Daily contests add to the fun

Build your lineups for the playoffs

Welcome to the “Super Wild Card Weekend” edition of our Post-Gazette Fantasy Favorites series.

Since the summer of 2023, we’ve focused on the many strategies and tactics needed to help you win your seasonlong fantasy football leagues — and some player prop bets along the way.

But there’s another way we can take advantage of our fantasy opponents come winter time: playing weekly Daily FantasySports contests.

As most of you already know, most DFS contest forms comprise selecting a typical fantasy lineup of one QB, two RBs and three WRs, as well as a TE, FLEX and D/ ST. But here’s the wrinkle: each player has a specific salary that you must fit into your team salary cap.

The salary cap ensures that you can’t just jam all of the top superstars in the league into the same lineup. It’s also mostly done to reduce the chance that your lineup in a given contest is duplicated. Therefore, if you win money, you will likely not have to split that specific prize money with another person with the same lineup.

DFS contests on popular websites like DraftKings, FanDuel, Yahoo and Underdog can be played each week, fromthe preseason all the way tothe Super Bowl. So for those of us who have that post-fantasy league itch and need a scratch, playing DFS during the playoffs can be a great way to feed our fantasy hunger and also put ourselves in a position to win some decent cash along the way.

For the sake of brevity in this column, we will focus on only one of the two primary forms of DFS contests: “Guaranteed prize pools,” also knownas GPPs.

Also known simply as “tournaments.”

These top-heavy payout tournaments differ from the standard DFS “cash games,” where 50% of the field gets paid out. A cash game is often done in a head-to-head format, similar to what we’re used to in our fantasy home leagues from week to week. Opponent A faces Opponent B. If there’s no tie (in which case refunds are given), then the winner here would take home roughly 2x the entry fee amount.

There are cash game pros out there who enter thousands of these head-to-head type contests and grind out solid profits from year to year. But they’ll also be the first to tell you that it is indeed a grind and that you’ll never hit the lotto or get a big payout on any given Sunday while playingthese games.

That brings us back to tournaments, which unlike cash games above, typically only pay 10% of an entire field. For example, a $15 contest entry could pit you against 40,000 other lineups in a given tournament.

First place nets $100,000. Second through fourth place gets between $40,000 to $10,000. The list goes on. However, Anyone outside the top 8,000 lineups does not get paid. Some tournaments go even heavier (and more expensive) than this and others that of course go cheaper and lower.

The goal in these tournaments is to keep your lineup as unique as possible. The last thing you want is for a handful of your selected players to explode for 30 points each, only to realize that 50% of your opponents in the field also had those same players.

Uniqueness is key to standing out from the crowd of 40,000 other lineups in this example.

Ask yourself, “What do I win when I win?”

If you force yourselves to be contrarian at one of two positions in your lineup, it can often lead to big payouts in the end and allow yourself an easy out to emerge from a crowded tournament field.

Correlation is also key. There are nine players in your given DFS lineup here, which means you don’t want those nine players to be from nine different teams.

Ask yourself again, “How many times do I need to be right?”

Case in point: we don’t want to force ourselves to “be right” nine different times.

“Stacking” a quarterback with at least two of his passcatchers, for example, allows you to correlate one-third or more of your lineup. If you nail down the fact that Matthew Stafford and the L.A. Rams will rack up 400+ passing yards vs. the Lions, for example, then stacking him with Puka Nacua and Cooper Kupp could allow you to be right on three of your nine DFS lineup positions right off the bat. Throw in Amon-Ra St. Brown as an opponent stack, also known as a “bring back” in your stack, and now you’ve correlated nearly half of your entire lineup.

If the Lions-Rams is a shootout and the pass-catchers go off, there’s a strong chance you lap nearly 75% or more of your opponents..

There are a plethora of additional nuances we can get into when it comes to DFS tournament strategy, many of which we’ll dive into in the coming weeks, as well as into the long NFL offseason.

But for now, let’s focus on some of my favorite DFS tournament lineup strategies for the four SundayMonday games this weekend. Keep in mind that these are DraftKings salaries listed below, which takes into account full PPR scoring:

DFS Tournament Stacks I Love

Matthew Stafford with Puka Nacua, Cooper Kupp and Demarcus Robinson (triplestack)

Jared Goff with Amon-Ra St. Brown and Brock Wright (doublestack)

Jordan Love with Jayden Reed, Dontayvion Wicks and CeeDee Lamb (double stack witha “bring back”)

Dak Prescott with CeeDee Lamb and Jayden Reed (singlestack with a “bring back”)

DFS WR Bargain Bin: Top Values

Brandin Cooks, DAL ($4,900)

Dontayvion Wicks, GB ($4,800)

Demarcus Robinson, LAR ($3,600)

Jameson Williams, DET ($3,500) TreyPalmer, TB ($3,400) KhalilShakir, BUF ($3,400) Trent Sherfield, BUF ($3,300)

BoMelton, GB ($3,300)

DFS Contrarian Plays: Top Values

QB: Baker Mayfield and JalenHurts

RB: Rachaad White, D’Andre Swift, Aaron Jones and NajeeHarris

WR: DeVonta Smith, George Pickens and Diontae Johnson

TE: Dallas Goedert, Tucker Kraftand Cade Otton D/ST:Steelers ($2,600)

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This column is dedicated to the late, great “Gigi” Gianna Maria-Onore Bryant ...