Playing daily fantasy sports can be extremely entertaining. There are so many great platforms out there on offer, and so many competitions that you can try your hand at. However, we always stress the importance of playing to the best of your abilities, and making sure you play to win. That is why every DFS player needs a daily fantasy sports strategy.
In this review, we’re going to cover some of the best strategies you can rely on for DFS strategy play. We’ll cover how you should go about setting up your team, which competitions are the best for DFS play and also which platforms will benefit you the most to play with. Every good player needs a solid strategy as their foundation, and this page will certainly help.
What is Daily Fantasy Sports?
Daily fantasy sports is an accelerated variant of fantasy sports that condenses the fantasy sports season into a shorter period of time. So, instead of playing a fantasy sports league for a number of months that a sports season lasts, you’ll be playing shorter competitions that last a day, a week or a weekend.
The regulations and formatting of a DFS season, apart from that, is pretty much structured the same. You are given a salary cap, and a choice of players to draft at the start of your competition. The competition can last as short or as long as you like, and at the end of it, you can be rewarded with a cash prize.
There are some fantastic apps out there that offer an exclusive DFS app for users. You should check out our best daily fantasy sports apps review to learn more about that. However, we feel it is important to differentiate between DFS and other fantasy sports, just so you understand how different the strategy will be for these kinds of games. You’re playing a much shorter game, but it is still very complicated and requires making calculated decisions. So it’s critical that you follow a Daily Fantasy Sports strategy that suits your overall play style, and what kind of competition you want to play.
What Types of Daily Fantasy Sports Competitions are There?
There are several different types of DFS competitions that a user can play over most DFS apps. These include:
- Salary cap competition – The original kind of DFS competition, these ones operate under the same conditions as traditional fantasy sports. You have a salary cap, and a choice of players within the sport you’ve chosen. You choose your players, and lock them in for your competition.
- Snake drafts – Snake drafts are when a group of people enter a competition, and are randomly assigned a ‘pick’. Whoever gets the first pick in the first round of drafts will often go last in the next round, and so on, and so forth. No one can ever get snake twice in a row, so for the interest of fairness, and unpredictability, it’s one of the more unique fantasy sports competition.
- Multiplier mode – This is one of the more interesting DFS variants, as it completely changes how every game works. You can pick any player you want, but the better players will have lower multipliers than usual. The average or below average players will instead have the higher multipliers, adding an air of unpredictability to every DFS competition; this puts value into playing with underdogs or dark horses.
- Champion/MVP Mode – A popular mode on websites like DraftKings, which we cover in more detail in our DraftKings review. This puts more stakes and multipliers into the star players, meaning that they can really pay off if you are playing with them. However, they require much more of an investment of initial your salary cap
- Super 15 – Just a reduced salary cap. You are given a cap of $15, and you have to fill your team up with a series of values attached to your players.
- Props – Rather than playing your traditional league play of fantasy sports, these prop games are focused more on statistics and play history. You can play More/Less on a players goals, matchup props on stat categories of 2-3 players and other types of combo props.
Now that you have an idea of the types of competitions you will be strategizing for, let’s get right into the daily fantasy sports strategy that you can employ for your DFS play.
The Best Daily Fantasy Sports Strategies
When we give daily fantasy sports advice, keep in mind that it’s different for everyone. Some players are beginners to the DFS world, and other more experienced players may be ready for a more complicated strategy. Well, we’ve got an extensive list of strategies below, and we’re sure one of them can help you with your DFS play.
1. Prioritize your Goals
First things first, it’s important to understand your goals before we start giving you your daily fantasy sports advice. What is it you want from daily fantasy sports? Do you want to simply just have fun in your spare time, or do you genuinely want to make money from your DFS play?
Let’s say your brand new to DFS play. First off, check out our DFS legal states review just to learn the basics, in detail, of daily fantasy sports. Once you have chosen your platform, we recommend you allocate 80% of your budget to cash games, and the other 20% to tournaments. Let’s differentiate the differences between the two before we continue.
Cash games means you are narrowing your competition down to one player in most cases. Most head to head competitions you see on DFS platforms are under the cash games. There’s a little more room for error in cash games and opportunities to learn as you can play for far less money when head to head with another player. The payouts will not be amazing when you win, but you can learn the game, and the patterns, to understand how to build the best squad for your daily fantasy sports strategy.
Grand Prize Pool Contests, or Tournaments, are a lot more difficult. You’re entered into competitions where you have to compete with multiple different players, with the opportunity to win big cash prize at the end. The more entrants there are, the more attention to detail is essential. We recommend more experienced players focus on tournaments, simply because the skill level is a whole another level. You are dealing with a whole world of experienced players who understand all the details, and niches of the game, so if you are new, it’s likely you will lose rather quickly. With most competitions requiring an entry stake, this means you could lose plenty of money quickly. Our daily fantasy sports advice would be just try it out from time to time if you’re new.
2. Play to the Site Scoring Strengths
Remember when we mentioned every platform has different strengths? Well, this is how you can develop your daily fantasy sports strategy to match the platform you are playing on. Each platform is different, so it’s important to know which platform has the most strengths.
For DraftKings, the platform offers unique scoring benchmarks for football and basketball. Right backs and quarterbacks are the aim here, as the consistent bonuses that they offer for players that score, and that hit 300+ yard rushes. So, focus on the stronger right backs and quarterbacks.
For Underdog fantasy, the platform has multipliers in effect, meaning that average or worse players will have higher players. So, the best way to put together a more rounded squad would be to only focus on getting two to four consistently good players on your squad, that will perform, while placing a bunch of dark horses in your squad.
This will help balance out your squad a bit more, so that you can gain a good lead with your players, while also perhaps getting access to the underdog players’ multipliers if they happen to perform. Check out our Underdog fantasy review to learn more about the value that the platform has to offer.
Summary: Some Great Strategies to Employ
We always say here at eSportsbets.com, that strategy is everything. In DFS, you can just throw together a team of high performing players, and you may think that is enough to get you a win. Unfortunately, it does not work that way, because it requires a lot of research, and knowledge of how the game and platform works if you want to succeed, and win some money in the DFS world.
That being said, we hope that our guide is helpful for you. This is a good general overview of what to expect for a daily fantasy sports strategy, and it will help you make the right decisions along the way in your fantasy sports career. So, we recommend you sign up to one of the websites mentioned above and get started!
