Daily Fantasy Strategy: Seattle Stack Scores Big In Week 7

This is the eighth installment in David’s diary about playing one-day fantasy football for the first time. All other posts are listed in this blog section.

I’ve been entering a handful of lineups in large tournaments each week, hoping for a big payday. This week, I finally got one.

I entered eight lineups in a $1 entry, 4,597-person tournament: my two top head-to-head lineups, plus six 3-player stacks on six different teams. One of those stacks hit gloriously, and I ended up finishing in 3rd place, good for a $150 payday.

Not bad for a $1 entry fee.

OK, really $8 in fees, but who’s counting?

Oh right, I am.

Week 7 Results Recap

  • Initial Bankroll: $250
  • Bankroll Entering Week 7: $273.94
  • H2H & 50/50 Entry Fees: $42 (15.3% of bankroll)
  • H2H & 50/50 Net Winnings: +$31.60 (+75% ROI)
  • Tournament Entry Fees: $12 (4.4% of bankroll)
  • Tournament Net Winnings: +$149.50 (+1246% ROI)
  • Total Entry Fees: $54 (19.7% of bankroll)
  • Total Net Winnings: +$181.10 (+335% ROI)
  • Bonuses+$2.16
  • Bankroll After Week 7: $457.20

I’ve been posting tables and screencaps of all my contests. But with 54 entries this week, that’s a little ridiculous. So I’m leaving off the head-to-head contests, and I’ll just show you the tournaments and 50/50’s, with the most exciting result highlighted.

[click to enlarge]

FanDuel tournament winnings

The TeamRankings Private Tournament

As I do every week, I also entered the TeamRankings private tournament (more info here) using the screen name teamrankings, as opposed to my personal account, tr_david.

Unlike last week, I remembered to update the lineup on Sunday with my top 50/50 lineup. And, thankfully, it was back to our winning ways, as we finished in 20th out of 185 entries.

Lineup Notes

Here are links to each of my lineups, with a few notes.

Main Head-to-Head and 50/50 Lineup
(129.42 pts, 16-3 H2H, 2 for 2 in 50/50’s, cashed in 3 of 3 tournaments, net +$18.90 on $24 in entry fees)

I haven’t wavered on my head-to-head strategy. I’m still starting with QB and RB, and working from there, and trying not to spend too much on wide receiver.

This lineup featured Joe Flacco at QB (he ok, i’seemed like the safest not-quite-elite QB choice), Arian Foster and Le’Veon Bell at RB, and (once again) Team-Playing-The-Jaguars at DEF.

The Foster/Bell RB pairing is notable for two reasons:

  1. As I’ve mentioned in the past, pairing two RB’s facing each other is supposedly a way to reduce variance and raise your floor. If one of the teams gets out to a big lead, that RB should get a ton of carries, even as the other one gets ignored in favor of a heavy reliance on the passing game.
  2. This pairing was in the Monday Night game. It was fun to watch this lineup climb up the tournament rankings, and rack up head-to-head wins, as the night progressed.

One value WR in this lineup hit big — Golden Tate (remember that name for later).

Second Head-to-Head and 50/50 Lineup
(125.2 pts, 17-2 H2H, 2 for 2 in 50/50’s, cashed in 2 of 3 tournaments, net +$15.70 on $24 in entry fees)

I was originally planning on weighting my entries more heavily towards my first lineup. But leading up to kickoff time on Sunday, I saw reports of strong wind gusts in Baltimore, and I got worried about riding Joe Flacco so heavily on a windy day. So I switched some of my head-to-head lineups in order to use this secondary lineup in as many contests as the first one. They scored almost the same number of points, so it didn’t end up making much difference.

This second lineup featured Aaron Rodgers at QB (projected as the best elite QB choice), DeMarco Murray and Jamaal Charles at RB, and a big ol’ goose egg from the Seattle DEF.

One value WR in this lineup hit big — Doug Baldwin (remember that name for later).

Tournament Lineups

I entered six 3-player-stack lineups (plus the two above lineups) in a large $1 tournament (4,597 entries), in the hopes that one would hit for a decent payout.

Boy, did that work out well. Four of the eight cashed — three for $2.50, and one for $150.

I’ll go into a bit more detail on my tournament strategy below, but here are the main ideas for each lineup, which I then tried to fill in around with solid values:

Tournament Strategy

I’ve reviewed my head-to-head and 50/50 strategy in depth in the past (see the Lineup Notes here, or the discussion of the historical data underpinning the strategy here), but haven’t spent much time on my big tournament strategy. After the big cash this week, it seems like the appropriate time to go into a bit more detail on that.

Here’s my method from the past few weeks:

1. Identify several teams to stack on.

In past weeks I’ve done this by using the quarterback projections from RotoWire and numberFire, and trying to find the best value QB’s. However, in reviewing the winners of big tournaments I’ve entered, and in looking at the optimal lineup each week (which FanDuel emails out every Tuesday), I noticed that the value QBs didn’t tend to show up — it has basically been Manning, Luck, or whoever was facing a defense that was terrible against the pass.

So this week, for my six big-tournament lineups, I entered a couple stacks based on taking advantage of teams that had done the worst against the pass so far this season, as determined by RotoGuru’s FanDuel scoring archive, and a couple based on the projected highest scoring quarterbacks, regardless of value.

2. For each stack, pick 2 players to pair with the QB

For each stack I looked at player projections from RotoWire and numberFire, the opponent’s FanDuel points allowed by position, injury reports, and Football Outsiders defense vs. wide receiver type to try to come up with two players that seemed like the best bets to go off (or to be great values) if the QB had a good day.

For example, I paired Randall Cobb and Jordy Nelson with Aaron Rodgers. That one was obvious.

With Russell Wilson, I grabbed a couple of super value plays — Doug Baldwin (undervalued receiver) and Cooper Helfet (backup tight end forced into action by injuries against a defense that had allowed tons of points to tight ends). This ended up working beautifully. The cheap stack allowed me to combine it with a couple stud running backs. Both the stack and those studs hit, and I got modest production from the other spots, which was good enough for 3rd place.

3. Let RotoWire optimize the rest of the lineup … with some manual tweaks from me.

I locked in my stack, then let RotoWire optimize the lineup. Then I removed players that numberFire didn’t agree were in for a good day, or who were going against defenses that had been very good against their particular position, and re-optimized. I kept repeating that until I ended up with a bunch of players that all sources seemed to agree were good plays.

I also knocked out some players that seemed like good plays, but who I had used in a lot of lineups already, to try to get a bit of diversity across my lineups. This actually ended up costing me — if I had simply used either of my top two kicker picks for the day (Shane Graham and Shawn Suisham) instead of Robbie Gould on my SEA stack, I’d have finished in 1st place for a $400 payout.

You live, you learn.

(By the way, whether you’re into daily fantasy or just a newbie, make sure you get into our weekly private tournament on FanDuel for TeamRankings users. It’s fun to play and we kick in lots of extra prizes.)