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FanDuel advice: Leaving money on the table
In the smaller fields, sometimes you spend what you spend and you can’t spend anymore.
Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports
When I play FanDuel fantasy football, especially if it’s a Sunday or all-weekend game, I want to spend every dollar, or at least come close. Every hundred dollars left on the table is, in theory, a missed opportunity.
For example, if you have $100 left, maybe you can upgrade your wide receiver. Or maybe you don’t like the $100-more wide receivers, so you downgrade your kicker by $200, and can upgrade your wide receiver by $300. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and while you can (and many do) succeed by spending $59,900 or $59,800 or even $58,200, I always try to at least get as close to $60,000 as possible.
But that’s for a full field. In a FanDuel contest that encompasses 10, 12, 15 games, there are four or five guys at just about every price point. That means you can tweak at the edges, as described a paragraph ago, to your heart’s content.
Not so in the small fields. On Thursday, there are three games (and that’s why I’m doing roster advice here, flip-flopping it’s normal schedule in the week, for the zero of you who care about what day I write which piece), and in a FanDuel field with three games, the plan changes.
Here’s my roster for the Thanksgiving tournament:
I left $1,600 on the table. I could have spent most, if not all, of it — just for one roster spot, I could upgrade Ted Ginn Jr. to Jordan Matthews and been done with it. Eddie Lacy could become Darren McFadden. Or I could just barely upgrade three or four different spots and burn through that money.
The problem: I think Ginn is a better option than Matthews, despite the difference in salaries. I think McFadden is probably a better play than Lacy, but he’ll also be used in orders of magnitude more rosters than Lacy, meaning there’s no advantage to using him. The small tweaks just didn’t offer the better plays I was hoping for. So I’m leaving the $1,600 on the table. (For now; by the times the games start I might change my mind or move things around. Never commit earlier than you have to.)
And $1,600 isn't even the worst. In Week 16 of last year, the Thursday night game was Jacksonville/Tennessee, and the Saturday night one was Philadelphia/Washington. It was, as I wrote at the time, the world's saddest FanDuel player pool. In that particular tournament, I left four grand on the table. (To be fair, I finished nowhere near the money in that game, but to be fair-er, the player who won left $1,700 unused, and is also named Daniel. So there.)
In the big-field games, you want to spend every dollar you can. In the smaller ones, all you want to do is make a roster. Sometimes the money doesn’t spend itself.
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