LineStar NFL Takeaway - Week 5: Was I right? Let's DO THE MATH.

📝 @zeroinDenver 🎯

Welcome back, everyone. Again, it's your dude, ZeroInDenver, here to try and bring some insight into NFL DFS contests. If you're new, this is where I do some analysis on NFL DFS contests and do analysis on what might work and what might not in terms of strategy and lineup construction.

At this point, let's take a look at the strategies I've mentioned before and see how well that would have applied in Week 5.

About the Contest

We're going back to the DraftKings Milly Maker this week. The difference is that I'm only going to look at lineups that placed 2,550th or better. These lineups would have won $100 or more.

In week 5, the top score in this contest was 260.84 points and the score needed to min-cash was 161.72.

Strategy

Stacks

This shouldn't be a surprise, but stacking is important in NFL DFS. As you can see here, all but 140 of the top 2,550 lineups used some sort of QB+WR/TE/RB stack

I also mentioned "running it back" (including a player from the opposite team as your QB) as a popular strategy. Again, it doesn't look like something you absolutely need to do. Many lineups did not "run it back".

Afternoon Hammers

Maybe I'm a fish, but I keep putting emphasis of afternoon players in my lineups. For what it's worth, lineups in the top 2,550 positions averaged at least 2 afternoon players. In the top 10 lineups, 6 lineups had at least 2 players.

Punt and Pray DST

Is punting (picking a cheap) DST and hoping for the best a viable strategy? Still appears so. As you can see, no one in the top 20 spent more than $3000 on DST with $2580.

Ownership

Below, I've done a comparison of ownership between the top 2,550 entries and all entries overall. Alexander Mattison was the top owned player overall, but was owned almost 67% in the top 2,550 entries.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I don't think you can blindly fade the top projected owned players.

Here are the top 20 lineups in the Milly Maker. You can see that for the most part, lineups have 2 higher-owned players, and the rest are 15% or less.

Projections

I'm going to drop one last gem here. If you're playing the highest projected lineup from the lineup builder, you're doing it wrong.

Here's the top 20 lineups again, but this time, I'm looking at how they look using LineStar projections. I've also summed them and provided a percentile ranking. Of those top 20 lineups, the average percentile of the lineup's summed projection was 42%. That meant that on average, 58% of all lineups projected better. That's why I will generally build more lineups than I need and delete the top 10% of the highest projected lineups.

At the same time, don't get it twisted. You can't simply pick a gang of players projected under 10 points each and expect to ship. In fact, here's a look at the average minimum projection in these lineups.

Of course, you can use the builder settings to set a minimum projection, but keep in mind that most DST will fall under 8 points, for example. What I like to do is raise the projection of the DST that I want to use above 8 points, so the builder will use them.

So to summarize, these are strategies that seem to work, that I employ in my builds

• Stack, but not too heavy

• Include players from afternoon games

• Punt DST

• Mix high-owned players with lower-owned players

• Don't play the highest projected lineups

EZZZZZ GAME. EZZZZZZZZ LIFE.

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!