Editor’s Note: FanDuel is running a $1,500,000 fantasy football league in Week 15. The top 66,000 teams win cash with $100,000 paid to first place on Sunday. Join now!
FanDuel advice: Playing in small-field games
We have four teams playing Thursday and Saturday this week that don’t have a lot of great FanDuel options.
Thomas J. Russo-USA TODAY Sports
I’ll often highlight the difference between playing tournaments in FanDuel fantasy football and playing 50/50 or similar games. Ultimately, if you find the best players each week, you’ll win any game you play, but of course you won’t always do that.
In short, the difference: In a 50/50, there’s no scales to winning. If you finish in the top half of players, you win the same money for first as you do for last winner. So you don’t need a boom-or-bust guy, one as likely to get you zero points as 30. You want a running back who will get all his team’s carries, a wide receiver who doesn’t rely on the big plays. But for tournaments, prizes is scaled to the top, so you need home-run plays. A guy getting eight is not that much better than a guy getting you zero, so you want someone who can do all out.
In even shorter, in 50/50s, you want quantity. In tournaments, you want quality.
Well, this week, there’s a game where, literally, I don’t think there’s any difference between the two. I’ve discussed playing small-field FanDuel games before, and this week, with Saturday games starting, is one of my favorites: The Thursday/Saturday field.
There's no guarantees a Thursday/Saturday field will be bad. Theoretically, Thursday/Saturday can feature New England, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Arizona, and we're all bathing in points. But reality is, there are two Thursday/Saturday fields this season. This week, we have St. Louis, Tampa Bay, the Jets and Dallas, and next week, we have San Diego, Oakland, Washington and Philadelphia. Bad fields all.
When the fields are garbage like this, first, you don't have to spend all your money. You can, and it's all well and good, but sometimes every dollar just doesn't get spent. And second, these fields don't really lend themselves to quantity or quality. You just want production.
For this week’s Thursday/Saturday field, I ran an experiment and built a roster with literally the highest-priced option at every position. Just to see if I could play that roster and be done with it. As it turns out, not quite. The highest-priced players go over-budget by around four grand. The same strategy on a full-weekend game blows past budget by more than $12,000.
When it’s that tight, you don’t get to be picky about quantity/quality, boom-or-bust, whatever. You find a lineup. This week, at least as far as Thursday/Saturday is concerned, my tournament lineup and my 50/50 lineup? They’re the same:
See More:
