DFS Cash Game Primer 2023
Whether you’re brand new to daily fantasy sports (DFS) or are firing five figures per week in an NFL season, this is the right place for you. This piece, and each weekly piece this season by yours truly, will focus on NFL daily fantasy Cash Games. If that term makes no sense to you, do not worry, this is the right piece for you to read. We are going to dive deep. Our first job will be to learn all about cash games for NFL daily fantasy sports and then look at some of the common truths and misconceptions about DFS.
Each week, this piece will focus on cash games on DraftKings and FanDuel, providing some recommended plays and suggested rosters. There are other sites to play DFS such as Yahoo, Drafters, and some variations on Sleeper and Underdog, but the old-school Main Slate roster game is where we will focus.
First, let’s get the basics out of the way with some rules.
Seasonal Fantasy Players Throw the Rules Out the Window
If you’re a season-long redraft or best ball connoisseur, or if you focus more on the betting side of the NFL, DFS will be a totally new game to you that involves totally new skills. The skills needed to understand a roster and what it takes over 18 weeks to build a winner are much different than the skills needed to understand who might smash over one single game at a certain salary. The important thing to know about DFS is that it is a game where you have to take all the skills you developed mock drafting and building rosters and throw them out the window.
Another huge difference in these games will be the number of opponents you have. In your home leagues, maybe you’re playing against nine, 11, or 13 other people. In some of the contests I will recommend to you, there might be hundreds or thousands of opponents. But don’t fret. You’re always playing against the parameters of salary and roster construction, not against the other players.
What are Cash Games and How Do They Differ From Tournaments?
I am primarily a cash game player in DFS. That means I tend to stick to contests where more than 33% of the field in a contest is paid out for the slate. Typically when you hear “cash game,” you think of two things: double-ups and 50/50s.
Double-ups refer to the amount of money you win if you are in the top 45% or so of these contests. In these, winners double their money. Probably the most popular cash game on DraftKings is the Massive $25 Double Up contest. In this one, there are 4,597 entrants and the top 2,000 scores get twice their money back (or $50). Don’t want to start out playing a $25 contest? That’s just fine, there are large $10, $5, and $2 contests available as well.
The 50/50 contests refer to the number of people who win. In these games, 50% of the field will win, and get 1.8x their money back. So, if you enter the DraftKings 20-person $10 50/50 contest, 10 people are going to get $18 at the end.
On sites like DraftKings and FanDuel, I vastly prefer the Double-Up contest because a) you win more money, and b) they usually have a much larger number of entries. Why is this important? Simply put, the more people in the contest, the more people there are who can do dumb stuff and just become easy parts of the rake (the amount the site takes before they distribute winnings).
I also strongly advise new cash game players to start with Single Entry contests only. These are games where everyone can only enter one lineup in the game. The best cash game players in the world play multi-entry cash games where they can fire 100 entries at a time, and that minimizes the chances for less experienced players to pass those teams.
What Are Facts and Fiction About DFS Cash Games?
DFS Cash is: A level playing field for fantasy
In every redraft and dynasty seasonal league, there are always constraints on the players we can use. In redraft, seasonal league, you cant’ draft both Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase. You want to do that in DFS? Go right ahead. You might need to be prepared to roster Salvon Ahmed as one of your running backs, but that’s your choice.
DFS Cash is not: A place to play only the best players
Since DFS is always a salary cap game. It’s a balancing act of rostering high-dollar players who will most assuredly score massive amounts of points with lower-dollar players who can have a strong point-per-dollar return. In just about every slate, there are going to be “chalk” players. These are the guys whose matchup is do good or their salary compared to their expected level of production is so appealing, a large percentage of people have them on their rosters.
Take, for example, Week 1 salaries on DraftKings. Two of the most popular plays in cash games are likely to be Austin Ekeler ($8,400 on DK) and Jahan Dotson ($5,000 on DK). Why is that the case? Ekeler plays the Dolphins who allowed the most receiving touchdowns and the seventh-most receiving yards to running backs last year. On a full PPR site like DraftKings, he looks to be in a very good spot. On the other end of the salary spectrum, we have Jahan Dotson. The Commanders play the clearly-tanking Cardinals, Terry McLaurin is unlikely to play in this one meaning Dotson should see plenty of targets. At just $5,000 he is a smash play.
Consider this roster that I played in Week 12 last year.
This is a good lineup to reflect a lot of the realities of DFS cash games. The first would be the inclusion of guys like Jeff Wilson, Jr. and Samaje Perine. These are not guys you would normally play, but they got oversized roles thanks to injuries to Raheem Mostert and Joe Mixon. The second would be that my second-most expensive player (Mark Andrews) scored my lowest point total. Sometimes that just doesn’t work how you want it to. And lastly, look at the percentages of some of these players who are rostered. Almost all of the thousands of people in this contest rostered Jeff Wilson and Rachaad White. If you didn’t, you started behind the eight ball, particularly with White considering his salary.
DFS Cash is: A way to leverage matchups, usage, and context
One great thing about football is how unpredictable the games can be and often are. This is something smart DFS players use to their advantage. Just because Vegas says a game has a high 52.5 implied total doesn’t necessarily mean that many points will be scored. Likewise, a game with only a 44.5 over/under could easily crush the over, and many DFS players will have avoided it because of the low total. Use your own discretion when thinking about a game’s flow and its likely outcomes.
Novice DFS players often use numbers like over/under projections and median player projections as gospel and let them drive all of their decisions. If you feel strongly about a certain game script, or a series or players and their role within a game, feel free to use that in your roster building. I have seen many people (including myself) pay good money for player projections and a DFS lineup optimizer only to be disappointed because all they did was regurgitate the lineup it spit out each week.
DFS Cash is not: The place to get cute with contrarian players
If you play large tournaments, GPPs, or any contest with high multi-entry, you will run into what’s known as the contrarian strategy. They are looking for players who have almost no roster percentage but put up massive scores. It’s a low-probability outcome, so let them wade into those waters. Research has shown that many large field tournament winners often have multiple players who were less than 5% rostered. For cash games, that doesn’t matter nearly as much.
You don’t ever want to get too cute. Back to Jahan Dotson in Washington for a moment for 2023 Week 1. He is a strong value play at $5,000, but it is certainly not a lock that he scores 15+ DraftKings points. Let’s say you want to get different and pivot off of him where you find wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk for the same salary. He will certainly be less rostered, but what’s the more likely outcome? Aiyuk travels across the country to play in Pittsburgh and has target competition from Deebo Samuel, George Kittle, and Christian McCaffrey. Dotson will most likely have the highest target share for Washington and he gets a home game against the worst team in the NFL (at least from the oddsmakers’ perspectives). The right move in cash games is to go to Dotson even though he will have a massive roster percentage. You can always get different in other spots that don’t have as much of a binary outcome attached.
DFS Cash is: A game where you have to stay on top of injury and inactive news
Trust me, I know what it’s like in your home league. It’s Week 11 and you’re playing the guy who has already given up. You might be out for brunch on Sunday with the lady after setting your lineup and one of your guys is a surprise inactive. You have a choice to make. Run to the restroom and change our your lineup, or just leave it. That choice is no longer yours when you play DFS. Leaving one zero spot in your roster, especially if it’s a player who will be highly rostered could mean death for your lineup. You get a bad score or a zero from a player who was supposed to give you decent production? That happens. But taking an airball from a player because you aren’t paying close enough attention? That’s going to leave you below the cutline every time.
DFS Cash is not: The place to pay up for defense/special teams
Just don’t do it. There will always be a team under $3,000 in a good spot. Don’t waste your valuable dollars on something as volatile as defensive stats.
Each Week We Will Give You the Best Cash Game Plays
Each week this season, this column will attempt to provide you with the best options for quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, and defenses in cash. We will look at both expensive and value options for roster construction. It will never be a definitive or exhaustive list of the “good” or “best” plays, but will hopefully be a data-driven look at the main slate. It also will not be able to judge your own risk tolerance for a certain game or particular player, so take it all with a grain of salt. I’ll provide a sample roster for each week on the two main sites, but it will be frozen in time around Thursday nights and a lot of news happens between then and Sunday kickoff. For the archive of last year’s columns including how I placed in all my contests, please look here.
Hopefully, if you are playing DFS cash games this year, this will be one more tool in your belt to help you build winning lineups. Feel free to reach out on X (@CableBoxScore) if you have any DFS-related questions. Also, feel free to send me a head-to-head matchup on DraftKings. My username is rmkirksey and you’ll recognize me by the FantasyData logo!
Good luck in daily fantasy this season and see you next Friday for Week 1!
