The idea behind my process is simple, “more lineups are better than fewer lineups”. Lower entry fee contests generally have weaker competition and I believe that, over time, with more lineups, we can reduce our variance and actually see very consistent gains while still having opportunities for massive upside nights.
As you can see from my results from last year, “cash games” were not my cash game results were not great. Early on in 2019 I decided to go with a predominantly GPP approach to DFS as I’ve never been a great “cash game grinder” and that decision helped me have the best DFS year of my career.
I like to use 401k investing as an example. You would never put all of your retirement savings on the back of 1 stock, or 1 lineup. You would be much better served to spread out your risk and diversify your portfolio as much as possible. For example, If we’re playing $20 dollars, it’s better to play 20 lineups in the $1.00 dollar 20 max contest rather than playing one entry in a $20 single entry tourney.
Contest Selection is Key
Before we get started, I want you to download the RotoGrinders Chrome Browser Extensions for Fanduel and Draftkings. These extensions will allow you to see the Margain and Payout Percentages for every contest on both sites. Pay attention to the type of Tournaments you’re entering. Most of these tourneys have awful payout structures these days, but, some are much worse than others.
Above we see the Fanduel 25 max $2.22 tournament with a pretty solid payout structure where 10% of the total prize pool goes to 1st place, and then 22.2% goes to the Top 10. This is one of the better payouts on the site and doesn’t cost too much to max each day. This tourney pays out $5,000 to 1st most days and would be a real nice bankroll booster if we could take it down one day.
This contest is the big 150 max $7.77 contest on Fanduel. As you can see the payout is MUCH more top-heavy here and a whopping 25% of the prize pool goes to 1st place, and a ridiculous 39% of the prize pool goes to the Top 10. You will be hard-pressed to make money in this tourney long term unless you take the whole thing down one day. Even if you’re a full-time MME player like myself, I wouldn’t put too much of my bankroll into Tourneys with payouts this bad very often.
Bankroll Management and Contest Selection are even more important than picking the “right players” each day. Kevin aka “The Geek” has a great article discussing this even further so make sure you check out the Geek’s Bankroll Management and Contest Selection Article here.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, lets get into the process I use each day.
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My MME Process from start to finish
Every day of the NBA season is unique but I try to keep my process the same day in and day out. My goal is to remove as much of my own personal bias as possible day to day and rely strictly on the numbers from the NBA Research Station. The number I lean on more than anything else in the RS is the AND1 Rating. The rating was developed by Ben Jammin @xBenJamminx and is apart of our NBA Research Station. The rating is an all-encompassing metric that will lead you to the best plays on each slate each day.
Step 1 – Sort the RS or DS
Sort so that the highest-rated AND1 scores are shown Highest to Lowest
Step 2 – Use the ADORE feature on the Domination Station
By using the ADORE feature I Increase the projection for the Top 5 players at each Position by 15%. I like to use the Top 5 as a general rule, but, on smaller slates, 5 games or less, I drop it to Top 3 usually.
By using the ADORE 😍 feature on these players, we increase their projections by 15%. This alone will cause these players to show up more frequently in our lineups than if we did not use the Adore feature.
NOTE – here is a point where you can add some of your own Personal Bias if you chose to do so. If you really like a player that is not showing up in the Top5 AND1 at his position, you can ADORE him anyway. I am simply giving you a basic foundation in which you can build your own process from here. Don’t think of this as an “end all be all” strategy that works all the time for everyone.
If you’ve read the Coaches Notes and you see we have someone marked as CORE, but, they aren’t in the Top5 AND1 at their position, feel free to ADORE them. Remember, I’m just trying to get you started, you can tweak this process however you see fit and combine our other tools here if you’d like.
Step 3 – DS Settings
After I’ve used the Adore feature on the players with the highest AND1 ratings, I get my Settings set up in the Domination Station.
This is the general baseline I use each day, and I’ll tweak this based on the slate size.
150 lineups
– these settings work fine for 20 lineups as well
2-4 unique players
– you can run anywhere from 2 to 4 unique players depending on the slate size. For smaller slates you want fewer Uniques because there are fewer players are in the pool
50-70% global max exposure on all players
– I don’t want any single-player more than 70%, usually, I end up having multiple players at 70% owned and that becomes my “core” that day
5-10% randomness
– this gives me some diversification in my lineups, I wouldn’t go any higher than 10% for NBA
Tournament Mode (not optimal mode)
– this helps distribute players better throughout the 150 lineups in your build
Step 4 – Run and Review
Now that we’ve got our settings all plugged in, we run the Domination Station and we review our build.
Here we’re looking at our Ownership of the players, vs the Expected Ownership of the player on this slate. We want to figure out where to get leverage on the field here by going overweight or underweight vs the field on a player or a group of players. Sometimes, being different in one aspect of your build can lead to the majority of your lineups being just different enough from the field to separate you from the pack.
For example, on this 1/16/20 slate, Monte Morris is mega chalk (35% owned) and priced at only $4,000, and starting for injured Jamal Murray. We’re projecting him to be 35% owned and our initial run here gave us 56% of him. We see that he’s only paid off this price at 6x 22% of the time this season, so, there are few ways you can approach a situation like this. (1) you can go all in and increase his projection slightly to try and get him to your 70% max exposure, or, (2) you could decide to go 1/2 the field ownership on him, by setting his “max” exposure at 17% or (3) you could leave him right where he is since you believe he’ll go well over 6x today given the injury situation on his team.
These are the decisions you’ll need to make slate to slate to gain your edge vs the field. Is Monte Morris worth being owned in 56% of your lineups? Priced at just $4,000 you would like to believe that he would pay that price off more times than not, but will he pay it off enough to help you win tournaments? You also know the rest of the field is thinking that same thing. For me, seeing that he’s only paid off this price at a 6x value 22% of the time, I think he is a good fade candidate. If you decide to fade him, your lineups will surely be different from the field and you could have a huge leg up on everyone should Morris fail.
Wrap it up
Alex “Awesemo” Baker (the #1 DFS player in the world) had a great quote in a recent article he wrote.
Hopefully that all makes sense. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me in the VIP Chat at any time. I’ll leave you with the Top3 And1 players below at each position. Be sure to check on these closer to lock as well, as these change when news breaks later in the day.
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