Hello again Army, and welcome to the Daytona 500 edition of Calming the Chaos! We’ve had all sorts of races here over the last few days, so hopefully the general idea of how to approach this monster race is in your mind, but if not, you’ve come to the right place. We have a lot of strategy to talk about, so let’s just dive right in!
As always, be sure to check out my driver list & tools suite and the coach’s cheat sheet. If you have any questions, reach out to me in Slack at #nillys-garage-nas-mlb and I’ll be happy to help however I can.
Daytona International Speedway
It’s more of the same here; nose-to-bumper racing for a bunch of laps, with the potential for half of the field to get wiped out in a moment’s notice at any given time. We all know this, so let’s get to the important stuff!
Weekend approach
If you’ve already look at my notes/cheat sheet, you may be asking yourself “well hell, he listed nearly every driver, how am I supposed to pick from that?!” Valid question! I did that for a reason, which we’ll get into here. The first thing we need to do is get into the right mindset of how to approach this race. I like to sum that up like this:
We’re not trying to predict who will or will not wreck, that’s virtually impossible. Rather, we’re trying to put ourselves in a position to take advantage of the good/bad luck drivers will face as the chaos unfolds.
There will be chaos…and plenty of it. It may run clean for a while, but eventually somebody will slip up and start a chain reaction, causing anywhere from a few cars to half of the field being wiped out in seconds. We don’t know when/where in the field that will happen, how the field will be set at that point in time, who will be taken out, how many times it will happen, etc. Since we don’t know these things, we don’t want to try and build around that stuff.
So, what do we know? For starters, as we’ve already covered, there will be chaos. We know that those drivers starting deeper in the field (say, 25th or worse) will naturally have a higher ceiling than those starting closer to the front. Unfortunately, this is not a secret, as others know to take advantage of this as well. So with this knowledge, we can conclude that:
- Generally speaking, drivers starting deeper in the field have a higher floor/ceiling than those starting closer to the front
- Generally speaking, drivers starting in the front of the field will have a lower floor/ceiling….unless they can lead a lot of laps
- Because of that, salary doesn’t hold much weight this week, as there can be winning lineups with upwards of $10,000 being left on the table
- Drivers starting in the middle/back of the field will have higher ownership
- Drivers starting in the front/middle of the field will have lower ownership
- We cannot point to any one driver and say “he’s guaranteed to crash/not crash”
All of this brings me to my next point; all things considered, at Daytona, quantity is more important than quality. I don’t recommend playing cash games here, and not really single entry GPP either (unless you’ve been around the block a few times and know what you’re doing). Rather, I would prefer to see people smash multi-entry contests with as many entries as possible. If that means you have to drop from a $10/lineup tournament down to a $3/lineup tournament in favor of having more lineups, so be it. If you normally spend $75 to enter a handful of various tournaments, I’d rather see you enter a 150-max tournament instead.
We know that our player pool will naturally favor drivers starting closer to the back. Everybody else’s pool will do the same, however. With that in mind, we can force in drivers with lower expected ownership that could still find their way into the winning lineup, should the race play into their favor (i.e. drivers in the mid-teens finishing in the top-5, a driver leading 100+ laps, etc). Let’s discuss the chalky approach first, and then we’ll get into how we can be different.
The chalky approach
Load up on drivers in the back and hope they survive the chaos. Easy enough! That’s easy to say, of course, but let’s talk about how we can make that happen in our lineups with the DS.
There are two basic ways to do this. First, you can simply bump up the projections of those drivers (the ones I listed as core and main plays) and let the DS naturally put them in.
The second, and more fun way, is to mark them all as “dominators” in the DS and create a rule to force them in. You can force in one, two, or however many you want, or even fade a few and hope you picked the right ones to fade, but chances are that a few of these chalky drivers will be in the winning lineup, so you don’t need to flat out fade them all trying to be too unique.
Fades aside, a good rule of thumb is to have plenty of exposure to all of the core/main drivers, as they represent those with the highest ceilings on the board.
Remember, you’re not looking at them to say “ok, I think Bowyer has a higher ceiling than Blaney, and my magic 8 ball tells me he’s less likely to crash, so I want more Bowyer!” You’re looking at them to say “ok, Bowyer and Blaney have the same ceiling, and both are just as likely to crash or finish in the top-10…but since they both start so deep, their ceilings are much higher than guys like Truex, so I want a bunch of exposure to Bowyer AND Blaney!”
This is all good and well, but simply doing this probably isn’t going to help you take down any tournaments. What will? Let’s get to that now.
Separating yourself from the field
The first thing we can do is to include the pivots, or the drivers listed as leverage plays. For the most part, they all have lower floors/ceilings than the core/main plays, but we’ll still need them to win. Now, that might not make much sense at first glance, but hear me out!
Let’s say the race plays out in favor of the chalk. “The Big One” happens and half the field gets wiped out, but 6 chalky drivers all go from 20+ into the top-8 and we see huge ties everywhere with massive scores and cash lines. Yikes!
In another scenario, we get a few wrecks here and there, and fortunately some of those chalky drivers are involved. This helps not only by eliminating chalk and knocking out some lineups, but it also lowers the bar on how high of a score the winning lineup will have! This is extremely important, because all the sudden the gap between the “medium ceiling” and “high ceiling” drivers has shrunken down, and people with more exposure to those “medium ceiling” drivers start separating themselves from people without them.
It won’t happen in one wreck, but the more wrecks there are (or wrecks with a higher number of chalk bombs in them), the more those “medium ceiling” drivers slowly turn into the new “high ceiling” drivers, simply by replacing them on the track. The race might start with a 400+ fantasy point ceiling, but as more and more of those “high ceiling” drivers head to the garage, the ceiling will drop to 375+…then 350+…maybe even low 300’s, which is easily attainable by the “medium ceiling” drivers. These are theoretical numbers, but you get my point.
Like I mentioned in the Bowyer/Blaney scenario earlier, remember that these pivots/leverage plays are all essentially the same. If you have two drivers starting next to each other, you can’t really point to one and say “that’s the one that WILL wreck, so I want the other one instead!” Instead, you want exposure to them both, because they could both be equally as important in making your lineups different than everybody else’s. Of course, you could flip a coin and fade one over the other, but that’s all it is…a coin flip and hoping you were correct.
Another way to be different would be to grab a dominator from the front. Stenhouse, Bowman, Logano, and Keselowski are the four most likely to be able to make that happen, but remember that they will need to lead somewhere around 75-100 (or more) laps and finish somewhere in the top-5 to be in the winning lineup. It’s absolutely possible, as Blaney has done it before, but it’s not super likely, so don’t go crazy here. Just mix them in with your other chalk/pivots and use them as another way to be different.
DraftKings vs Fanduel
Something else I should mention is that you can use the two different sites to split up some ownership (i.e. taking more of the drivers starting closer to the front on FanDuel since place differential isn’t quite as important). Maybe you load up on more chalk in the back on DraftKings and get extra exposure to the pivots in the front on FanDuel. Or maybe, if you’re really bold, you could flip the script and try to leverage as much ownership as possible on both sites, and hope the race plays out in a way that favors doing that. Either way, you’ll need to find ways to be different, and manipulating ownership between the two sites is one way of doing that.
Closing thoughts
Whew, that was a fun one to type out! I hope this article sparked some creative thought for you all, because really, that’s the name of the game at Daytona…finding ways to be creative and different while still having some sort of a realistic chance of winning. As always, play within your means, feel free to skip the cash games this week, and remember that nothing really matters during the race (aside from your dominators leading laps) until all the wrecks start to happen. As long as your drivers are on the track, you’ve got a shot. Good luck, and I’ll see you all in Slack!