FanDueling For Dollars

Last year, we dabbled with FanDuel as a way to try to cash in on our fantasy football research during the season, with moderate success–this year, we decided to take it a little more serious.  Here’s a few things we’ve picked up on FanDueling so far:

1. One thing we picked up from a friend of ours who has been playing on FanDuel for longer than us is to stick with 50/50 leagues. Obviously payouts aren’t as high as winning a standard league, but all you have to do is finish in the top half of the league. Given that we have the 17th foremost fantasy expert on the whole of the internet in our back pocket, we’re pretty sure that we should finish in the top half of our leagues frequently.
2. We prefer to have at least a couple different leagues going, but we use different lineups in each league rather than the same one in each league. This hedges our bets a bit, in case we are off on one of our player picks.
3. There are numerous approaches to picking your lineups, but the one that we’ve settled on using most frequently is to grab at least a couple of top line starters, then we actually fill in our Defense, Kicker and TE with some mid-tier spots. Then we go back and fill in the rest of our starting offense, generally trying to find 4 guys who are average out the remaining dollars (ie, if we have $28k left, we try to find 4 guys in the $6700-$7300 range, rather than grabbing another guy in the $8k range).  We don’t always stick to that last part, but we try.
4. Generally speaking, we also only set lineups on Sunday morning, rather than trying to jump on Thursday games. No need to end up with Adrian Peterson in your lineup the week that he goes and gets arrested.

Week 1 this year saw great success–we jumped in a couple leagues late Sunday morning, in one league riding Calvin Johnson and AJ Green to #9 out of 100, and Matt Ryan and Matt Forte and some spare parts to a #11 out of 100 in the other.

This week, so far we’re only in one league, riding Andrew Luck and Jamaal Charles as our big dogs–we’ll let you know our remaining picks next week, when we have our results in, but feel free to post your thoughts on who we should be using in the comments below.