Daily Fantasy Sports 101

In this article, I’ll cover what exactly Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) are. I’ll be digging into how DFS works and different types of contests and tournaments. Additionally, I’ll be covering strategies for different types of contests and how you can better understand them.

Ever get tired of season-ending injuries on your fantasy teams? Not a fan of hitting the waiver wires or making trades? Do you really love drafting? If all of these things are true, you should check out Daily Fantasy Sports. Daily Fantasy Sports, or DFS, is a fantasy sports game played in shorter intervals, with most contests completed in one day. Players compete against each other by building a roster of professional or college players while remaining under a salary cap with fantasy scores based on the statistical performance of players’ real-world games.

How DFS Works

Each player is assigned a salary for each slate, and you must select the number of players required to stay under the salary cap for every lineup you create. Each sport has different roster requirements you must build around. For example, football requires one quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, one flex position, and team defense/special teams. Much similar to your traditional fantasy football leagues.

Furthermore, the roster construction is different for each platform and each has a maximum amount of players used from the same team. The scoring rules also vary from site to site, so make sure to review them before making your lineups. The scoring can change your projections, and even if it is just a couple of points, it is well worth the time to ensure you have all the correct information.

Each player is locked into your lineup at the individually selected game time, but you can still make changes to those who have not started. This feature is called late swap and is very useful as important news can break at any point and changing your lineup can give you a big edge on your opponents.

DFS Contest Selection

There are two main contest styles in the daily fantasy sports world: cash games and tournaments.

Cash Games

Cash games are meant to be safer contest styles that pay out more people. These contests are used to build your bankroll. In cash game contests, roughly half of the entrants in the contest will make a profit. The minimum score to cash is often lower in these style contests making it easier to build your bankroll.

50/50s

These are cash games where exactly 50% of contestants will be in the money. If you are in the top 50% you will make slightly less than double your entry fee after the host site takes its cut.

Multipliers

These are a variety of different cash games in which you get a certain multiplier of your entry fee. Common multiplier contests include double-ups, triple-ups, and quintuple-ups. These contests pay out the multiplier you enter but pay out less than 50% of the field in order for the websites to take their cut.

Head-to-Head

Head-to-head contests are cash games that involve competing against one person. While these contests are considered cash games, they have a really high variance as the winning score can be all over the place. For head-to-head contests, you can get paired up with new players, experienced players, and even professionals. When playing head-to-head contests pay attention to experience levels so you do not get matched up with much more experienced players. These can be a nice bankroll builder if you search for newer, less experienced players.

DFS Tournament Types

Guaranteed Prize Pool (GPP):

These contests are guaranteed to run even if they do not fill. Tournaments are a more risky form of DFS but offer much larger payouts. If they do not fill you get an overlay, which means you have a better chance to make money because not as many people are in the contest. Tournaments contests are riskier because they only pay out about 20% of the field. As a result, the lineup score to make a minimum profit is much higher for these contests over cash games as less of the field is paid out. However, they offer large prizes to the top finishers of the contest and some contests offer $1,000,000 to the winner. Within the tournament section, there are several different options for you to play.

Single Entry:

This tournament type allows for only one entry per person. This is appealing because you will not have to spend a huge chunk of your bankroll in order to compete with some of the people who enter a lot of lineups.

Mass Multi-Entry (MME):

These tournaments are where entrants can enter a pre-determined number of lineups, most of the larger tournaments will be 150 max entries per person. And no, most people do not hand-build that many lineups. If you are entering 150 lineups, you are going to want an optimizer.

An optimizer is a tool that builds the set amount of lineups you ask for given a set of projections you or a service assigns to each player. It provides lineups that are projected highly but differentiates itself with each lineup it makes. Each DFS site provides you with a template for uploading this many lineups, meaning you do not have to type out 150 different combinations, but rather just copy, paste, and upload.

Types of DFS Slates

After figuring out your contest selection, you can now decide what type of slate you would like to play. There are a few options you can choose from whether it be main slate, mini slates, or even single-game contests. The main slate is where DFS sites put their larger contests and it includes all of the games for the given date. The mini slates occur when sites choose a smaller portion of the day for their contests.

For NFL contests, a good example of these are the 1:00 PM only game slates, in which you are only allowed to choose players from the 1:00 PM games. Single-game contests are comprised of just one game with a format different from your traditional lineups. Furthermore, in single-game contests, you have a smaller roster usually five or six players. There are no set positional requirements and each player is labeled as flex.

Another big difference is one player has a 1.5 multiplier, meaning if they score 10 fantasy points they get credited for 15 if they are in the multiplier spot. The single-game contest has become extremely popular and makes the primetime games even more exciting to watch.

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