Fansided

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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(Photo illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images) /

NFL Fantasy Football: NFL DFS on FanDuel

So I guess I was living in the past? Apparently, the kicker position is no longer in play even on FanDuel, as they added the flex last season and it seems like it was just last year we had it. Upon further review though, I can now remember wishing we had it back at times to separate some of the chalk out of cash games.

If you have made it this far in the article, chances are we are finally getting to the sites you have heard of or possibly already play. FanDuel was and I guess is still the upper echelon in Daily Fantasy Sports, and while I still play there quite a bit for PGA DFS and plan to play NFL there as well this season, the overall experience is fairly lackluster.

Roster Construction and Scoring

It is sort of confusing, but if you go to the FanDuel scoring rules page, it is not yet updated, and kickers scoring is still listed. However, in their NFL Training Guide, it shows that they did indeed remove the kicker last year, and added the FLEX spot.

When it is all said and done, my belief is that kickers should not be a part of DFS. While obviously important to real football, it is a fair argument that the kicker position is impossible to predict fantasy-wise, and therefore makes it more gambling and less skill.

Contests

Being the original DFS site and launching shortly before DraftKings did, FanDuel at one point had the largest payouts and contests in the industry. Times have changed, and it is pretty clear over the last few years that more casual players that have played on both DraftKings and FanDuel have either completely moved to DraftKings, or still play both.

There will be no shortage of contests of all buy-in levels and formats. However, I would take a good look at the payout structure of those GPP tournaments that boast a huge payout for first place. In my opinion, this is everything that is wrong with DFS, in a sense that yeah we are all trying to win first place, but what if you beat 21,000 people for 6th place, and win less than 1% of the total prize pool?

It sounds crazy, but I am using a $5.55 buy-in MLB tournament as an example. $100,000 prize pool, $20,000 for first place, and $600 for 6th place. Even the drop from first to second place is like a nightmare, in my opinion, dropping from $20,000 to $7,500. These tournaments fill every day, and they will continue to. I expect to see more of the same in this NFL season.

Remember, you can play those big tournaments and chase that big payday, I still do. But there are other options. Any tournament that is single-entry is as fair as it gets, and FanDuel will have plenty of GPP’s that may not pay out as great but will give you a better chance to win, as opposed to the shark in that million-dollar tournament with 150 entries.

Rake

This intention of this article is not to discredit any of these companies, I need to make that clear I think before I proceed. Regardless of the facts, I will present to you about the current rake we are paying for NFL Fantasy Football contests on FanDuel, I still play on all of these sites regularly, and understand the ins-and-outs of where my money is going.

First of all, you can forget rake-free anything on FanDuel, H2H contests included. On top of that, you will currently not only find the worst payout structures as explained above, you will also have almost 20% of the prize pool taken off of the top. With an average rake of 19% per large field GPP, nobody makes more money off of each contest in the industry than FanDuel. However, they have plenty of loyal customers, and a great interface, along with an easy to use product.