Make This Upcoming Football Season on Draftkings your most Successful Yet!
While everyone loves playing fantasy football, not everyone is willing to put in the time and research it takes to dominate every Sunday on Draftkings. Many beginners focus in on the records of teams playing each other and make decisions solely based on that. For example, it isn’t as simple as “The Patriots play the Browns so i’m using Brady and Gronk,” while the Browns are admittedly a bad team, they may defend tight ends extremely well. This past season on Draftkings I didn’t lose a single week from week 7 on and while I can’t guarantee these results for everyone, I am willing to share some of the secrets that helped me double my money every week.
Next: Choosing your Quarterback
It all starts with the Quarterback position, but not in the way you would think. While you need an elite signal caller to win games in the NFL, Draftkings is almost the complete opposite and not enough people seem to realize this. Spending top $ on a quarterback will almost always make it so that you have to leave points on the table for your running backs and wide receivers. When you also factor in that a lot of quarterbacks are under priced, it makes it even easier to see. Blake Bortles for example was criminally under priced for almost the entire season, averaging 22 Draftkings points per game over the course of the year. Tom Brady on the other hand averaged just over 23 points per game, yet was just about $3,000 more expensive then Bortles each week.
By “sacrificing” that one measly point on the quarterback position, you gained an extra $3,000 in your budget that you could use to upgrade your running backs and wide receivers. This could realistically have allowed you to upgrade in week 17 from Donte Moncrief ($6,100) to Antonio Brown ($9,100). Familiarize yourself with defenses rankings vs. the pass and try and find a quarterback that is in a good spot to succeed for that given week.
Next: Hidden Gems and How to find Them
While knowing how to budget your lineups is very important, there was nothing that helped me more than discovering advanced statistics for NFL defenses. Stats such as “defenses ranking vs #1 wide receivers” and “defenses rankings vs running backs out of the backfield” are invaluable when finding bargains and stars alike that you want in your lineup. You can find these statistics with a simple google search, (though I would recommend football outsiders) and I found that they almost always predicted who would have a monster game. Week 17 for example I needed to find a bargain at wide receiver so that I could include Antonio Brown in my lineup.
When I went over to football outsiders I saw that the New England Patriots ranked dead last in the NFL at defending #2 Wide Receivers. The Patriots happened to be playing the Dolphins that week and DeVante Parker, (The Dolphins #2 wr) was only $4,100 on Draftkings. My 2% owned Parker went for 5 catches, 106 yards, and a touchdown and helped me score another successful week. While the average fan thinks that this was a random good game from a cheap player, you now know that it all makes sense because of the advanced statistics. There were countless other times I discovered a player using this method and it is the most important piece of advice I could give to someone who wants to win more money on Draftkings. TRUST.THE.STATISTICS.
Next: Responsible Money Management
While going on a winning streak is nice in any daily fantasy sports game, you have to remember that even the best players have losing weeks and because of this you need to budget your bankroll. A nasty pattern that I see players get into is they have a couple of good weeks in a row and think they can’t lose. The next week, instead of your usual $50, you put in $150 and wait for the money to start rolling in, unfortunately your star running back breaks his leg in the first quarter and you lose almost all of the money you’ve accumulated over the past two weeks.
Even though I ended up winning 10 consecutive weeks on Draftkings, not once did i change the $300 weekly budget I set for myself.
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I would play a lot of smaller 50/50’s and enter one lineup into the millionaire maker just in case I had a monster week. On weeks I cashed in the GPP I would cash out with over $600 and on the weeks I didn’t I would finish around $530. While the almost $3,000 in profit I made is certainly nothing to turn down, it would’ve been easy to get cocky and put in much more than my $300 budget. However I know that as much research as I put into dfs, at the end of the day nothing is a guarantee.
While everyone has different bankrolls, I would advise you to set a limit for yourself each week that you feel comfortable with regardless of how many wins in a row you stitch together. It keeps you grounded and takes a lot of the stress away from playing dfs knowing that even if you lose a week, its an amount you feel comfortable with.
NEVER BET MONEY THAT YOU DON’T HAVE.
Next: Early Fantasy Football Rankings
Even if you have money to spend, never play with an amount that makes you terrified to watch the games, it takes the fun out’ve playing dfs.
This certainly won’t be the last article you’ll see from myself this upcoming football season and I wish you the best of luck this NFL season.