plays are pretty obvious which will make it tough to differentiate. In general, I am lukewarm about this weekend’s games and slates so I am leaning towards scaling back my play which is not something I usually do until the Super Bowl.
This weekend presents us with four games which are likely to be very entertaining from a real life football perspective, but all have questions around what type of scoring we will see::
With all of that in mind, the game that exceeds expectations to the greatest extent is likely to provide a massive edge to those who build heavily around it. Which game environment do you like the most relative to expectations?
