Daily Fantasy Sports Strategy And Tips

MLB DFS GPP Strategy

Holy cow, that title was almost entirely composed of acronyms. For those not speaking the DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports) language, that reads Major League Baseball Daily Fantasy Sports Guaranteed Prize Pool strategy. Guaranteed prize pools are the tournaments that generally have top heavy payouts and offer the most financial upside day to day when playing DFS. Strategy in the GPPs for baseball is a little bit different than it is in football or basketball, as the range of outcomes grows immensely for each player every night.

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In basketball and football to a lesser extent, the outcomes can have enough predictability to where it’s very tough not to roster the chalk (highly owned) players at least some of the time in your tournament lineups. Baseball, however, is a very different animal, as even the hitter in the dreamiest situation who is oozing value can easily go 0-4 or 0-5 on a given night and leave a pile of teams in the tournament sporting a big fat donut in their lineups. Being on the other side of that coin, when the 60 percent owned player lays an egg, is a humongous leg up.

In addition to fading some of the chalk, you can also get a sense of which players aren’t being talked about much for that day within the DFS community and aim to target players that will be low owned. Having a player on your roster who stumbles into a grand slam or a two home run night while being under 5 or 6 percent ownership is a fantastic boon to your chances in a GPP. When that happens, you’re lapping 94, 95, heck sometimes 99 percent of the field at that spot if your hidden gem happens to be 1 percent owned.

The reason this type of thinking is so beneficial in MLB DFS is the inherent unpredictability of baseball on a nightly basis. In basketball, players who aren’t a huge factor for their team and only rate to play 28-30 minutes on a given night are very unlikely to have a big outburst, while the players who have the ball in their hands a lot and play tons of minutes are very likely to be productive. In baseball, while Mike Trout is of course more likely to be productive on a given night than a slugger like Chris Carter or Colby Rasmus, those guys can easily go deep twice while Trout goes 1-4 with a single, causing huge fluctuations in fantasy production from night to night. Russell Westbrook is never scoring 22 fantasy points barring injury or some other super fluke.

So the logical next step is, how do you go about being a contrarian in daily fantasy baseball? Well, there are many ways to achieve that. As I’ve noted, fading the player who you feel is likely to be very highly owned is one way. Another is to actively target players you expect to go lightly owned. Maybe they’ve got a fairly tough matchup against a pitcher who is generally decent, but can have a blowup outing, like Gio Gonzalez. Another is to play stacks – groupings of players on the same team – that are a bit off the beaten path. Say you think the Indians are in a good spot that you expect not many people will be on. Instead of just stacking the Indians best hitters, maybe leave one off and stack around him or stack the middle to bottom portion of the order instead of the more obvious top of the order stack.

Thinking for yourself and predicting the public behavior are huge elements to giving yourself a chance to be successful in daily fantasy baseball tournaments. Don’t be afraid to steer clear of the popular plays for the day that you keep reading about if your goal is to win a tournament. For cash games, yes, you want to stack your lineup with as much value as you know how and let the chips fall where they may. For tournaments, you want to play off and try to benefit from the idea that the happenings on any given night of baseball have a large element of randomness. Aligning yourself with the public and highly owned players is the absolute worst way, generally, to open up the possibility that you come out on top in a big GPP.

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Thanks for reading. Find me on Twitter @IanJ300 with any questions.

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