Daily Fantasy Football Strategy: Week 2's best FanDuel lineup, Week 3 advice

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Daily Fantasy Football Strategy: Week 2's best FanDuel lineup, Week 3 advice image

Looking for tips and strategy advice to field a winning FanDuel lineup? We have you covered every week so you can maximize your prize potential in daily fantasy football contests and tournaments.

The theme for NFL DFS in Week 2 was fairly clear: Elite wide receivers paid off and elite running backs ticked us off. Aside from Adrian Peterson, no other high-priced RB was worth owning on the Sunday slate. You would have been much better off with the likes of Dion Lewis and DeAngelo Williams.

MORE: Best Week 3 FanDuel tournament lineup | Cash game lineupWeek 3 DFS values

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Antonio Brown simply has the highest floor of any player right now, so look for his price and ownership levels to continue to rise. He’s in Clayton Kershaw-territory for me. Fade him in cash games at your own risk. I was able to get away with paying slightly less for Odell Beckham Jr. this week, but I will try to build my cash-game lineups around Brown until the price gets too high.

In order to win a large GPP — like the Sunday Million on FanDuel — you needed to correctly hit on one or more of the cheap wide receivers that excel. Larry Fitzgerald, Travis Benjamin, or Allen Robinson were found on many rosters at the top of the leader boards in Week 2, along with a trio of Steelers. There were many GPP-winning stacks of Roethlisberger/A. Brown/ D. Williams, which has some elementary and clear negative correlation. This was very frustrating because owning a trio of QB/RB/WR from the same team isn’t the ideal way to construct a GPP team, yet it worked.  Lets chalk Week 2 up as an outlier and move on with a clean slate for Week 3.

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Odds are you didn’t score anywhere close to the 209 points it took to win the $1,000,000 first place prize, so let's instead analyze a more attainable scoring lineup. This week I’m going to break down my best lineup from Week 2 — not because it’s outstanding, rather because it's a more common score and I can take you inside my game selection. This will perhaps be the most important message I deliver during the entire football season, so if you take away just one piece of info, it's that game selection is crucial to your bankroll. 

I work in Finance, and the widely held theory is that asset allocation is more important to an investment portfolio's return than the actual stocks selected. Drawing a parallel to DFS, I’d argue that game selection is more important than the actual players owned. Sure, you know that entering tournaments and cash games is important, but do you really know how your payout will be altered given different scores in these tournaments?

To help emphasize the importance of single-entry contests, I’ve compared the returns for both my lineup and varying scoring points in the $25 Sunday Million (multi-entry with 215,385 lineups) vs. the $25 NFL Sweep (single entry with 1,839 lineups). For the second week in a row my cash-game lineup was a loser — I’m looking at you, Sam Bradford — but thankfully I’ve had a great start to the NFL season with good results from tournament teams.

Below is a picture of my Week 2 team. Ignore my efforts at live finals and redundancy in the lower buy-in GPP’s; instead, focus on the return in the two $25 games. 

See our optimal Week 3 FanDuel lineup for big-money tournaments here

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Pretty simple roster construction, huh? I chose the best WRs and surrounded them with low-priced No. 1 RBs and a QB/TE combo. However, we’re not focused on the roster, rather the variance in returns. At the same scoring level, my single-entry tournament returned $250 on a $25 entry compared to a $100 return in the Sunday Million. By sacrificing the upside of having one more entry into the Sunday Million, I was able to increase my return $150, or 2.5x, by entering a smaller tournament. The Sunday Million even had some overlay, which will certainly go away in the coming weeks, increasing the importance of also entering smaller tournament fields. 

MORE: Why "overlays" are important in DFS

Maybe the $150 difference wasn’t enough to sway your opinion? Let's take a look at a slightly higher score. The winner of the single-entry NFL Sweep scored 166.86 points, beating the field of 1,839 and claiming $5,000. That same user placed 177th in the Sunday Million, earning $1,000 in that contest. The same lineup, with the same $25 buy-in, varied in payout by $4,000 simply due to game selection by the user. Going even further, 177.6 points were needed in the Sunday Million to return $5,000, whereas only 166.86 were needed to win the same amount in the single-entry NFL Sweep.

Single-entry isn’t the only answer. Another way to reduce the number of your opponents is to increase your buy-in levels. Obviously this is restrictive to your bankroll, but you could likely enter two $10 tournaments instead of 10 $2 tournaments.

Game selection is absolutely critical. Regardless of whether you’ve won or lost during the first two weeks, analyze your game selection to ensure it also includes single-entry and smaller-field tournaments for Week 3.

As always, best of luck this week. 

Editor's note: The Sporting News Football Championship is here! Hosted by FanDuel, this exclusive event will feature 10 weeks of qualifiers, culminating in a FREE Week 11 Final with $20,000 in prizes. Sign up now!  

Sporting News contributor maddox2 has been playing Daily Fantasy Sports for two years and was a finalist in the 2015 Playboy Basketball Championship. When not tending to his full-time job in Finance, he's grinding DFS all year long in the three major sports. Follow him @maddox2DFS on Twitter.

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