Best Ball Drafting on DraftKings, Fanduel and Yahoo.

My second season playing Best Ball on DraftKings/Fanduel/Yahoo and I think I’ve learned a lot from last year.

If you’re not familiar with Best Ball games, it’s pretty straight forward – you draft a team and all your top scorers will automatically be scored for you. No more agonizing over who to start from week to week – Best Ball takes care of that for you. There is only one thing you need to worry about; if a player you drafted gets injured you can’t pick up a new player from the waiver wire. Once you draft your team that’s it you’re stuck with it the whole NFL season.

Each site is slightly different:

Draftkings gives you 1 full point for receptions while the other 2 only give you .5 points. That’s a big difference – for example if you draft a WR who has 100 catches on the year you would get a full 50 more points during the season with Draftkings.

My strategy for DraftKings is to target pass catching RBs like Ekeler, Kamara, Deandre Swift and Saqoun Barkely. My backup RBs are going to be the pass catching 3rd down backs. Some of my favorites are Michael Carter, Jerrick McKinnon, Travis Etienne and Chase Edmonds among others. Of course this list will change once official depth charts come out.

Getting a full half point for receptions is huge so if you’re playing Drafkings be mindful that high volume receivers that don’t get a lot of yardage (see Keenan Allen or Jarvis Landry) and TDs can still be valuable.

So if you’re not drafting in the first 4 or 5 picks then go the zero RB strategy route and try and snag a high volume WR like Adams, Diggs, Justin Jefferson, Calvin Ridley, Travis Kelce and Deandre Hopkins over RBs who don’t catch the ball like Derrick Henry, Ezekiel Elliott and Jonathan Taylor.

Fanduel has 2 flex spots (one more than Draftkings and Yahoo) which means you need a deep bench. My strategy is to really make sure not a lot of my players share the same bye weeks. I know it’s a hard thing to keep track of but if you want to maximize those 2 extra slots you want to have as many players active each week which means that I don’t have more than 2 WRs sharing the same bye week if I can help it (this is true especially of RBs I think).

Last year I finished out of the money by a few points quite a few times and if I could’ve had done better job of planning the bye weeks better I think those extra few points I possibly could gain on bye weeks would’ve been the difference between being in the money or busting out.

Yahoo does it a little differently. They reward money for having the high score for the week. I play mostly the $1 or $5 buy-ins. If you win a week on a $1 team you get a .25 cents for the high score of the week. For the $5 games you’re rewarded $1 per weekly high score. I think this is neat because if you have a team riddled with injuries and you’re basically out of it for the year, you can still get some of your money back. This is the best feature of Yahoo Best Ball in my opinion.

Example: Last year I targeted Zeke Elliott for a number of my teams and as everyone knows he got injured fairly early in the season. I knew my chances of cashing Best Ball was slim (anytime your 1st pick in the draft gets hurt it’ll be a long frustrating bestball session) but I did manage to win back a few dollars by winning a week late in the season.

Perhaps the pros have a different approach but these are my observations. So if you’re a super successful DFS player maybe you can give me your opinions on this. I’m open to any criticism or advice so fire away!

Well that’s it for today! Happy Drafting everyone!

Fantasy Football is back!

So I haven’t written anything here for over 7 years because of various life stuff. I finally grew up and got married and have a wonderful daughter. She’s older now so I now have some time to play some poker with some friends online and I will continue to try and profit from Daily Fantasy Football on Fanduel and Draft Kings.

Sports betting is another way to potentially profit, however, from what i’ve read and seen on Youtube sports betting is extremely hard to win consistently and only the top 1% – 3% of all sports gamblers actually make money. Those odds don’t look to good but I’ll give it a try anyway.

My strategy for daily fantasy this football season is a simple one: Invest $5 per week on DraftKings and Fanduel. Play in $1 single entry DFS tourneys to start (usually $20K prize pool) and then split the rest between other tournaments that are multiple entries.

This strategy may change but I think I have a fighting chance at these low level entries because:

• I won’t lose a lot of money as I’m only risking $85 on this project.
• I don’t think that the DFS pros are going to bother working these low level DFS tourneys. I may be wrong but I would think that if you’re a DFS pro then they’re not looking to play the $1 events. Not sure if is actually true but that’s what I think (if anyone is reading this and have actual information about DFS pros playing the $1 tourneys please let me know).
• Most of the players are just like me. I just want to have fun watching football and hopefully make a little money at the same time.

The next project will be my regular fantasy football leagues. I have been a part of 2 leagues for a long time now. Each league is different in many ways.

One league is an auction league where you bid for players on your team ($100 salary cap). This particular league costs $300 to join. I split the buy-in with a friend of mine so we make the decisions jointly (more on this later). This is your basic set up 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, kicker and D. I know it’s old school bidding for a kicker but it’s been this way since I joined this league so who am I ask them to rewrite the rules? 12 team league so opportunity to make some money is there with a little luck. The league also gives a $100 prize to the team that gets the highest total score for that week, so there’s opportunities to win some of your buy-in back. I kinda like this rule because even if you’re out of the running for the playoffs, your team can still some money if you have a awesome week.

The thing that makes the auction league different is that you play every team every week. So in any week you can go 11-0 if you have the highest score for that week (you also get the $100 weekly bonus). Before it was heads up but then we had situations where a team trying to make the playoffs plays another team who is done for the season and they don’t bother putting up a working roster. Thus giving a team basically a free win in that heads up match up. To counter this we found a fantasy site (CBS Fantasy) that will allow us to set up the league where everyone plays everyone else weekly. This way if a team tanks and loses interest in the season it doesn’t affect any team negatively because everyone will get a win against this team that punted the league because their top player is out for the year. Hopefully I explained this well.

Auction leagues are great because you can bid for the players you actually want instead of waiting your turn in a traditional draft where you can miss out on players you’ve targeted but someone else drafted. You want Pat Mahomes as your QB? Bid him up!

My other fantasy football league is a little weird I guess but when you’re playing with friends it’s still fun.

This league has 10 players and the buy in $100. This is a standard snake draft league. The thing that’s different is that this a 2 QB league. Yes that means you have to draft and start 2 QBs every week. This is a standard head to head matchup every week. Top 4 teams make the playoffs. 3 places paid with a $20 weekly bonus for having the high score of the week. Draft details will be coming soon!

I will discuss sports betting and my online home poker league the next post.