LineStar NFL Takeaway - Week 3: The Afternoon Hammer

📝 @zeroinDenver 🎯

Welcome back, everyone. Again, it's your dude, ZeroInDenver, here to try and bring some insight into NFL DFS contests. In the last couple of weeks, we explored stacking and ownership. This week, I want to continue along the path of trying to figure out how we should be building lineups.

About the Contest

Looking at a single-entry contest this week, the $75K Pylon on DraftKings. The entry fee on this contest is $3 with the opportunity to win $4000 for placing first. It's a large field with 28,166 total entries and it pays out the top 7,720 positions (top 25%).

In week 3, the top score in this contest was 213.92 points and the score needed to min-cash was 145.08. (Comparatively, the top score in the Milly Maker was 223.92 and the score needed to min-cash was 146.92)

Strategy

This is always my favorite part. I love trying to answer questions we see in chat with real data from actual contests.

Something that I've been wondering a lot lately is "should I be putting some focus in my lineups towards players in the afternoon slate?" Maybe you've had a similar experience as me. During the early games, my lineups are triple fire, but as the afternoon games get underway, I see my riches start slipping away.

I did the math. Here are the average number of players (non-DST) from the afternoon slate in lineups in this contest.

On average, most lineups used 2-3 players from afternoon games, and most lineups that did really well used 3-4 players from the afternoon games.

That makes sense as 3 of the 4 afternoon games had over/unders of 45 or more points.

The challenge becomes, how can we do this within the LineStar tools?

Right now, there's no way to force a specific number of players from afternoon games, but here are some techniques I used:

• "Love" or increase projections of players in afternoon games. For example, I increased projections of THE GREAT HUNTER RENFROW.

• Manually put player(s) into the builder and let the optimizer build around that (shown below)

• Manually look through your lineups and swap as necessary.

Ownership

I'm going to keep coming back to ownership because I think it's so important in DFS and is absolutely misunderstood by most players. Let's start by looking at the top owned players (ignoring DST) in this contest:

Most of this list shouldn't be a surprise. If it is, I'd recommend sorting by "Loved" in the LineStar app. It's not a perfect measure of ownership, but it can give you a solid look at where the LineStar community was leaning:

Here's where this gets interesting.

Cooper Kupp as the top-owned player on the slate shouldn't have been a surprise. We knew that was going to happen. But what was the move? If your gut instinct is to FADEEEEEEEEE, you might want to reconsider.

Have a look at the WRs used in the top 10 lineups in this contest. Cooper Kupp was used in 8 of the 10 lineups.

The winning lineup didn't have Kupp. On one hand, you could argue that you didn't need Kupp, but you could still land 2nd place with him.

I find this interesting as well. Here's a look at what the average highest owned player (and lowest owned player) was owned at for all entries, only those entries that cashed, and the entries that finished in the top 100.

To me, it's about ownership across the lineup. I'm not going to shy away from a higher-owned player, but I'm going to balance it with some lower owned plays.

Let's face it, "chalk" is "chalk" for a reason. Sometimes "chalk" or favorite plays do well.

Just like last week, here's a look at what summed ownership looks like for the top 20 in that contest.

Last week, we saw more lower percentile ownership lineups do well. In week 3, some really low-owned lineups did well, but some chalky lineups did really well too.

So pick your narrative. You can win with low-owned lineups. You can win with higher-owned lineups.

But be careful. Here are the highest-owned lineups. You can see the majority cashed, but they were also duplicated. For me, higher-owned lineups make more sense in cash games (but always toss into a GPP just in case).

Again, thanks for taking the time to read. If you find this useful, please let me know.

Also, I don't have all the DFS answers. I'm trying to learn, just like you. So if something looks off, doesn't make sense, or you have a better idea, please let me know.

Thanks again for reading and I'll be back next week!