After slogging through a few lesser cards, it’s finally here. UFC 300 is the biggest event the company has put on in many years, with 12 current or former champions on the card and three five-round fights.
The trifecta of five-round offerings makes this an interesting card for DFS strategy, so we’ll discuss each of those fights on their own, as well as our usual discussion of value plays, sleepers, and more.
The 13-fight card locks at 6:00 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
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
Alex Pereira ($8,300) vs. Jamahal Hill ($7,900)
On a typical UFC event, this main event would be a clear stacking play in cash and a “must include” in every GPP lineup. It’s a fairly close fight with the defending champion Pereira going off around -130, so picking a winner is hard. It’s also a fight where we’ll want the winner, as both men are strikers with massive power.
That means the loser of this one probably finishes with a disappointing score, as we won’t see a ton of striking volume before one of the big men fall. The lack of grappling doesn’t help the DFS case either, since it limits the path to fantasy points for both fighters.
Given the other five-round fights and the plethora of likely finishes, I’ll probably be avoiding this one entirely in cash games. I still want some exposure in tournaments, but I won’t lock one or the other in every lineup.
With all of that said, I’m leaning towards the champ. The elephant in the room is the quick return from a torn Achilles for Hill, who suffered the injury last July. There’s not much precedent on what that recovery is like for MMA athletes since it’s typically a basketball and football injury — Hill’s injury came during a pickup basketball game at UFC fight week. However, it’s still a short turnaround time.
Now he’s fighting the most dangerous calf-kicker in MMA in Pereira while contending with ring rust and what looks to be a significant weight cut based on recent appearances by Hill. That’s a lot to overcome. Sean Zerillo and I are on the same side of this one, as we discussed on our latest UFC Betting Podcast:
Co-Main Event
Weili Zhang ($9,200) vs. Yan Xiaonan ($7,000)
This is another fight I won’t be stacking in cash games. That’s because I’m anticipating one-way traffic from Zhang, a roughly five-to-one favorite.
While she’s only defended her strawweight title once in her current reign, the retirement of Joanna Jedrzejczyk and departure of Rose Namajunas to flyweight leaves no significant threats to her title, which is how we got to Xiaonan in this spot.
Coming in on just a two-fight winning streak, she’s not who we’d typically expect to get a title shot. However, she’s the “next woman up” at 115.
She doesn’t have much of a chance against Zhang, who on top of being very likely to win is a great DFS fighter. She averages just under six significant strikes per minute, over two takedowns per fight, and scored an absurd 191 points in her last win. She’ll be a priority in all contest types for me.
The Easy Chalk
Bo Nickal ($9,500)
Could it be anyone else? The UFC is still doing the slow buildup for their super-prospect, giving Nickal another soft matchup to open the UFC 300 main card. That would be Cody Brundage ($6,700), who’s threatening to be the biggest underdog ever in a UFC fight this weekend.
Unlike past Nickal opponents who at least had a very narrow theoretical path to victory, it’s hard to see how Brundage puts up any resistance here. He shares Nickal’s wrestling base, except Brundage wrestled division two and Nickal won the D-1 NCAA tournament — three times.
Nickal is -190 to win this fight in Round 1, and even that feels like a value, as Action Network Senior Editor Dann Stupp pointed out. This would mean a 100+ score on DraftKings is heavily favored for Nickal too.
He’s hard to fit, especially in builds featuring Zhang, but I’ll be trying to get as much of him as possible this week.
The Upside Play
Jiri Prochazka ($8,000)
With only three fights on the card favored to hit the judges, upside is not hard to come by at UFC 300. What is hard to come by is salary, with most of those likely stoppages favoring high-priced fighters. Those lines could swing even more heavily to fights ending inside the distance with the announcement of $300,000 performance bonuses for this historic event.
While Prochazka isn’t cheap, he’s a solid value play given his roughly pick ’em odds against Aleksandar Rakic ($8,200). More importantly, if he wins, it’s likely to be by knockout, with that making up 70% of his win condition based on current implied odds.
That feels about right to me given that this is Rakic’s first fight back following a two-year layoff for a torn ACL. I also spotted some technical deficiencies in Rakic’s game that could spell bad news for him in the striking exchanges.
Given his salary, any stoppage should be enough to slot Prochazka in the optimal lineup. I’ll have a heavy dose of him in GPPs, while possibly looking his way in cash games as well.
The Value Play
Jessica Andrade ($8,100)
The fight between Andrade and Marina Rodriguez ($8,100) is probably the least-anticipated offering at UFC 300. Both women snapped extended losing streaks in their last bout but are unlikely to be in the title picture anytime soon.
However, that doesn’t mean we should ignore it for DFS. First, it’s the rare fight where both fighters have the same DraftKings salary. That’s because it was close to a pick ’em fight when salaries dropped last week. However, Andrade has since moved to -142. That’s an identical betting line to Diego Lopes ($8,500) at a much cheaper price.
This is one of the few bouts on the card favored to hit the judges, though just barely. Andrade has finished nine of her 16 UFC wins, with her last two going for over 130 DraftKings points. That gives her plenty of upside to go with her value at what should be fairly low ownership.
The Contrarian Choice
Renato Moicano ($7,300)
“Money Moicano” is back at it again, just two months removed from his victory over Drew Dober. He draws a somewhat-similar matchup this time in Jalin Turner ($8,900), a hard-hitting lefty with scary knockout power.
Turner is a different animal thanks to his massive 6’3″ build, but the principle is similar. Survive the early onslaught, score a takedown or two, then pick apart your tired opponent on the feet. Turner has never won a fight that started the third round, a fact I discovered while researching my betting preview for this fight.
Of course, Moicano’s floor is nearly 0 here, and Turner has massive upside of his own. I want to have a mix of both fighters for GPPs, but I probably won’t get to either in cash games. However, the nature of the salaries on this slate and my read on the fight push me heavily toward the underdog.
He’s also seen his moneyline odds drop slightly, and any win should be enough to make the optimal lineup given his cheap salary. Besides, who doesn’t want to root for another Money Moicano interview?
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The Swing Fight
Justin Gaethje ($8,800) vs. Max Holloway ($7,400)
This “BMF” title fight is the first of the three five-rounders at UFC 300, going off in the middle of the main card. It features two high-volume strikers in Justin Gaethje and Max Holloway, who both average over seven significant strikes per minute.
If there’s ever a fight to stack, this one is it. The underdog Holloway is averaging 58 DraftKings points in his last four losses, three of which came to former featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski. The other was his last fight at lightweight against Dustin Poirier — the man Gaethje just defeated for the BMF title.
While Gaethje hasn’t scored as well in his recent losses, they both came against fighters who immediately turned it into a grappling match. That won’t be the case here, as both he and Holloway prefer to settle things on the feet. His only other UFC losses saw him post scores of 48 and 49, so his floor is rock-solid here too.
That makes this one a must-stack for cash games, as the pair should easily combine for over 150 DraftKings points with the ceiling for more. There’s also an argument to stacking this one in GPPs as well, even on a 13-fight card.
If most of the high-priced fighters perform as expected, the only way to afford them is by finding cheap fighters like Holloway who score decently. He could do that even in a loss, making that an interesting strategy consideration for tournaments.
Regardless, you’ll want at least one of the pair in every lineup you build. The winner either gets 25 minutes to work their voluminous striking, or they get a stoppage with all of the extra scoring that entails.
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