DFS Best Value Contests

Where’s the Value?

Each week the main sites in Daily Fantasy gaming – your DraftKings, your FanDuels – offer up stacks of contests and tournaments which you can enter at your leisure.

But with so many different options, knowing where to invest your cash can be tricky.

So we thought we’d compile a guide to the DFS best value contests for DFS gamers to enjoy. Whether you are operating on a budget, or fancy yourself as a high roller, read on.

Prize Money vs Field Size

Look, we all want to win mega bucks while playing DFS, but is it realistic? The answer is a tentative yes, but there are a number of caveats to that.

The best advice we can give advanced DFS players is to build a bankroll. In doing so, you will have a war chest of funds with which to launch an assault on the mega-prize contests.

Keep that analogy of building in mind as we show you two examples of contests:

Here, our buy-in is set at $27, and often we are seduced by that whopping top prize of $2,500. That would be very nice indeed.

But this is a 770-team guaranteed prize contest, and so your chances of winning stand at, you guessed it, 1/770 – or less than 1%, in layman’s terms. Could you win the contest? Sure, but you would need your roster to perform expertly.

You can’t see this on the screenshot, but the bottom rung of prizes is $50 for entries finishing 101st-125th. So, you’ll need to finish inside the top 16% to even lay your hands on a prize.

 

Good Value? Not Really.

 

Here’s a different kind of contest; the Double-Up. As the name suggests, you can double your money just for finishing inside the top 45%.

So that’s a payout of $50 for finishing in the top half…compare and contrast that to the Guaranteed Prize contest above, where you need to finish inside the top 16% to snaffle the same $50 prize.

In a discussion about the best value DFS contests, clearly the smaller the field size, the better your chances of pocketing a decent profit.

DFS Best Value Contests: Multi-Entry Madness

The above statement is correct on a level playing field, as in single entry contests. Here it’s one on one with no discernible advantage to anybody.

But in multi-entry contests the edge is very much with those who buy-in at the full amount. Think about a lottery: you can win the jackpot with one ticket, but if you have ten tickets – each with different combinations of numbers, then your chance of winning the top prize has just increased by x10.

And the same is true of Daily Fantasy.

When it comes to drawing up your shortlist of players for your draft, and that could be Soccer, American Football, Baseball, Golf, or any other DFS for that matter, you may find that you have a shortlist of 15 players to go into a six-man draft.

Here’s what you do: you create multiple line-ups featuring different combinations of players on your shortlist. Think about the lottery example again; the more line-ups you have, the more chances you have of winning big.

So draft 50% of your roster from guys you just know are going to play well in that gameweek. Then rotate the rest of your drafts with the other players on your ‘maybe’ list; and remember the key: finding those ‘sleeper’ picks that few other DFS managers will draft.

In Conclusion

Refer back to the first contest outlined above, and imagine if you played all 20 of your multi-entry options.

Your outlay would be $540, but you would only need 5 of your 20 teams to finish in the top 50 to break even – and your chances of winning the $2.5k jackpot increase by 20x.

In the short term, attack those Double-Ups and Head-to-Heads. These are the DFS best value contests and they will help you to build a nice bankroll.

You can enter these contests at DraftKings or FanDuel. Both DFS operators offer a great selection of games and contests and will also give you a nice bonus for your first deposit!

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