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!