Beer Money Bets | Making a Process for NFL DFS Pt. 8

I am still tilting after my DFS play this last week. I spent all last week building up this process as profitable and finished and what did I do? I did not follow my process. If you read along last week, I changed my process slightly because of the high salaries I had to deal with and didn’t play Davante Adams. I wrote the process on Thursday and at that point Aaron Jones looked probable to play and so bending my process seemed the optimal thing to do. Then Aaron Jones was out. A piece of news that substantial, especially to a team with a top implied total, should have made me rerun my process with the new information. Jamaal Williams had a higher value than Alvin Kamara, and I would have been able to play Calvin Ridley and Davante Adams. I checked it out and I would have scored 215.14 and FINISHED 42ND IN THE CONTEST. So there are two very important lessons that came out of this last week:

1. Update your lineup Sunday morning for injury news. 
2. TRUST. THE. PROCESS.

Okay, enough tilting. I think that is an adequate analysis of last week’s play and onto revising an old process. If you read last week, you would have also seen that I threw my old showdown process out. I have been thinking all week and I was attacking showdowns without any sort of theoretical backing and was going straight to analyzing numbers and it was doing horribly. So I am going to back up and try and spitball some theory about how to create a new showdown process and see if anything sticks. 

I am going to start with what many people consider the most difficult part of a showdown contest, choosing a captain. The obvious choice is to choose the highest scoring player. The major issue with that is on DraftKings, which will most likely be one of the highest-priced players and set you back 25-30% of your salary on a single player. For example, in the Ravens and Steelers game, I have Lamar with the most projected points. If I wanted to put him in as the captain, it would cost me 35.4% of my salary. I think it is really important to realize what a captain adds to your team. I think there are two arguments to be made when choosing one and the thoughts behind it:

1. Select a player that is going to be one of the top-scoring players in the game: This will likely be the more expensive option and will be fairly safe. To think about this concept, as a captain you are getting an extra half a player. A way to think about it is assuming Lamar Jackson scores his projection of 19.8, him as captain would be worth a $5,900 player that scores 9.8 points. While this makes you have less overall salary, you’re paying up to get more elite production. That being said, if this player underperforms, you’re losing a lot. If Lamar scores 13.3 as he has twice this season, you’re paying $5,900 for 6.65 points extra. 
2. Select a player that is going to outperform their salary the most: This is the high risk/high reward play. Using the same idea from the previous point, J.K. Dobbins costs $2,900 to captain for 4.5 added projected points. If Dobbins outscores his projection of 9 PPR points by 5 points, you’re getting another 2.5 points, so a total of 7 points, for only $2,900. If Dobbins disappoints, let’s say only scored 5 points, you are paying $2,900 for 2.5 points. While that doesn’t sound great, spending less on Dobbins as a captain most likely meant you could fit another high salary player into your lineup. 

After this quick analysis, my conclusion is to avoid high priced captains unless there are obvious cheap players to play. An example would be in a game where a starter was ruled out midweek and so a backup is cheaper than they should be and Green Bay and Jamaal Williams are a good example from last week. Whereas, in other games where there isn’t an obvious cheap play, I would go with captaining an overachiever option. This will maximize the salary you can use on top players. To give some plays this week, I am going to make two different lineups for Ravens vs Steelers based on these two theories and see which works out the best. 

Check back next week to see which of these lineups performs better. Good luck this week and if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter @bpofsu. Also for all of your DFS needs, check out Paulie’s DFS Sleepers and Michael Reedy’s Money Makers and Heart Breakers here at The Undroppables.