Chances are that if you’ve found this article, you’re someone who has casually tried out Daily Fantasy Sports already. Although 10 states have unfortunately left the DFS Industry behind, many others have legislated the game to the degree that it has needed to reinvent itself, and it is once again growing.
DFS is a strong alternative for those that couldn’t find a home league to play in, or want to leave the rigors of in-season team management behind to benefit from the joys of simply selecting their favorite players of the week and going from there. It’s also there for anyone who just wants to play more fantasy football on top of what they already love. No matter the reason you’re playing DFS, the odds are that if you’re reading this article, you’re doing so on a casual level.
You can be a successful casual player without a goal of making this a career if that’s not your desire. The best thing about DFS is that it’s literally whatever you want it to be. You play it how and when you want, for whichever level you want to compete at. Whether you’re a brand-new player or not, to be a successful casual player, you need to be diligent in your game selection.
Choosing your opponents as carefully as possible is easier than assumed in daily fantasy sports, but oftentimes newer players get heavily involved in games against the best players and are turned off by losing to someone they felt they were unfairly pitted against. All the major sites offer transparency regarding who has entered a competition and what level of player those entrants are. Following the game selection process below will help insure you avoid those players as much as a you can.
Both are simple, but often overlooked, as payout percentage and the number of maximum entries per game are the most important elements in how you should choose which games to play. If you’re a causal player who is looking to grow their investment along the way for the entire season, you should spend the majority of contest selection focusing on 50/50 games. These are the games that will give you dead-even odds on winning the contest as they pay exactly half the field of entrants. It’s important to account for the size of the field in these contests. The larger the field, the less variance you’re going to encounter because your team will be compared to a much larger sample size. It’s recommended to avoid the smaller contests here and focus on the larger ones.
You want to make sure you always check the entry levels for each of these contests and only choose the ones that permit a single, lone entry. If you’re choosing the larger 50/50 games that permit multiple entries, these are the games where full-time players feed their cash game bankroll and you’ll run into more players using lineup optimization tools, algorithms and lineup building tools.
Double-ups and multipliers are exactly what they suggest, offering exactly double the amount or a multiplier of your entry fee, but they don’t carry the same payout percentage as 50/50 games. Those games typically pay out closer to 45 percent of the field to cover the rake (the percent of the money taken in from the game to for the hosting site).
Head to head games are the closest contest choice that resembles the way season-long fantasy football is played and fits under the same umbrella. It’s just you versus a lone opponent where one person wins. I would not recommend playing head to head games as a casual player because many of those contests are set by players who are professionals and high-level players, but if you’re someone who wants to set out a handful of your own head to head games, it’s imperative that you use the multi-matchup blocking tools available on each site. If you want to be a successful head to head player, you’re going to need to diversify your opponents. Putting out 10 head to head games means you’re looking to play 10 different opponents. Tools are available on each site to prevent a single player from grabbing all the slots in games you have offered for people to join.
Payout percentage is also critical for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time in cash games and would rather causally play in larger field games, using disposable income to chase a few pots of gold each week.
You may want to chase tournaments with guaranteed prize pools that offer the largest payouts, but before entering any large field, make sure you check the number of spots that contest pays out. You want to ensure selecting tournaments that pay out as close to 20 percent of the field as possible.
If you’re a newer and more casual lineup builder, you want to stick almost entirely to tournaments that allow only 1-5 contest entries. As the amount of entries increase in a contest that are available to each individual player, the more players you are going to run into that use tools to set lineups and optimize their rosters to circumvent variance in larger fields.
Avoid all games labeled as a satellite or qualifier. Those are contests with a small buy-in that allow players to enter a contest with a larger buy-in. These contests are for high volume players and will cost you double the rake if you win because you are entering two contests. If you play well in the satellites, you can save money in the long run as compared to buying into the GPP contests directly, but they are advantageous for players with larger bankrolls that use tools to set multiple lineups and ones designed to win large field tournaments against less-experienced, casual players.
While these suggestions don’t necessarily offer the allure of life without a regular 9-5 job, they will put you on a path to ensuring the most success through game selection on a casual level to maximize your experience wading into the DFS waters.
