Today, I’m entering DFS NHL Hockey lineups at three sites, DraftKings, FanDuel, and CoinRoster (which is a bitcoin fantasy site my friends are making).
I’ve never spent much time trying to win at DFS, but I’ll share my results with you over the next few weeks. If you have tips or advice for me, I’d really appreciate it, please comment this post and I’ll reply and take your suggestions into consideration.
My main goal is to gain an edge, any sort of edge, at DFS. I’m not even sure its possible but I’m going to try (that will be what makes it fun). I assume that my competitors are a mix of casual sports fans who like a little sweat while watching the games, but also includes serious DFS players who employ software to crunch numbers. I’m somewhere in between as I won’t initially be employing any software to help me improve the way I play, although I’m open to the idea (if anyone can suggest software that will help me, please leave a reply to this post).
I’m going to keep my risk pretty small initially and I’m going to track my results to determine the volatility of my outcomes. The most computing power that I’ll employ in my quest will be an excel spreadsheet.
The first strategy that comes to mind is to use the odds of the games to help me determine which players to draft. Using Odds Checker, I’ll determine the biggest favourites of the night, and cluster my lineup with players from these games. The idea being that if a team is favoured to win, they are more likely to score more than their opposing team. This might also be how I draft a goalie. Tonight these teams are Penguins (1.57), Blues (1.66), and Jets (1.57).
Next, I’m going to screen for games with the highest likelihood of having the most goals (i.e. games that will go “over”). The idea being that if a team is likely to score a lot of goals, the players on those teams will more likely get the most fantasy points. Odds Checker doesn’t make it easy to view a list of all the total lines, whether the total goals are above or below a certain number, so I consulted Bodog.
The games that are most likely to go “over” 6 goals are Pens/Sabres, Panthers/Sens, and Jets/Canucks. Seeing as two of the three games I’ve identified as most likely to go “over” also contain the highest favourites, I will take this into account when drafting goalie. The first thing that comes to mind, is “who is the Blues goalie tonight”, maybe whoever is playing net for the Blue is who I should choose as my goalie as this player will be on one of the favourite teams, but also one that is less likely to be high scoring.
So the next thing I’m going to do is pick specific games to enter. My only strategy at this point is entering 1 lineup on both DraftKings and FanDuel for a $1 each, and entering $200 worth of lineups on CoinRoster. I’m going to choose a classic scoring format contest on DraftKings with 10 entries and a FanDuel contest with 51 entries.
To determine which goalies were starting, I used DailyFaceoff.com. This tells me Jake Allan is the confirmed starting goalie for the St Louis Blues tonight.
Here is a link to my FanDuel lineup. My DraftKings lineup is the same except instead of Skinner & Guentzel, I used Pettersson. My utility player in DraftKings is Edmundson.
On CoinRoster, their format is a bit different compared to DK and FD, they don’t have goalies, and each lineup is 6 players of any position, so you don’t have to slot in a forward or a d-man specifically. So I entered a number of lineups, click here to view this contest. CoinRoster also has these pools where you can bet on which player will have the most fantasy points, so I entered a couple of bucks there too, click here to see these wagers.
More updates to come later tonight as the games are played.
