Larejo is a mid-stakes tournament mastermind who specializes in outmaneuvering 150-max players with a small number of entries
Among my regrets this season through seven main slates is not having enough exposure to two “had to have it” game stacks: Ravens/Dolphins in Week 2 (80 points) and Lions/Seahawks in Week 4 (93 points). The reason I feel this way is because those are the types of slates where my play style could actually win a million dollars. You see, I am at the point in my DFS career (since 2014) where I know for a fact that I am unable to predict the future. Many of us would nod in agreement that we too cannot predict specific player performance with much certainty. But, even after acknowledging this fact, few of us actually put this into practice.
Building winning DFS rosters is a skill, one that requires much luck, and in order to get that type of luck, we want and need to build for first place. But with all the roster spots we have to fill out, along with the seemingly infinite amount of options, I have only seen success in DFS through one macro strategy: game stacks. Correlation is our best friend, and using it to our advantage is key. Correlation leads us to try to predict fewer outcomes, and as we talk about frequently on the One Week Season streets, I like my chances if I’m predicting three things that need to go right while you are predicting nine.
One of my favorite quotes that I constantly refer back to is from one of my favorite thinkers, Naval Ravikant. He states, “A lousy way to do memory prediction is ‘X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.’ It’s too based on specific circumstances. What you want is principles. You want mental models.” Essentially, all he is saying is you are being lazy if you think what happened in the past will happen again in the future. And the only way to simplify our prediction process is to form guardrails in our minds and make soft rules or models mentally to dictate the do’s and don’ts of building tournament-winning rosters. For me, this means game stacking. Driving our stake into the ground to say, if we can successfully predict one game environment, we can successfully predict a handful of players to correlate and succeed all at the same time.
On a slate as ugly as this Sunday, let your mental models find your game stack.
Permanent Price Bump coming at the end of Week 2!
Lock in the lower price for life!
