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Oct 30, 2018

How To Dominate Draftboard

DFS players coming from Fanduel and Draftkings are used to implementing a boom or bust draft strategy. This makes perfect sense in large field tournaments with 10,000+ players and top heavy payouts that demand you finish in the top several slots. Accomplishing this requires an extremely high scoring lineup consisting of players that are not owned by a large number of other users. In essence, you have to embrace volatility and construct a lineup that will either do extremely well (while your opponents to poorly), or flop completely.

Draftboard is Different

Our contests feature a flat payout structure and are capped at two or ten players so you're trying to outscore, at most, nine other lineups. At Draftboard your goal is to construct a lineup that will perform just well enough to outscore your nine opponents, and do so a high percentage of the time. Your focus should NOT be on constructing a lineup with the potential to score incredibly high because the additional points you score above those required to finish first are wasted.

The Floor is Your Friend

A player's floor is an imaginary fantasy point value that he is expected to exceed with a high degree of certainty. To dominate Draftboard, avoid chasing the high ceiling guys and build lineups made up of consistent, high floor players. How do you identify high floor players? Focus on AT&T: Attempts, touches, and targets.

Your players can't earn your fantasy points unless they 1) touch the ball, and 2) do something with it. Of course, there's variance associated with both of those events. That sub 4.3 WR you drafted might be targeted only a handful of times (or not at all) and once the ball is thrown is way, he has to catch it and do something spectacular in order for you to get value for him. Clearly, there's a lot of uncertainty there. At Draftboard you want the guy who's going to see a healthy amount of targets a game. If he happens to break a big one for you that's gravy, but its not required for you to get a great return on your investment.

Stack Dollars, Not Players

To crush big field tournaments you want a lineup consisting of highly correlated players. Drafting a QB and his WR1, WR2, or both means you double dip on TD passes from your signal caller to his top wideouts. It also means that if your QB lays an egg you're normally going to have a super low scoring lineup. This is perfectly fine because in a large field tournament, as soon as one of your players has an off game your day is over anyway. It doesn't matter how poorly your lineup does at that point.

At Draftboard, you CAN absorb a poor showing from one of your players and still win your contest, so you don't HAVE to stack at all. You don't have to avoid stacking all together, it just doesn't need to be a primary focus in building your lineup.

Ignore Ownership

A player's ownership level is the percentage of users who rostered him for a specific contest. In large field tournaments it's not enough to draft the highest scoring players. You also need a lineup consisting of players you think will be owned by relatively few users. That way when your lineup goes bonkers everyone else is left in your dust. Draftboard contests are capped at 2 or 10 players, so you get to focus your research on predicting player performance, not how many other users are going to draft a specific player.

Dan Quinn