FanDuel roster advice: How to play a smaller field

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One thing I haven’t touched on in my FanDuel fantasy football advice so far this year is game structure. Typically, and this is mostly because I run this piece on Fridays, I write about entering tournaments that only involve Sunday-Monday games. But FanDuel has tournaments (and cash games) with much more variety.

My brother hates waiting to find out if he wins. So every week, he plays a tournament from only the 1 p.m. games, then another from only the afternoon slate. You can play a Sunday night-Monday game, just picking from two games. You can start early, playing a game with every single game from the week, Thursday to Monday. Later in the year, when there are Saturday games, you can pick a Thursday-Saturday slate.

Roster selection is different in such limited games. In a full day’s slate, you can be discerning, deciding whether an extra $300 in salary is worth an extra two points in fantasy projection. In a two-game, four-team tournament, though, you just need a functional roster. You’re going to settle for someone you’d normally ignore, because there just isn’t, for example, a good tight end at a fair price.

You’ll also need to pick the team, the offense, you trust the most in those small setting and load up. With nine roster spots in each FanDuel game, you’re already guaranteed an average of more than two players per team. FanDuel limits you to no more than four players from a given team, but in such small fields, you probably want to pick a team to perform well and max out.

Those are just a few notes on strategy. Since by the time this goes up, half my field will have played, I don’t really need to break down my picks. I’ll just post my lineup here for mockery: