Have you ever finished a tournament with an extremely high score and wondered how well you would have done in the high-level buy-in contests? Most people will check on some of these high priced tournaments (GPP) and tell their friends and the Twitter universe that they would have won “X” amount of money if they had only entered that contest. What most people fail to contemplate is if they would actually have played that lineup if they had to put $333 or more on the line just to be in the tournament. I know I construct different GPP lineups for a $1 tournament than I do a $25 contest. I also know that in the higher priced contest that there are fewer people you have to beat. The strategy to beat 50-300 people is much different than trying to beat 20,000 other lineups. This article will break down the winning lineups in these shark infested contests and hopefully allow us to learn something from the pros on how to construct and attack a GPP.
Welcome to Shark School, let’s get to work.
This first contest is a familiar contest that we all have heard of and know that the sharks play, the MLB Monster on Fanduel. This one took place on Sunday, May 28th and the prize breakdown is as follows:
The second tournament we are going to study is a tournament that one of our very own staff members took down earlier this week. The $1.5M WFBC Qualifier #44 (Chicago Trip + WFBC Seat) has a prize package breakdown as follows:
Winning one of these seats is an enormous deal as it puts you on the map and allows you to play against less than one-hundred people for one million dollars. What an incredible opportunity. Now the reason I showed you the payout structure for both tournaments is that they were won by the same person, tinderella, with the same lineup. They were both won in an exciting fashion as a couple 15th inning home runs moved him up in the standings and enabled him to take down both tournaments. Here is his lineup:
This Shark School lesson is an important reminder that when you’re watching your lineups that you are never out of contention. It also is a stark reminder for anybody who thought they were sitting pretty in the standings that you’re never safe either. A three-man Tampa stack was doing well, but not amazing, until the top of the 15th when Longoria and Morrison blasted a couple solo shots. Can you imagine the roller coaster of emotions “tinderella” and other pros must have been feeling, both good and bad when those home runs made it to the bleachers? Heck, I was elated just following along in the standings while I was preparing to write this article.
Let’s take a quick look at the roster construction that took down two tournaments. It’s a good lineup to review and will be a nice reminder that you can take the highest owned pitcher and still win everything under the sun. Usually when someone pays up for a pitcher like that they either started with the pitcher first or built the rest of their lineup with the thought in mind to save a bunch of money for the high-priced arm. Assuming Lance McCullers Jr. was a lock for “tinderella”, he went with a couple team stacks between the Rays and the Reds. He did a great job selecting the Tampa bats with home run upside. His Reds bats were solid and he made sure he had Adam Duvall who has insane upside. He was able to grab these high priced bats and McCullers Jr. because of taking the 7th batter in the Reds lineup, Patrick Kivlehan. Sometimes a low-owned player in a team stack who’s really inexpensive pays off, more often than not they don’t. Sunday, it paid off in spades.
No matter what, no matter how many innings are left, no matter how many people you have still remaining, until the final game is completely over your positioning is never set in stone. Baseball is weird like that. It’s the sport with the most variance that Daily Fantasy Sports has to offer. You can legitimately be near the bottom of the standings and thirty minutes later be near the top of the same contest. Home runs, steals, strikeouts, quality starts, and opposing teams pitchers getting rocked and losing points can all shoot you up the standings incredibly fast. Stay positive and never count yourself out because on any given night you could have submitted a tournament winner that doesn’t take down the contest until the 15th inning.
Lastly, I implore you, no – I challenge you, to do your best not to get caught up in the, “if only I had entered it there” mindset. That is a really negative way to play DFS MLB and not very healthy for your long term psyche. Staying positive and being able to celebrate your victories is imperative to be able to outlast the rest over the course of the six-month MLB season. There are enormous peaks and devastating valleys along the way and staying in the right mindset is the only way to traverse the terrain. When building your lineups do your best to think and play like a shark. Don’t fear that your lineup could bottom out. If it does, so what, you didn’t double your GPP entry for the day, big deal! Our goal should be to take one down and then move up to the next buy-in level, not forever stay doubling the $1 GPP investment, which we know after looking at this article is much harder than at the higher levels. The faster we can move up the ladder and play at the higher buy-ins the more success we can potentially have.
I wish you the best of luck in your tournaments and on your journey to becoming a shark. You can find me on Twitter @DFSnDONUTS. I love to hear feedback or discuss DFS of any kind.