Play Yahoo DFS To Be Profitable This Season

If your goal is to become a more profitable DFS player, this is one big change you can make this season

Play where you have more of an edge. Assuming your skillset hasn’t increased since last season to the point that you’re now eating alongside other sharks, the best way to eat more is get out of the shark infested waters.

To be profitable in DFS, not only are you battling the field, but you’re also battling the rake. The rake will not change so the only way to be more profitable is to be more skilled or find less skilled players. If you’re playing against equally skilled players as yourself, you’re actually losing money because of the rake.

Let me explain, let’s say you play 10 head to heads at $10 per game against someone as equally as skilled as you. You win 5 of these games thinking you broke even because you won $100 in winnings and lost $100 in entry fees, correct? No.

You’ve actually only won $18 in 5 of those games instead of $20 because you lost $2 to the rake in each contest. You actually ‘Won’ $90 in those 5 games and spent $100 on entry fees, so you lost $10 in total.

To continue to play against opponents of even equal skill is a formula to deplete your bankroll, and as more and more sites continue to pump out quality DFS content for Draft Kings and Fanduel, the field continues to get sharper.

If you’re still curious as to how sharp the field is, go to your Draft Kings app, scroll to the bottom, and click the Average Results icon. Under where it says Player Statistics, Net losers are currently at 84%. 

Only 3% broke even in the last 7 days and 13% made a profit. The numbers in the last 30 days are almost identical. The solution? Play less skilled players and play in guaranteed prize pool contests that regularly don’t fill.

More Casual Players on Yahoo

If you’re on a platform with more casual players, the skill gap is greater and thus your chances are greater of being more profitable in DFS. You want to play against the season long fantasy football players on yahoo who just stumble on the Daily Fantasy Sports tab and decide to build a lineup without really knowing the ins and outs of contest selection, cash games, gpp’s, and applying the proper leverage for each contest. 

Furthermore, the industry leading sites such as DFS Army offer optimizers to help build a plethora of tournament lineups for DFS players and most of them only offer useability on Draft Kings & Fanduel. The convenience of the optimizer keeps a lot of Sharp DFS players off of sites like Yahoo because it’s another time-consuming step in their process and they simply don’t have the time to hand build a bunch of lineups on a third platform.

I have been guilty of this, too. The good news is DFS Army will have Yahoo on the Domination Station within 2-3 weeks (we’re beta testing it right now) so the convenience of sorting through value plays, player ownership projections, and optimizing 150 lineups for Yahoo will now be included with your DFS Army subscription!

Contest Overlay

This is something that a lot of casual players don’t realize but if a contest is marked as Guaranteed, that means the contest still runs and the prize pool is the same even if the contest doesn’t fill.

So, if you have a contest like the Yahoo $500K Sunday Baller with 39,000 entries and only 19,000 players fill the contest, you have 20,000 less players to beat out for the prize pool. In fact, it pays the top 10,000 so you really only have 9,000 players to beat out to minimum cash and make your money back while you’re taking a shot at the top prize of $100,000.

This is known as Overlay and realistically if you’re a GPP player, contests with overlay are the contests you should be targeting and entering the majority of your tournament lineups into. These contests have the most expected value and your best shot at taking down a GPP.

Yahoo has plenty of them.

Exploiting inefficiencies in pricing

One of the skills that separates top DFS players from the rest of the field is their ability to exploit inefficiencies in player pricing. If there’s a player priced on one slate at $5000 but really should be a $7000 player, this is probably a player you want to have a lot of exposure to in your lineups because you’re underpaying relative to the player’s actual value.

The same can be said for not overpaying for players who should be priced at say, $6500 but are priced that week at $8,000.

Yahoo pricing can be quite a bit softer than platforms like Draft Kings, so you can compare sites and see which players are inefficiently priced. For example, just this week on Yahoo, you have Saquon Barkley priced at $18 with Yahoo’s Salary Cap of $200. For comparison, JT and Henry are priced at $40, CMC at $37, and Ekeler at $34.

On DraftKings, this $18 Salary would be the equivalent of $4500. Yet Barkley is currently priced at $6800 this week. Say what you want about Barkley, but I think even his harshest critics would agree that he should be priced above $4500 on DK or the equivalent of $18 on Yahoo.

The same can be said for $11 Dameon Pierce on Yahoo. It’s true that we don’t know what his workload will be but there are only 32 starting Running Backs in the NFL and yet 52 backs are priced higher than Dameon Pierce on Yahoo. I’ll have plenty of exposure based on that pricing.

These are the kind of player pricing inefficiencies that you can better exploit on platforms like Yahoo as fewer players in the field are aware of relative to sharper players on sites like Draft Kings and Fanduel. These are also ways I’ll be looking to leverage the field this season on Yahoo and will be covering each week over on Youtube for DFS Army.

For more content on how to be a profitable DFS Player in 2022, watch DFS Army’s Founder, Kevin Allen, break down the common mistakes to avoid this season. Also, don’t forget to Subscribe to DFS Army on Youtube to catch all the DFS Content this season including new coverage of Yahoo DFS!