Winning Fantasy Football On A Budget – Tips, Advice, and Strategy for Fanduel and Draftkings Contest Selection NFL Week 1 (FREE!)

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $1000/day, or even per week, to plunk down on hundreds of different fantasy football contests like the big boys.  I’m a #Smallaballa through and through, and I need to be smart and efficient with my fantasy football budget. Contest selection is paramount to my success, and probably yours.  Every week, I will be drafted by DFS Army to offer you a roadmap towards building your own fantasy football bankroll smartly with tips, advice, strategy, and templates for several different fantasy football budgets.

The track record is there on both Fanduel and Draftkings.  In 2020 alone, I have won an MLB contest containing more than 140,000 people.  I placed 4th out of 217,000+ in NBA.  I placed 2nd of 15,000+ in NHL, 4th of 7800+ in NASCAR, and 12th of 3500+ in PGA.  Being smart and well-rounded is my game.  I can teach you to conquer giant tournaments on a fantasy budget, but I can also teach you to grind up that bankroll while you lay in wait of the huge night. So, follow me, and let’s lay siege to our next sport of the calendar year….NFL!

What Started It All?  Revisit “The Ladder System:  Revolutionize Your Game“

Building Your Foundation

Every “athletic” endeavor starts with a solid foundation.  DFS (daily fantasy sports) is no different, and any coach worth his salt will tell you so in your first meeting.  Cash games (contests paying half to one third of the field) offer some of the safest paydays in the industry.  And, using them as our foundation allows us to become more and more aggressive with our weekly fantasy budget. We can focus on different mixes of head-to-heads, 5050s, double ups, triple ups, 3man leagues, and the like, but these contests will comprise the bulk of what we look to tackle.  However, these do get a little boring.  And, they have very limited upside.

So, we will also incorporate calculated layers of contests that not only increase the risk, but also the rewards.  The trick is to add this risk/reward combo with precision and a goal.  Add too much, and you increase your chances of visiting a town we call Redepositsville.  Add too little, and you just spin your wheels forever breaking even.  But, adding just the right amount, in just the right places, allows you to cover your risk with upside and steadily bring your fantasy football budget to new heights.

Week 1 Fantasy Football Sample Budgets

Each week we will switch things up a little, but keep in line with our foundation.  We will display the versatility of chasing cash prizes on a budget and still mix in some fun.  From head-to-heads, to chasing qualifiers, to even dabbling in some mass-multi-entry, we will offer example after example smartly targeting the various fantasy football contests and slates around the NFL.  We will talk about cores, single lineups, 3 lineup attacks, chalk plays, contrarian plays, stacking, when to press up our earnings, and more.  This is just the beginning of what should be a fun ride for anyone and everyone across all skill levels and a variety of budgets.

$20 Sample Budget

With $20 to play, we will focus on one site and one lineup.  The principles of focusing on just one lineup are still to win, not to merely “make the cash.”  We want to aim for the win and “miss with the cash.”  We are going to choose smart players, probably chalky (among the most popular or highest owned) players, and we are not going to worry about being “contrarian.”

Focus on the smart plays, those with both safety AND upside.  Like the Tampa Bay at New Orleans game.  It has the highest current total (49.5 over/under) on the main NFL slate, and has plenty of very popular fantasy football players in it from running backs to receivers.  Another popular place to start will be the QB phenom, Lamar Jackson.  He showed tremendous safety (being a rushing style quarterback that frequently scored plenty of points with is legs) and also upside with frequent multi-passing touchdown games.  Baltimore finds itself at home, heavily favored (-8 currently) and facing a softer opponent in the Cleveland Browns.

I will find many of our players using the statistics and tools of our NFL Research Station.  I will employ overall ratings, historical statistics, and even some DVP (defense vs position) rankings to help me round out my small, but efficient, player pool.  From there, with $20, I would avoid the Double Ups being they are multi-entry.  I would, however, enter something like this…

• $10 worth of 5050s.  (Either a single $10 entry, or 2-$5 entries, or even a $5 entry, 2-$2 entries, and a $1 entry.  Gaining exposure to many different players helps mitigate risk over large samples.)
• 1-$2 triple up league, and 2-$1 3man leagues
• 1-$2 quintuple up league, and 2-$1 5man leagues
• 2-$1 100man leagues on Fanduel

I would use the same lineup in everything.  I will do some QB/WR stacking, but I won’t force it if it doesn’t make a ton of sense. My goal here is to win a contest with 100 people in it (not 23,000 people…that requires a different type of lineup).  If I fall a little short, I can still cash the triple ups or the 5050s and at least breakeven for the week…keeping my bankroll in tact for the next week’s fantasy football slates.  I don’t even need to win half the time I do this because I will have great days that win the 100man leagues, and those days will pay me back (and then some) for the few weeks I miss even the 5050s and blank myself.

$100 Sample Budget

With $100, we have a lot more room to play.  We can build just one lineup, we can build several, or we can build with percentages of our budget and take lots of shots.  Let’s do that in Week 1.

The first thing we need is a foundation of cash games.  At a budget of this size, our foundation is head-to-head contests.  I am building one lineup as my anchor, and I am going to enter at least $40 worth of head-to-heads.  I will start at the lowest level possible and maximize it for all the site allows.  For many of you, that will be the $1 level.  It’s not until we get capped by the site we move up to $2 head-to-heads.  The secret to these fantasy football contests is volume.  Lots and lots of volume!  Grab as many individual opponents as possible.  A $5 head-to-head may seem efficient, but it actually costs us 4 individual opponents and increases our variance substantially.  In cash games, we don’t want to increase our variance (something we talk about in our coaching forums all the time).  We want to decrease it for more methodical outcome.

• So, $40 in HTH contests.
• $10 in 5050s or single-entry double ups (I’m only making the one lineup…I’m not entering in the multiple entry contests just like the $20 example).
• $5 triple up
• $15 in the 3man leagues again focusing in volume (starting at $1 and only working my way up to $2 and $5 if I need to).
• $5 quintuple up
• $15 in 5man leauges just like the triple ups.

Now, we can do a couple of things with our remaining $20.  We can enter our cash lineup in something like the $25 Small Bomb on Fanduel where the top 8 of 47 get paid and the winner takes home a cool $300.  (And, we do this by borrowing $5 from the quintuple ups or triple ups.)  Or, we can break that $20 up.  But, if we are using our main cash lineup, we need to understand it is NOT built to win contests with more than 300ish people in them.  47 players in the Small Bomb is perfect (also noting it is a single-entry contest).  We could even bump things up a little to the Small Sweep of 94 players where the top 16 get paid and the winner gets $400.  But, if we want to unlock a small chance at pretty big money, we need to build another lineup….one that can win a tourney of larger size.

If that is the option you choose, let’s at least put our cash lineup in the $10 single-entry Small Scramble with 352 players. 64 players get paid, and the winner gets the same $400 as the Small Sweep.  Our odds are significantly less with 350 players, but it does happen on occasion.  I would prefer a $5 contest with say 110 players in it, but as of now, there aren’t any in the lobby…so watch for more fantasy football contests at the $5 level as the week progresses and you might free up a little more money for your tourney-built lineup.

We have $10 left for some bigger tournaments.  But, we need to build a lineup (or three) full of upside and a couple of lower-owned pivots.  Our NFL Cheatsheets are perfect for finding these players!  We don’t really want to touch our central core, but we do want to take a couple of secondary pieces out and take bigger chances with them.  Our defense, our QB even, or maybe we stack a QB/WR and run it back with the WR of the opposing team in a game we hope scores 40+ points on both sides.  Again, let our cheatsheets be your guide.

We can build 3 strong lineups with different twists each and target the Fanduel $3 Three and Out.  9,900 people will require some funky stuff to go right to win, but it’s not unwinnable.  The top 2,500 get paid (a generous 25%), and the winner takes home $2,500.  This is a nice, balanced tournament by today’s standards and definitely one I would be excited to regularly enter.

If you wanted to borrow that $5 from a triple up or quintuple up again, we could enter the three single-entry Small Spikes once each with our three lineups.  These are only 470 players each, so they don’t offer the home run the Three and Out does, but they are very winnable with very subtle changes to our cash lineups and might be the way to go for someone wanting to play things a little more on the safe side.  The choice is yours, and either option is sensible with real winning chances.

The Secret to Winning Fantasy Football on a Budget

The secret is simple.  Employing the right tools in the right contests with the right support system.  We offer that inside our VIP walls at DFS Army.  And, as the weeks go on, I will give you small tidbits of different combinations for different budget levels.  But, if you want to really take your game seriously, jump inside and dive even deeper into contest selection with our coaches.  Stop putting the wrong lineups into the wrong contests.  Stop getting eaten alive by the sharks.  Become a shark instead!!

Join DFS Army

And, use coupon code DFSARMY for a 20% discount as a thank you from me for reading this article and passing it around social media.  I will see you again next week with a different set of contests and combinations for new budgets.

 

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