Featherweight stalwart Max Holloway looks to prove he’s still the best non-champion in the division, as he looks to hold off the surging Arnold Allen. Allen has been brought along slowly in his UFC career, but with a 10-fight win streak it’s time for him to step up in competition. There’s a stacked 14-fight card overall, with the action kicking off at 5:30 p.m. Eastern.
We have built out a full player-projection model using the FantasyLabs Tools and Player Models to help put together some winning DFS lineups in UFC. You can use our optimizer to build optimal lineups using these projections.
The model, created by our own Sean Koerner, is based on 10,000 simulations of all the fights. He then pulled the DraftKings score from each bout to create floor, median and ceiling projections for every fighter. Here is how he defined each projection:
- Floor: Fighter has an 80% chance of going over this score, 20% chance of going under
- Median: Fighter has a 50% chance of going over this score, 50% chance of going under
- Ceiling: Fighter has a 20% chance of going over this score, 80% chance of going under
These should give us a better sense of which fighters we should target based on the game type – maximizing ceiling in GPPs, for example. We’ve also added ownership projections by yours truly, to help find leverage spots for GPPs.
You can check out the projections for every fighter on Saturday’s card in our UFC Models.
Main Event
Max Holloway ($9,000) vs. Arnold Allen ($7,200)
This is my absolute least favorite style of fight to handicap. Prospects like Allen with long winning streaks against lesser competition leave a lot of questions to be answered. We were supposed to see him in a stiffer test last time around against Calvin Kattar, but an unfortunate Kattar injury robbed us of the opportunity.
We haven’t seen Allen beat anyone near Holloway’s level yet, but that doesn’t mean he can’t. He’s handled his business so far, beating everyone he’s matched up with an impressive fashion. However, Holloway has essentially only ever lost to championship level competition, with five of his seven career defeats coming to Dustin Poirier and Alexander Volkanovski. All of which is to say, that if Allen picks up a win here, it proves he’s among the best.
Regardless of your thoughts on the fight, Allen is pretty clearly underpriced here. His moneyline odds have moved to around +150, which would normally mean a price tag close to $8,000 on DraftKings. That doesn’t make Holloway overpriced though, as his absurd output leads to some big scores in fights he wins.
Holloway is averaging 175 points in his last two (five-round) wins, both decisions. That’s obviously way more than enough to pay off his salary, while Allen’s price tag means any win gets him there. I like Allen as an underdog here generally, but Holloway provides a better ceiling/floor combo for DFS.
Either way, don’t make a lineup without at least one of these two, and certainly play both in cash games.
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The Easy Chalk
This is a tough week for chalk, with no fighters having moneyline odds better than -265 on Friday. That means that the expensive fighters are inherently overpriced relative to their odds of winning. Most players will still end up spending close to the $50,000 on DraftKings though, so higher-priced fighters will still be popular — making this a great week to leave salary on the table.
Rafa Garcia ($9,500)
As mentioned in the preamble to this section, the best moneyline odds on any fighter this weekend is about -265. That’s the line on Garcia, who’s cheaper than Zak Cummings ($9,600) despite having better betting odds. For that reason, he stands out as the obvious expensive choice for his fight against Clay Guida ($6,700).
It’s not the most comfortable play, as Garcia has a 3-3 record and has topped 100 DraftKings points just once. He does most of his scoring via takedowns, but Guida is a notoriously challenging opponent to take down (or finish.)
The betting line and salaries for this fight are baking in a ton of regression on the 41-year-old Guida, but he’s looked reasonably solid in his recent fights. He’s 3-3 in his last six UFC fights, with a controversial split decision loss to Mark Madsen — an Olympic-level wrestler who was unable to take Guida down easily.
Garcia is the safest bet to pick up some kind of win, but be careful for GPPs, as a massive score isn’t likely.
The Value Play
Pedro Munhoz ($6,800)
Munhoz is one of many underdogs whose DFS salary is drastically too cheap on Saturday. He’s only a +165 underdog but priced as if he were in the +400 range. His bout against Chris Gutierrez ($9,400) is also the men’s fight with the longest odds to end early, so we should get a respectable score from Munhoz even in a loss.
Munhoz is 1-4-1 over his last six UFC bouts, but all six of those losses came against current or former champions. The no-contest was due to an eye poke by Sean O’Malley — currently ranked as the #3 bantamweight by the UFC — in a fight that Munhoz won the first round.
With his performance against O’Malley, I’m willing to bet that the 35-year-old “young punisher” still has it in the cage (even if he doesn’t have a currently relevant nickname). Gutierrez has won seven straight in the UFC but against a much lower level of competition. The fan in me wants to see the young prospect make a successful step up, but I’m betting on the old dog to deny him.
Both Sean Zerillo and I expressed similar sentiments on this fight, as we discussed on the latest episode of The Action Network Podcasts UFC Betting Preview:
The Contrarian Choice
Edson Barboza ($7,500)
It’s hard to select one “contrarian” play here, as so many underdogs are projecting well relative to their salaries. Among them is Barboza, another older fighter representing a step up in competition for his opponent.
That’s Billy Quarantillo ($8,700), who’s 5-2 in the UFC but has three wins against fighters who’ve since been cut. The other two wins were against fighters who are roughly .500 in the promotion, though Quarantillo finished both impressively.
So long as Barboza’s chin holds up, he should have a skill edge here. Quarantillo was absolutely destroyed by leg kicks from Shane Burgos, and leg kicks are one of Barboza’s better weapons. Barboza also fought Burgos, roughly six months before Quarantillo did. Barboza won that fight by knockout, while Quarantillo lost a decision.
MMA math isn’t the most reliable, especially among older fighters. However, Quarantillo isn’t that much younger than Barboza, so it’s hard to project major improvements from him relative to Barboza. While I don’t love picking against a fellow grown man who still goes by Billy, I’m doing so here.
Brandon Royval ($7,100)
Royval is another fighter on this card who’s only ever lost to top competition, He’s 4-2 in the UFC, with losses to current champion Brandon Moreno and next title challenger Alexandre Pantoja. However, both of those fights had odd circumstances.
Royval’s shoulder popped out of place against Moreno, and he was finished on the ground while trying to pop it back in himself. Pantoja landed an inadvertent eye poke that was missed by the ref, then took Royval down and finished him in the aftermath.
Those were the only stoppage losses in Royval’s career, and either easily could’ve gone the other way. He was losing to Moreno at the time of the injury but was up on the scorecards against Pantoja. That doesn’t necessarily mean he should beat Mattheus Nicolau ($9,100), but it does mean he’s undervalued and underpriced by the markets.
For more on this fight from a technical standpoint, check out my breakdown for the Action Network.
The Upside Play
Ion Cutelaba ($8,400)
While I’m betting on Tanner Boser ($7,800) to win this fight, the DFS upside belongs to Cutelaba. He’s a first-round-or-bust fighter, who empties the tank early in search of a finish. He also has tremendous takedown upside, averaging nearly five per 15 minutes in the UFC.
That’s a bit misleading, as he doesn’t often fight a full 15 minutes, but the upside is still there. He’s averaged two in his past three fights, all stoppage losses for Cutelaba. That raises both his ceiling and his floor, as he should be able to take down Boser early. Boser has below-average takedown defense and needs to weather an early storm here.
Cutelaba is a bit too scary for cash games here but has tremendous upside for GPPs. His moderate price tag means a finish almost certainly propels him into the optimal, with a finish making up the vast majority of his win condition in the betting markets.
The Swing Fight
Dustin Jacoby ($8,900) vs. Azamat Murzakanov ($7,300)
This should be a banger of a fight, between two powerful light heavyweights who average less than one takedown per fight combined. Jacoby is a former kickboxer with power in both hands and both feet, He has three first-round knockouts in six UFC wins and a 6-1 record in his current UFC stint.
Murzakanov is no slouch either, with three knockout wins in three fights between the UFC and the Contender Series. He’s 12-0 overall as a professional, with just two fights needing the judges’ scorecards to be decided.
Jacoby is the better technical striker here, but Murzakanov is the more explosive athlete, with some slight grappling upside. Murzakanov is also the better value here since the betting lines are far closer than the DFS salaries would imply.
However, that could create some leverage on Jacoby.
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