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NFL Fantasy Football: Where should you play NFL DFS? An Unbiased Perspective

By Chris Aliperto

CHICAGO, IL - OCTOBER 16: The fantasy sports website DraftKings is shown on October 16, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. DraftKings and its rival FanDuel have been under scrutiny after accusations surfaced of employees participating in the contests with insider information. An employee recently finished second in a contest on FanDuel, winning $350,000. Nevada recently banned the sites. (Photo illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
CHICAGO, IL - OCTOBER 16: The fantasy sports website DraftKings is shown on October 16, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. DraftKings and its rival FanDuel have been under scrutiny after accusations surfaced of employees participating in the contests with insider information. An employee recently finished second in a contest on FanDuel, winning $350,000. Nevada recently banned the sites. (Photo illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images) /
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NFL Fantasy Football
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 30: Football quarterback Sam Darnold and Yahoo Fantasy Analyst Liz Loza appear at the 2019 Verizon Media NewFront on April 30, 2019, in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Verizon Media) /

NFL Fantasy Football: NFL DFS on Yahoo Fantasy

Yahoo Cup

I think the appropriate place to start with Yahoo here would be the Yahoo Cup. Believe it or not, I still play season-long fantasy sports with folks on Yahoo who have still never clicked that Daily Fantasy Sports button, so if that sounds like you, my advice would be to get in on the action, and join the Yahoo Cup for your shot at $150,000 in prizes over the course of the season, all for free.

I have done the Yahoo Cup for every sport since it has been offered, and the time invested is paying off for PGA for me this year. It is a way smaller prize pool than NFL at just $50,000, but I am currently in 30th place out of 42,671 entrants and am set to win a decent chunk of change, all on freerolls throughout the entire season.

For a quick link to the NFL Yahoo Cup, click here.

Rake – Management Fees

As it stands right now, Yahoo is charging you much less than anywhere else to play DFS, and it sort of is their modus operandi. Other sites make you calculate the rake if you are truly interested in knowing how much each site makes off of each contest, and you should be if you play any sort of volume that you feel is important to you. Every GPP tournament in the Yahoo lobby will post the management fee right there for you to see, and it is substantially lower than what you are playing per contest on FanDuel and DraftKings.

On top of the low rake, Yahoo also has a pretty strict max-entry policy. Their highest paying contests are almost always a 10-max entry, which evens the playing field tremendously if you are making multiple lineups. For PGA and MLB, Yahoo is offering completely rake-free tournaments with a capped number of total entries, and I expect they will do this for NFL DFS as well.

Get in these early before they fill, because if the PGA ones are filling up as fast as they do, the NFL ones will not be in the lobby long. The GPP that I have maxed every week since it has been offered has been the $3.00, 10-max entry per person, with a cap of 1500 entries. You will not get rich off a tournament like that, but having the full $4,500 worth of entries in the prize pool, instead of Yahoo taking 10-15% of it, makes it much more enticing to me.

H2H Quick-Match

My last point of interest is here on Yahoo is the head-to-head Quick-Match feature. these are without a doubt the most evenly balanced contests in the industry, as you simply click your dollar amount, import your lineup, and await your opponent to be assigned to based on your Quick-Match history and ranking.

If you have a bad week or two, at least you will be paired against others who have likely had the same luck. Five H2H Quick-Matches will be available per slate is my guess, and you are allowed one at each buy-in level. The buy-in amounts are $1, $2, $5, $10 and $25, and all are also completely rake-free.

Summary

If you are completely new to Yahoo NFL Fantasy Football on the DFS side, my advice would be to start with the no veterans contests. If you know your stuff, you should be able to do really well in those. If you prefer the higher buy-in’s and the shot at the bigger paydays, you will only pay around 12% on average for rake.

For details on DFS scoring and roster construction for NFL Fantasy Football on Yahoo, this link will take you there, as I seemed to have rambled a little more about the features I like here than I had planned. Scoring is similar to FanDuel in a sense that is also a .5 PPR format. Click below to proceed to find out if Fantasy Draft might be more your style.