As DFS players, we spend most of our time looking forward to the next slate, the next season, etc. Equally important, though, is looking back. Figuring out the thought process that leads to winning lineups is crucial. That’s what makes us better players long term.
This week, DraftKings offered a special $5 Milly Maker, with the lower buy-in necessitating a more top-heavy payout structure and more total entries. Despite that, we had a solo winner — who took down the contest by a .02 margin of victory.
Our winner this week was Sidi1979, who took down the 150-max contest with their second lineup.
The Lineup
Let’s see how they did it.
The Stack
I’ve noticed for a while in these massive contests that having a traditional stack is less valuable than in smaller field tournaments. The reason is that you need true outlier performances at every position, which typically includes rushing production from your quarterback.
A quarterback who scores multiple rushing touchdowns — like Josh Allen this week — doesn’t always bring along pass-catchers with him. That was the case here, with no flex players from the Bills scoring more than 13.3 DraftKings points.
Sidi1979 did include multiple players from the same team at other positions — without their quarterbacks. That included the Dolphins Tyreek Hill and De’Von Achane, plus the Saints’ Juwan Johnson and Rashid Shaheed.
We’ll discuss those pairings more in later sections, but the key takeaway here is that you don’t have to pair quarterbacks with their pass catchers, particularly when the upside case for the QB involves plenty of rushing production. I mentioned Allen as a strong “naked” play in my Week 1 Breakdown for that very reason.
Other Correlations
The only true correlation play here was pairing the Texans’ Joe Mixon with the Colts’ Alec Pierce. Opposing RB/WR “stacks” are a great way to get some sneaky correlation in your lineup without taking on too much ownership.
The logic is that a game environment where the running back’s team leads should produce more carries for him and more passing volume for the other team. It made sense to target this game specifically as well. It had one of the highest totals on the slate, with the Texans as slight favorites.
On top of that, the Colts had a fairly condensed passing attack with Josh Downs inactive, while the Texans have three relevant wideouts — but just one alpha RB. This pairing was able to capture the bulk of production for both teams while saving tons of salary compared to the Texans’ pass-catchers.
The Chalk
The two chalky plays in the lineups were the Dolphins pairing of Hill and Achane. Hill was pretty clearly the best play on the slate, with a cheaper price tag than he had much of last season. He has slate-breaking upside on a weekly basis, with that impact magnified by the lower (fantasy) scoring environment of Week 1.
Achane had similar upside, with a wider range of outcomes. He’s an extreme outlier in terms of efficiency, with fewer opportunities than we typically expect from an RB1.
It remains to be seen how long he’ll be able to maintain outlier efficiency, but he put up a solid 23 points last Week on 17 touches. Plus, while Achane and Hill were both popular individually, I’d be willing to bet the combination of the two was less popular than their individual ownership would imply.
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The Sleepers
This lineup included three players with less than 1% ownership, an extremely bold strategy that paid off. I, for one, never would’ve predicted the Saints to be Week 1s highest scoring team, but their 47-point performance obviously brought a lot of fantasy production with it.
That included Johnson and Shaheed, who combined for 26.9 points on an $8,100 salary. I wish I had an explanation for how anyone saw that coming (especially Johnson), but if I did, I might be a million dollars richer. Shaheed is a deep-threat receiver who seems to pop up for big games semi-randomly a few times a season, so he’s always worth rostering at low ownership in a portion of your lineups.
Outside of the Saints combo, they also rostered Denver’s Josh Reynolds, who somehow led his new team in receiving in Week 1. I’m not sure how this lineup landed on Reynolds specifically, but any cheap WRs other than Andrei Iosivas was probably +EV in massive tournaments thanks to the chalk forming around the Bengals’ backup.
As always, fading the popular defenses was key too. The Vikings made plenty of sense coming into the Week — any D/ST against Daniel Jones does. The takeaway here remains the same, which is to avoid the chalk at defense in big tournaments.
