NFL Week 1 – Leverage Lane | DraftKings & FanDuel DFS Strategy

Can I make this work or anything like that? You don't have to guess anymore. I've got the data in the Discord where you just look at the data and you say, okay, very clearly, pairing a quarterback... With the stack in this way and using this type of bring back is a winning strategy. And now all I have to do is go find the stacks that actually fit that mold and do so well. So yeah, that's definitely a big part of it.

And then also everything I have over at Black Analytics now, the contest sim, the new and improved GPPGPP (Guaranteed Prize Pool)A GPP is a tournament whose prize pool is guaranteed to pay out in full even if the contest does not fill. Payouts are steep: a small group at the top wins most of the money.Before you enter a tournament lineup, ask how it finishes first, not just how it cashes. If you cannot name that scenario, rebuild it.Full explanation ↗ scores, like all of it, I think just really in a good place. And I'd also say that because I've been working on my own thing for so long now, every other kind of NFL season has felt like a rush to get started and to just make sure everything's ready on time. And this time around, I had contest sims up and running last Tuesday or something like that.

So yeah, it's been a long time coming at this point, and I kind of can't believe that we're already there because it feels like just a week ago that we were watching the Tour Championship and we were still two and a half weeks away from the start of the season. But here we are, and I can't wait to get going.

Yeah, just a week ago, we were actually doing a cohort with the AI DFS people, and I appreciate everybody that checked that out. So if you guys want more of that in the future, let us know. If you guys are longtime watchers of Leverage Lane, let the people know in the chat. Leave the comment below after we're done with the live session here, and let them know your thoughts on this show. We think it's going to be a really fun season.

Before we get into it quickly, just going to run through fast on our end, because a couple things. If you're already a Ship It Nation member... I'm going to tag the Discord one more time. And that's it. The promo, the secret promo, the backend promo member only, et cetera, with the SaberSim and founding family, two point old promos for starter or founding family ends tomorrow morning. There's no exceptions. If you're late, you miss. It's not to be rude.

We've given you all the time in the world. A lot of people like to procrastinate. We know that. With the survivor contests out there on Splash, et cetera. But just keep in mind, if you want that, the early bird special, if you're trying to get the entire season for just NFL only and include SaberSim, not even SaberSim.com can give you NFL single sport. So for three forty nine, you get everything. We've simplified it.

It's showdown projections, ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗, the stone and Stone 2.0 point oh, which we'll get to later. The Slate Station, which will go live this afternoon right after the show, the value report from our man Rio. And then as the weeks go on, we'll get you the DVP rankings. You can see little social proof. If you click Winner's Circle on the main page, you can see the four Millimaker winners. We've had all the $100,000 scores, $10,000 scores, et cetera.

Won't bore you with those, but our members do win. And then Ship It Games. It's the coolest thing in the DFS industry. No other site does anything like this. None I know of are even giving away a mega ticket. For week one. And that's only one tenth of what we're giving away, which is $45,000 in cash and prizes. It's a community contest. Every all access and NFL only member is eligible.

Go to ShipItGames.com or ShipItNation.com and click the $45,000 one hundred forty seven dollars at the top. You can see how it works, but there's ways to boost this prize pool up even more. One lucky winner from the Ship It Nation community that's with us this season will come away with ten grand cold hard cash, if not more, because there's a way to boost it.

$5,000 for second $2,500 nobody in the top ten will come away with less than a thousand dollars and bonus prizes from SaberSim.com all right alex I do want to show this off funny enough you said something about like um like hopefully it starts off this way hopefully but you know I recall last year seventh place in the mega milli for the for the man jim blickle over there You had yourself a year and I want to show this off quickly for people because this is interesting.

And I think it's going to start the conversation for where we're going this year. Everyone knows with week one in NFL DFS, there's a ton of, I know everything. And then there's also a ton of, well, the projections tell me this. So I'm just going this way no matter what. And then for you and for me, a lot of it comes down to game theory first.

LeverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ putting that stuff together so that okay we can use some of this some of that but my knowledge isn't necessarily what I know about a player it's maybe what I know about how DFS players play how we can play against that and some of the strategies and the data that you've got now so we've got a partnership at dfsos.com very simple url to go check out you can use code ship it to get half price so you get uh down to I'll show you here though alex this is pretty cool So I went here.

Once you're in the dashboard and you're a member, it starts, it's fully customizable to whatever you want. I just went slate review. I changed it already. So it saves my settings, but you can change it. I went twenty twenty five NFL. I'm going back to that Sunday. I loaded the mega milli and right there, Peter Gibbons got the job done. But You're only nine points back or so. And I'll let you talk about it in a second.

Now your lineups there, but also I'll show this off quickly. I went to player profiles. I typed in Jim Blickle. I'm going to save the time for everybody because it's already there in my thing. And then I went view line. I just went back to September. I sorted by your biggest win, which was the $50,000. I clicked the view lineups button. This has five years worth of data on here, but there's your team, my friend. And man, what a glaring hit that is.

I don't know if Nico Collins ever put up less than six points and he was, you know, not cheap either. So it's like that got to be hurtful, but talk to us just a little bit about your strategy from this maybe and bringing it across because I know we're going to talk a lot about this week and it's still week one, different people, different prices, different landscapes, coaching, et cetera. But talk to me a little bit about this and that experience.

Yeah, I mean, for one thing, that was really cool. I had won that ticket in the Tour Championship last year, so I gave myself a chance to really make some noise off the bat and unfortunately was able to capitalize on that. And anybody who hasn't watched a ton of Leverage Lane before, one of the things that Tambo and I talk a ton about is the full satellite strategy, trying to give yourself access to more DFS ceiling without having to actually increase...

The amount that you're putting into lineups. Instead, you just try to win those tickets. And then when you get the tickets, obviously you get a chance to make some real noise. And so was very, very happy with the start of that. And I think the cool part about this lineup is it did a couple of things that I talked about a lot last season, just from a strategic standpoint. Things that I'm still going to be talking about all of this season.

The first of which that I'll point to is the Emeka-Abuka play. If you remember, and obviously for some people it's going to be hard to remember, this was exactly a year ago now, but Abuka was really, really cheap. He was very, very popular. And on the other side of that game, they were playing Atlanta. Drake London was extremely popular.

And one of my biggest takes coming into the game was that, hey, No one's really going to stack that game, but there are going to be a ton of Ibuka-London combinations, pairings, I should say. And so if you play just one of them as a one-off, you're going to get much lower conditional ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗ on that player than you would expect given his actual ownership. And that really came true for...

For Abuka and, you know, Drake London was very underwhelming in the game. He wasn't as underwhelming as Nico Collins, so maybe I would have been better off with London instead of Nico. But I do feel like that was a big part of the lineup. And then the second thing was just trying to be ahead of the curve on some team-level stuff. Obviously, like... I played the Colts here. I was not making a bet on the Colts being great throughout the season.

I was making more of a bet on their opponent, Miami, having a historically bad defense. Both kind of came true. So that's why I think that sack was so successful. And obviously, part of today's show, I think, is going to be about, okay, well...

Who, which offense this year can be the version of last year's Colts that right now we're not thinking much of their offense, but come week six, week seven, it's like, wow, you know, everyone is at least a thousand dollars more expensive. And we just have a ton more confidence in that team than we do at this moment in time. Yeah, and this is my topic of the week. So again, people are just joining us for the first ever.

What we try and do is give like an evergreen conversation at the start of the week. Week one, we're gonna have some fun. We're hyped up. You can tell the passion's always there, but the extra little bit of excitement, almost like Christmas day, Christmas Eve, ready for tomorrow, whatever holiday you might celebrate, just saying, getting excited. Or one thing I noted right away, by the way, was, you know, this ownership looks right now. You said Ibuka extremely popular. He was like forty one percent fine.

But how do you get away with that? Not who you play. It's how you play them. Well, your entire stack, Jones, Pittman and Warren was all under nine percent. Quarterback ownership's always spread out, but basically under five percent for the two stack pairings. And then the defense was almost basically five percent. And Nico and CMC, two studs that exactly. Again, whether it worked out or not, I get it with Nico and any other game for the season.

You probably win the million bucks with that score, but ifs and buts, candies and nuts, we know that one. So my point being, you really did find a way to play this different. I believe, if I recall correctly, you did just have the one lineup off the ticket that you'd won. I think you mentioned that, but you mentioned the tour championship or something. You got it.

It was exciting because it's kind of the wraparound, which we do now of golf and then football. You get to bring it all across.

But I wanted to talk a little bit today, going through – dms mastermind and over at ship it and everything with your you know folks over in your Discord like single entrySingle-EntryA single-entry contest allows each user exactly one lineup. It can be a cash game or a tournament.In single-entry, one or two contrarian decisions are usually enough. Pair a strong, popular core with a lower-owned piece instead of fading everything the field likes.Full explanation ↗ versus one lineup and people are like what what do you mean or like how does that work or what are you talking about it's it's like the people don't always connect that I think it's the exact same thing but you are still going up against like this week the mega Milly has maxed but seven hundred and fifty possible seats.

So there is going to be multiple people that have twenty two entries in that thing. So how do you go about it when you're in a tournament like this and you only have one lineup? Of course, what you're doing could apply and be brought across to single entrySingle-EntryA single-entry contest allows each user exactly one lineup. It can be a cash game or a tournament.In single-entry, one or two contrarian decisions are usually enough. Pair a strong, popular core with a lower-owned piece instead of fading everything the field likes.Full explanation ↗. But I think it's more important to remember, too. Sometimes people get into a single entry or have one lineup and say, got to tighten up. Min cashMin-CashA min-cash is the smallest prize in a contest, earned by finishing just inside the paid places. In tournaments it is usually a small multiple of the entry fee.Do not judge a tournament slate by how many lineups min-cashed. Track your top finishes, since that is where tournament profit actually comes from.Full explanation ↗ is huge. It's game changing.

I got this off a hundred dollar ticket or a seventy dollar or thirty seven, whatever it is. I just got to get a min cash, but anything else would be gravy on top. But then they build a lineup that's backed into a corner with the people with twenty two lineups have like three of that version of what you got. You most certainly did not do that running six guys at a nine under ten percent.

Yeah, I don't mean to jump ahead a little bit to start talking about the chalkChalkChalk is the most popular, highly owned play on a slate. The term comes from sports betting, where the favorite is called the chalk.Don't label chalk good or bad. Ask whether each popular play deserves its ownership, then decide which chalk you'll eat and which you'll fade.Full explanation ↗ builder, the chalk stack. But, you know, it's. Take this week, for example. If you have one lineup in the four, four, four, four, you're going up against so many different lineups that are stacking this Detroit and New Orleans game in some way. We're like, let's say you even think, all right, I'm going to I'm going to do it in a little bit of a contrarianContrarianA contrarian play or lineup is one built around choices most of the field will not make, such as low-owned players, unpopular teams or an unusual salary structure.Pick one or two contrarian spots per lineup and ground each in a real reason. The rest of the roster can look like the field.Full explanation ↗ way.

I'm going to go golf, Jamison Williams. I'm on Ross St. Brown. I'm going to bring back with Vele and Jawan Johnson instead of a lot of, you know, anything like that.

The thing you have to recognize is you're going up against so many different combinations and different iterations from that game, and then also different combinations and iterations around that game of however people are stacking that, that with only one lineup, it's really, really hard for you to get it right in a way that no one else gets it right.

If you instead go to a stack equivalent of last year's Daniels Jones stack, Um, Michael Pittman, Tyler Warren, which by the way, like that was also deviating off of the, the most popular pass catcher on Indianapolis.

Now it's not like he was chalk or anything, but he was, I think like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, I think if you looked at the top of the board, um, I, I can't exactly remember, but I don't even think that. There were many – I don't think there was anyone else near the top that had Tyler Warren. I don't think there was anyone else near the top.

Maybe someone had Pittman, but maybe no one else had Jones and Pittman. So I can't exactly remember. I've got it right here. There were more Jones than I remembered. But as you can see, most of these – yeah, it was just Jones, Pittman. Yeah. So all I needed was Warren. All I needed was Nico Collins. So yeah, it made it a lot easier for me to climb the board because I wasn't competing with a massive amount of different iterations of my own lineup.

If my own lineup did really well, if my own lineup was close to the thing that you needed, I knew that there were going to be very few competitors that I was up against near the top. And you talk a lot about in the past too, like inverse correlationCorrelationCorrelation describes how two players' fantasy scores move together. Positively correlated players tend to have big games at the same time, usually because one player's success directly adds points for the other.When you build a tournament lineup, ask which of your players need the same thing to happen. The more of them that do, the higher your lineup's ceiling.Full explanation ↗, like looking at like, again, a lot of people, especially in week one, here's the most common theme, right? Everyone's going to say the same thing. And it's true. We get it. We believe it too.

We live and breathe and die in these streets every single day. So it's like, we get it. But pricing came out July thirty first. Therefore, we're super mispriced. There's five dollar, eight hundred thousand Person tournaments to fill up on DraftKings, similar on FanDuel, et cetera, et cetera. We focus mostly on DraftKings here, but just noting it, we get all that. But on Monday, when I do takedown breakdown at ten a.m. Eastern on this station. So, again, subscribe to the channel.

If you don't already, all the shows are free. That's where someone's going to sit in that chat room and YouTube chat and say. Well, damn, that doesn't even look that crazy. But it actually might be. It's like you were on some of those spots, yes, but you also were like you were in a lot of the right places because certain things happened, but you didn't end up on the right players.

And so I've seen you do this a bunch of times where it's like – you know, everyone's on JT, you're on the stack. You know, everyone's, we'll talk about this week, but you're looking at what others are doing and just applying it in a different way because no one really knows anything. You do need the right players at the end of a DFS week. But to me, it's always the right picks and plays are a result of the process.

Like you build accordingly and then the outcomes happen. So that's how I look at it. I mean, it's actually like as we as we were talking through this, you know, I'm remembering things that were going through my mind when I when I built that lineup. And one of the big ones was that Jonathan Taylor was really popular.

And for those who can't remember, like this was a game where Taylor was doing really well in the first half and then like barely even played in the second half and came out that he was. Like kind of injured, but, but fine and could have finished the game, but they were just up a lot. So he didn't. Um, but, but certainly like the leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ off of Jonathan Taylor was a big reason why I played that lineup.

And actually I can't remember which of the, of the guys ahead of me, it was, but one of them had something like, and Jonathan Taylor was in of the and then the other two were Daniels Jones lineups that stacked the, the offense without using Jonathan Taylor. And it was exactly what, what you're kind of referring to.

They're like, they're, they're trying to, even though they're, they're making like a huge, uh, stance on one player and Jonathan Taylor, when they don't have him, it's not just a different idea. Like just in case he fails, it's like, okay, that lineup is going to tell the exact story of how he failed. And it's the Daniels Jones just threw it in for a touchdown each time. And it wasn't Jonathan Taylor breaking off an explosive run. Man, that's just so powerful.

And again, for some, I know it hits home already and they get it and understand. I talk a lot over at DFS Mastermind about aha moments versus oh yeah moments. And what I mean by that is sometimes people catch an aha moment. Somebody might be watching this right now and just learned that. They're the type that usually say, okay, Gibbs this week. Forget Gibbs. I don't want to play him at fifty five percent. I'm just going to fadeFadeTo fade a player is to leave him out of your lineups on purpose, usually because you expect him to be popular or you think he is a poor play.Fade with a reason, not a feeling. If you can't say why a popular player will disappoint, you're probably just giving away points.Full explanation ↗ him.

But then you go look at like the Detroit team total. You look at this matchup. Obviously, things can still fail. And I get that in some lineups. But I'm saying most, you know, if you're if you're looking at it from your perspective, most might say, I'm going to play Gibbs. Others might say, I'm going to fade Gibbs. But how many actually have the aha moment to say, OK, I'm going to fade Gibbs. But I still believe this is going to happen in this game.

Let me account for it and build. Or situational stuff where it's like, okay, I'm not on Jalen Hurts, but I'm also not on Barkley or Davante Adams Smith. And I'm thinking like, hey, if I know this lineup is not going to have Hurts, I'm saying he's not the guy. It's what you're saying, whether you know it or not. You're just saying it with your lineup. And so you have to think about that. And then the oh yeah moment is when people catch themselves doing that.

And sometimes a lineup, even those out there that are hand building and being like, oh, I landed on this defense. Well, I heard Blickle and Tambo talk about this. It actually makes sense now because I'm not on the defense that everyone's on on the opposite side. And there's a lot of players on that team that people are on. So it's not about the defense kills them necessarily.

They could still score points, but it's more of like, if I'm already not on them, I might as well just complete the story and end the book and then see how it plays out when we go and see the games play out. So I think it's important to remember that as you're picking up these concepts, it takes time, it takes experience.

But like you said- There's a lot of things you're thinking about where it's also like, okay, if you're not on Jonathan Taylor, what is it? Well, I'm going to go to Daniels Jones, Pittman and Warren. This is last year's lineup of yours, but also guess who's right next to Jonathan Taylor at low ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗. That's also a pivot that will crush him even further down the board. So now he fails. And the stack succeeds like it did for you. You get that leverage.

This is leverage lane. But then also you pivoted to CMC who puts up points at ten percent to Jonathan Taylor thirty percent. And it's like, whoa, now I'm getting extra leverage. Like you're separating yourself rooms.

At a time if you start in a room with a hundred people a hundred percent of the people and you found a way to escape thirty percent when jt gets pushed down and you go into the next room with seventy percent of the field now and really it's less because it's they don't have and then you get out of the seventy percent room because only five percent of those have the uh Daniel Jones stuff so now you're in this little tiny room that's like near the top and you guys can see the million dollar prize and it's like oh wait Not all these teams have CMC.

He has the big day. Now you got into an even smaller room and then you got into the room with ten people. And in the end, you ended up in the room with the final seven and you just you had to exit before the other six did. If you use that metaphor, analogy, whatever you want to call. So I think that's really important. And we're going to talk about that when we get to leveraging the chalk build. I've got the Stone 2.0 point off.

I loaded it some. But before we do that, you wanted to talk. And I know you were excited for this one for your little topic here this week about I guess it's kind of I'll let you explain it. But the main thing is how the field might overcompensate or have overconfidence, I should say, in some things. And I'll let you talk and elaborate on it. But tell me where this comes from and then break it down for everybody.

Yeah, it's essentially the second thing you said there. I think the field as a whole is going to be overconfident this year, and that doesn't mean that every single thing the field does is going to be wrong or anything close to that. What it means is we're going to see specific instances all year long where there's something we can really leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗, and it's just the field being overconfident. There are essentially two things, I think, that are feeding this. The first is the more obvious one.

It's just AI. If anyone who's using AI... Whether it's to build their own tools, whether it's to get actual advice from the AI, they're going to feel a little bit better about whatever decision they're making. That's true, but it's also a hard thing to leverage specifically. I think the more impactful one and the one that hasn't been discussed much, because if you turn on any DFS show this week, you've heard about how AI might change a landscape. And I do think that...

We might see a little bit more concentrated ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗ just across the board this year than we have in the past as a result of AI to some degree. And so that would help just make the field a little bit more predictable. Then it's easier to leverage the field, so on and so forth. But I think the larger one, the thing that people aren't discussing but might actually have the larger effect.

Is how much more access and how much more popular it is now to really use NFL charted data and coverage data, matchup data to that degree. And the problem with that for anyone using it is like, I did a long, big, giant project this offseason of finding what coverage splits and what blitz stats versus rushing concepts, what all of that stuff, like where it's stable and predictive versus where it's just noise. And unfortunately, the vast majority of it is just noise.

And I think the main reason for that is Sample size, but let's also recognize the fact that, you know, If you go on Twitter and look at the Drake May interception that he threw over the middle, you will see really, really smart film guys arguing with each other, all citing like, I heard from a coach that it was this coverage, but someone else says, no, it was this coverage.

Like what defenses are trying to do right now in today's NFL is make it really hard for the quarterback to diagnose what coverage they're in both pre-snap. And now like the, the new trend is even doing it after the snap. So like, you know, the quarterback, gets the ball, you know, whether, whether he's in the shotgun and takes the snap of shotgun or, or takes it from under center, takes a couple steps in the drop back.

The defenders are like holding for a second, a second and a half, and then bolting to their actual spot and whatever zone coverage they're, they're running. And so what they're trying to do is like, they're trying to give the quarterback an impression who takes the snap of looks up to see where the safety is, sees the safety's outside the hash and says, okay, I'm going to have the guy over the middle.

But as soon as he turns to look over the middle, that safety's darting across. And so the problem is like, if you want coverage splits to be really predictive, really stable, the thing that you need is for the challenge against that coverage to be similar from one week to the next, from one opponent to the next. But every team is playing and showing these coverages in a dramatically different way now. And so I just found that the vast majority of it, there's no signal.

There are a couple, and maybe I'll share one or two when they kind of pop up, but there are a couple that actually have a gigantic meaning on coverage. You know, ceiling outcomes, especially for, for opponents in matchups. So it's not like it never comes to fruition, but I think there are going to be instances this year where like the game environment isn't great.

And you know, the, the receiver hasn't shown a massive ceiling, but in, whereas in the past he would have been ten percent on twelve percent on this year, he's going to be twenty, twenty five percent because a certain site picks up the fact that, Hey, he's been really good against this coverage and the team they're playing plays a ton of that.

And it's not going to matter, but he's going to steam up to twenty, twenty five percent and fading that spot is going to be hugely advantageous to that slate. And similarly, they're similarly they're going to be guys who in the past would have been twenty five percent on because, oh, the offense is in a really good spot. And we know that that guy has a ceiling.

And people are going to catch on to the fact that, well, wait a minute, he doesn't have good splits against this coverage, and that's the coverage this team plays. And now we're going to get one of the best plays on the slate at fifteen percent instead of twenty five percent. So I think we're going to see certain instances of like massive ownership inefficiencies because people are way overconfident in predicting what's actually going to happen.

And so I think just like a general theme for this year is going to be constantly reminding everybody that even when the matchup screams one thing we still need to recognize. This is NFL football. It's one game at a time. And these ranges of outcomes for both the games and the players are still massive. And that's kind of our job still.

It's still leveraging just how uncertain we are about the entire player's range of outcomes and just taking advantage of the fact that taking advantage of the times where the field doesn't recognize how Likely it is to have a massive game or is over, you know, overestimating probably the most Likely outcome for that player. I've got a follow-up on that. I think, again, all good stuff. The chat's even humming about it.

I think at the end of the day, my question would just be how much is already baked into the projection? We do this in golf all the time where it's like the model leads to this. The stats lead to that. The Vegas odds are this. In football, we've got the props. We've got the matchup coverage. Now, I know sometimes the sportsbooks aren't adjusting enough.

It feels like at least sometimes on a Sunday when you find out that the center is out for a team or like the starting O-linemen and you're like, man, that kind of does mess some shit up that they got to change up their plan and this and that. And like, you don't see enough adjustment. Now, nowadays, I do think you see even some for that. But how much of it's already baked in? Because at the end of the day, I use like nothing.

When it comes to that. And I will tell you this from knowing like a ton, as you do as well, know a ton of successful DFS players that have consistency and have been in the game over the years. I mean, in any of those conversations, chats back and forth, you name it, there's very little of that conversation going on, but because a lot of things are incorporating it now, I think you nailed it. So what, what is your followup on that?

Just with everything I just said there. Hey, Yeah, it's a great point. And I would say it depends on whatever site you're using. Some sites are going to be open about really incorporating matchup data. And they're going to use that, by the way, as a selling point. They're going to say, hey, no one else is incorporating this into their projections the way that we are.

The problem is then I think a lot of those subscribers are going to go and they're going to double count things, right? Let me think of one off the top of my head here. I think the Bears last year, and I'm just going by memory, I think they played a ton of man coverage. So let's say someone has McMillan projected, like they gave him some extra target share points.

They gave him some extra explosive play potential because of the matchup with a potentially high man coverage team. Now if you go on and you say, wow, McMillan projects really well and he's in a great matchup because Chicago might play a bunch of man coverage, that means I like him even more than how well he's projected. Well, no, you just double counted that because that's already baked into the projection.

So yeah, whether you're a subscriber to Black Analytics, whether you're a subscriber to Ship It Nation, or any other site around the industry, it's important to recognize, okay, what is going into these projections and what am I potentially double counting versus where can I use matchup data actually directionally in a good way because I can confidently say, okay, this guy does project well. But I know that they are not incorporating this matchup level data into it.

So the fact that he does project well, and I think that he has this potential matchup advantage like that's only going to help me if I'm right about that. And even if I'm wrong, he's still a good play because look how well he's projected. Yeah. We'll round this out. We always aim to do about a half hour mark. We can get to the chalkChalkChalk is the most popular, highly owned play on a slate. The term comes from sports betting, where the favorite is called the chalk.Don't label chalk good or bad. Ask whether each popular play deserves its ownership, then decide which chalk you'll eat and which you'll fade.Full explanation ↗ build and we're going to get there next for you guys. So stick around, make sure to hit that thumbs up.

Sean Sully says, is it possible that overconfidence bleeds into full on stacks too? Like if X offense is good slash has been good this season, specifically against the opposing team, team's main defensive coverages. Like, are you, are you thinking that's the other way it's going to work?

Yeah, I mean, that will definitely come up at times, but most of the time when you're talking about, like, good versus man versus, you know, someone else is better versus zone, it's more about, like, shifting production within an offense, right? And so, like, one of the examples that I can think of is, you know, for years, you know, Ayuk was the man-beater, and then it was Kittle against zone. And so you just kind of played it that way and things of that nature.

So I think it's more about that than the entire stack. But certainly another point there, and this is also true of when opposing teams are really bad against a slot receiver or really bad against receivers out wide, is let's also remember that defensive coordinators aren't totally ignorant to what their defense is doing well and what their defense is doing poorly. And so let's say a defense through four weeks has really been gashed by slot receivers.

Well, in that defensive room, when they're making the game plan, when they're trying to figure out what they need to do, or even whether they need to make personnel changes, like a big point that they're trying to make and a big part of their strategy for that week is going to be, okay, this has been a real issue for us. How can we make sure we clean it up this week?

And so that's another reason why things aren't stable is not just that there's a lot of randomness in terms of like why a certain offense might be really good against zone coverage for four weeks or something, but everybody else is aware of this and their opponent is going to try to take that away, right? So like if a team has constantly just crushed man coverage, so let's even think of the Rams game.

This past week, not this past week, just two days ago, like I saw someone really criticizing the fact that the Rams brought into really good corners and then barely played man coverage. And someone like immediately responded with, well, the reason for this is because if you play man coverage against San Francisco, they're just going to put Debo Samuel into the, into the insert.

And they're going to make, you know, whatever corner is covering him, they're going to make him fill this rushing gap. And so now they're going to run all over you. If you try to play man coverage or they're going to get, Uh, you know, McCaffrey split out wide and now you're in man coverage on Christian McCaffrey with a linebacker in the slot and Shanahan's going to design the place.

So everyone else runs around him and McCaffrey just has all this room to work with.

And, and so like essentially all this is to say, yeah, it'd be wonderful if like these coaches were totally unaware of this data that we had and we could just say, yeah, Because they have played this much man coverage this year and because they've done poorly with this type of coverage, we know that they're going to continue to do it, and the offense is going to be able to react to it really well.

But not only do a lot of those splits come from just a pattern emerging out of randomness and not real signal, but more importantly, that defense can then adjust. Everybody can adjust to that and see what you're seeing, and that makes it not carry on into the future as much as we'd like for it to. I will say this, like, you know, I don't even know what all this stuff means. I'm not a Madden guy. I've never needed this stuff.

If it's again, it's a lot of it's baked in. I know how to play DFS. That's my focus. And this does apply because it's built into it. It's just in the back end. And someone like Alex, who's doing the analytics and all this, I know, Alex, we've had a good conversation. Pairing back and forth.

You guys can use code Black or Blickle on DFS Mastermind if you want to learn how I play the game, but I can promise you there's no too high shell, rotate to a single high, like all this stuff, we'll talk about its content, but I'm just playing based on game theory, leverage, contest selection, lineup selection, how to attack satellites, all that stuff and more. And you can literally get the seven hours of modules for forty seven bucks.

I think you get it for thirty seven if you use code Black, B-L-I-C-K. So you guys can go to DFS Mastermind dot com. This is me asking a thousand plus players how they play DFS and what they want to know. And then $10,000 plus hours of my experience all put into a course that you can take in one Saturday, nine to five shift, basically, and learn it all.

And then if you want everything, you can always go up to the method later. But let's get back, Alex. Let's go to where we need to go. I'm going to go to the Stone 2.0 point. Oh, that is on Ship It Nation dot com. That's the interactive version. I did just have it up. If you want the old stone, we still have it. That's that's right there for you. It's got it all. Some people like to look at that, but I like the new interactive one.

Poke holes in this. I've got it. I didn't even look at what our optimal was right now yet, but I'll let you have a look here. I've got Tyler Shuck, Jameer Gibbs, Bijan. I don't know if it's going to really be like Baker and Tucker. I know in cash gamesCash GameA cash game is a contest that pays a large share of the field, usually close to half, the same flat prize. Fifty-fifties, double-ups and head-to-heads are the common cash games.Treat cash games as the steady base of your bankroll. Use one safe core across your cash entries on a slate, and save riskier ideas for tournaments.Full explanation ↗, people are happily doing that, but that allows you to get Ja'Marr Chase, Olave. You can actually get three, two. Or sorry, the three one here with you've got Chuck, Olave, Johnson, bring it back withBring-BackIn the NFL, a bring-back is usually a wide receiver, tight end or running back from the team facing your quarterback stack.Pick the bring-back who gains the most when his team falls behind. In football that's usually the opponent's top pass catcher, not a running back who loses carries in a comeback.Full explanation ↗ Gibbs.

And then you still get Bijan and Ja'Marr Chase. You get the two Raiders and then you can get, you know, the Chargers D or the Jags D or whatever it is. I'm just throwing one version of it out there. But it's got to be something like this that you're seeing or at least thinking the same thing of.

Yeah, I mean, this is not a mini stack on the screen, but I do think the mini stack to avoid this week is probably Gibbs and Olave. You're just going to see a massive amount of those combinations. And when you think of those two players, there's really not much correlationCorrelationCorrelation describes how two players' fantasy scores move together. Positively correlated players tend to have big games at the same time, usually because one player's success directly adds points for the other.When you build a tournament lineup, ask which of your players need the same thing to happen. The more of them that do, the higher your lineup's ceiling.Full explanation ↗ there at all.

So sure, you can get instances where the game goes off, but when the game goes off, you're going to want to line up like this that actually has the entire game stacked instead of just those two guys. So I do agree with a lot of this. I don't think Bijan is going to be... Super chalkyChalkChalk is the most popular, highly owned play on a slate. The term comes from sports betting, where the favorite is called the chalk.Don't label chalk good or bad. Ask whether each popular play deserves its ownership, then decide which chalk you'll eat and which you'll fade.Full explanation ↗ anymore now that it's a Cooper Rush. And like, that's not to say that Tua is much better than Cooper Rush.

In fact, I was, I was going to be all over the Steelers defense against Tua. Now they're going to be more popular. I don't think the Steelers defense is better because of Cooper Rush. They would have loved them against Tua, but for Bijan, I think Cooper Rush is a lot worse because we know how much Tua likes to target his running backs. So yeah, I think Bijan probably won't be in there, and that will open the door for just probably a single tight end.

I don't see many people double tight ending, especially with such cheap tight ends. I think it is possible, but I do agree Mayer is going to be insanely popular this week. So yeah, I think a lot of this I very much agree with. I certainly agree that Chase is going to be really popular. Inside of Shuck stacks, yeah, I think you're going to get double stacks with Olave. And then I think we'll see plenty of Vele with Shuck, not just Jawan Johnson.

So I think it's probably okay to have the Johnson and Mayer pairing here since we're saying what does a Shuck stack look like. But yeah, I mean... Gibbs is going to be like one of the most popular plays of the entire season, I'm guessing, because not only is this a phenomenal spot for him, he's in a great offense. So like, you know, the number one way that you can say, okay, how is, how is this massive chop running back going to fail on any slate?

It's well, the offense just doesn't have a ton of success. That's extremely unlikely for Detroit. The next thing is, okay, well, what if they just throw it all game? Okay. But Gibbs is massively involved in the passing game. And he also has, you know, he has the like Derrick Henry explosive rushing side with the like prime Alvin Kamara receiving role, it's really, really hard for him to fail. So he's going to be insanely owned.

But then not only is he that good of a play, but also pricing on the slate is so loose. It's so easy to fit him that, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to be surprised if we see like sixty five percent in single entries and high stakes. Yeah, one thing I will say, just interesting on my end, but early runs. I'm not doing anything official until Saturday night, kind of when I start, and I'm not really building until Sunday.

But I will say, with Meyer, getting like, if you don't cap or don't do anything, like he's at the price, no Bowers, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't matter. It'll put him with Tucker. It'll put him with Gentee. Nothing matters. It will just play those guys. And it's still going into a lot of two tight end builds because it is wanting to put even like a Chan Gibbs, Ja'Marr Chase, a lot of it.

Like I'm showing here, like you still have $5,500 and pick a D like the Jets, or you can go back up to the Jags like we had in there earlier who are looking pretty popular. And it's like you still have $4,600. You can move pieces around, too. But I do think there is a lot that works that way where you could like boost up one more.

Like if you didn't want to go Tucker, that's where I'm saying I think people could talk themselves into. Like a Jawan. And now you have $4,900 left at wide receiver. Again, not saying it's the chalk necessarily because there's other versions of it. But let's see what happens if I take this to the Jets, who are also popular at $2,500. It will go down to them.

Funny enough, on different sites this week, we don't always bring this up, but it's like one site has the Jets popular, one site FanDuel, like people like the Titans. So interestingly enough there. But I don't know, you do kind of land in some dead zones. If it was Luther Burden, I don't know. So it's tough to say, but I think at least from some standpoint, we're going to have to have the Gibbs conversation for sure.

And then I also think there's something to be said for just the running back options this week. Like if you look, We've got Gibbs, Bijan, Taylor. No one's talking about like Cook, for example, but Chase Brown is interested. There's HM, Barkley, Hampton, Henry, Jeanty, like Swift. Keep going down. Etienne, Tootin, like there's Bucky Irving. So I guess let's start with the Gibbs conversation because that's the be all end all. We know he's going in there, whether you like it or not.

I had some, you know, passion yesterday talking with Mayo on the show about this stuff because I just think people don't fully understand it at all times. But how are you treating the Gibbs situation? And where's your head at when it comes to that? Just plugging him in versus, you know, thinking strategically around him.

My approach to Gibbs this week is going to be I want him in every lineup, but when I have combinations of other pricey guys where I can't fit him, I'm okay with the fade as well. So that's what it's going to be for me. In no lineup am I going to purposely say, okay, I'm going to try to leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ Gibbs here. The only way that I'm not using Gibbs is if I just need to not have that much salary spent on running back.

Yeah. One thing I was going to add to that, I feel the same way. So again, I let the, it's posted on my ex at toe tag and Tampa. You can see the clip from yesterday. Mayo said I'm fired up, but it was just telling people again, like they decide like, Oh, at that percentage, you're an idiot. If you play them or they're like at that percentage, you better get all in.

Like I don't have to put my entire portfolio on this guy on a hundred and fifty lineups. Yes. You do have to make a decision when it comes to single entrySingle-EntryA single-entry contest allows each user exactly one lineup. It can be a cash game or a tournament.In single-entry, one or two contrarian decisions are usually enough. Pair a strong, popular core with a lower-owned piece instead of fading everything the field likes.Full explanation ↗. Like we focus on here, but I'm with you. I want to try and get them in there. Not looking to just full-on leverage him that way. And in large field stuff, yes, I'll have some, you know, I'll have some golf with Gibbs. I'll have some golf, Amun-Ra, Jamison Williams, LaPorta.

I'll go after it in certain other tournaments, depending on the style. But overall, my thought process is that. What I will say, though, what's at least somewhat interesting is about that game. If you look like years back now, and you know I love a good Sample. Mm-hmm. But it's like the under can seemingly hit a lot more than you'd think in week one when people just assume like the totals mean everything too.

And it's, it's, they're still working with no daddy and better than we are at figuring it out and exploiting it. But wasn't it like last year, every single game went under or something. I think it was like, if you had a bet all third, like all twelve games, they all went under. Maybe one went over or something. So I just think that's somewhat interesting too. And how much these teams from a DFS perspective can spread it out. Like it can be Gibbs.

It can be Amin Ra, Jameson Williams, LaPorta.

Golf there's five guys on that side without going deep on the other side tesla on the other side you've got shuck olave and Juwan Johnson and then people think oh well that's kind of really it though well etn junior you're cutting him out he could definitely be in the mix on time he'd catch passes even and then also there's like the the wide receiver three wide receiver four like vla is on the list of what people are even like getting different with but then there's still the wide receiver three and four what is it lance and forget the other guy's name is like barry and brown or something but the If those guys ended up in a stack like that, that would really set you different and apart.

But it's like you're digging for the diamond in the rough. Not saying I wouldn't think about it, but just noting it. There's tons of options. So if you're not on Gibbs, I think this one's a little more interesting where you don't have to immediately say, okay, then...

That means this, you could say, okay, that's like, twenty points for Goff,

Eighteen points for Gibbs, seventeen points for Amun-Ra, Jamison Williams, like, you could actually have a scenario in this game, where Jamison Williams gets twenty-four, and you still don't need Goff, he's $6,000, like, you could just get the twenty-four out of him, and it's solid, and then LaPorta decent, but there's so many tight ends, et cetera, et cetera, so, um, I think that's one way I'm thinking about it, and then I'll kick it back to you on other stuff, and then the other thing was, I've talked about this a ton in the past, but, just slice and dice and what I mean by that is the Detroit d is getting no love there's the there's the Chargers the Jags and now Pittsburgh even above

Them against Atlanta against rush so to me it's like why why not just play gibbs with the Detroit d in some lineups and it's not just that it pairs well and that it separates from those popular defenses at the bottom well spending up Spoiler alert, might be a good idea sometimes to spend up a defense. Who knows? If only there was data to figure that stuff out.

But then on the other side, you know, Shuck, Olave, and Juwan Johnson are at least somewhat popular in some format. And it's not that the defense hurts them. It's that most of the lineups with them won't have that defense. So if you do have it, it's a way to get different with Gibbs, but also be against lineups differently than the way most Gibbs lineups feature at least Olave, if not more.

Yeah, the other point I want to make with Gibbs is his ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗, how high he gets, almost doesn't really matter to me. And this is something that the new contest sim that I've built, and shameless plug here, but it's free this week with any DFS or all access subscription. So check out BlickAnalytics.com for that if you want to check out the contest sim. But One of the big features in the contest sim is ownership sensitivity.

So you can see how the lineup expected sim ROI changes based on that individual player's ownership. Between Gibbs low end and his high end, so in the one that I'm looking at right now, between thirty-eight percent and forty-six percent His ROI goes from forty four point two percent to forty four point three. Like it doesn't change. It's basically saying Gibbs role is not to make you different at all from the field. It's just to preserve the advantage that everyone else in your lineup gives you.

And he does that better than any other option on the slate by far. You know, contrast that with someone like Ted McMillan in this lineup at eight percent plus fifty four percent at twelve percent, only plus forty one percent. So you're losing a really good chunk of expected some ROI in a way that you don't with Gibbs because it doesn't really matter how popular he gets. His role is not to help you separate from the field at all.

It's purely to preserve the advantage the rest of your guys get. And he does that whether he's at forty percent, sixty percent, seventy percent. It just doesn't matter. Like his role doesn't change. And he's so Likely to succeed. You know, it'd be one thing if he was like a Derrick Henry or a Saquon Barkley and you could get certain game scripts where he just doesn't have that much of a chance to succeed. But it doesn't.

Like nothing about how this game can play out outside of Gibbs getting injured is a scenario in which like you would expect him to not do really, really well. And so for me, that's why like he's he's someone I would like to include in every lineup. I'm not going to purposely fadeFadeTo fade a player is to leave him out of your lineups on purpose, usually because you expect him to be popular or you think he is a poor play.Fade with a reason, not a feeling. If you can't say why a popular player will disappoint, you're probably just giving away points.Full explanation ↗ him at any point in time.

But if I need a lineup that has like, you know, only $12,000 combined from my running backs, then I'm going to be OK with not playing Gibbs. Yeah, I'll use the stone for this because you have your GPPGPP (Guaranteed Prize Pool)A GPP is a tournament whose prize pool is guaranteed to pay out in full even if the contest does not fill. Payouts are steep: a small group at the top wins most of the money.Before you enter a tournament lineup, ask how it finishes first, not just how it cashes. If you cannot name that scenario, rebuild it.Full explanation ↗ scores. We have the optimal leverage where we're running the $10,000 simulations, almost like a data driven simulation up against our partner SaberSim, where we can then figure this out. I think a lot of people struggle with that.

You just said it perfectly and you were saying for both things. So it works out. But like you might have a negative GPP score.

On gibbs but that's not his job in that lineup anyway so it doesn't matter and that's what I try and tell people if we have gibbs to be optimal on $10,000 simulations he's showing up on thirty one over $3,100 of those lineups as the on the optimal yeah he's but but tambo he's negative eight and a half leverage yeah like against his potential ownership he's gonna be a little bit over owned In that sense.

But that doesn't mean you can't play him and it doesn't mean you shouldn't play him. It's where else are you finding? Like, I don't have too many guys that you're going to find across the board. If you're a member, you can go look it up. But I don't have too many people that are going to be thirty percent optimal on $10,000 simulation.

So it's like if that helps finish out your lineup and or starting point of your lineup, but then, you know, you got to get different around it. I think that's definitely the first interesting way to look at it. Any other ways to leverage Gibbs? If not, we kind of are at that point of the show. Now, anyway, we can go through by just, you know, quickly looking at quarterbacks.

The way we did it last year was like, you can tell by the quarterback what route people are kind of going. You're always going to see spread out ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗. Even your Daniels Jones was eight point five last year. That doesn't tell the whole story because Jonathan Taylor was like thirty points plus thirty percent plus your other guys with them were five percent or less. It's like The rest of it tells the story.

If you look at Herbert, I'm just going to use this as a quick example and I'll sort my team. And then you go down to Chargers and these are early ownership projections, but like lad getting a little bit Quentin getting a little bit. Yes. People are probably playing them together in some cases, of course, but that's just one example. Now you go back up here. Who else did I have? Tyler, you know, Tyler shock. We already looked at this.

Well, if we sort that by team and I'll do it easier way, go to the Saints here. Well, you're getting a $3,500 guy. At almost the same ownership as the, you know, the $6,000 version of almost McConkie being just shy of $6,000. And then you're getting a, a lot of it as we showed you, that's just contrasting the chalkChalkChalk is the most popular, highly owned play on a slate. The term comes from sports betting, where the favorite is called the chalk.Don't label chalk good or bad. Ask whether each popular play deserves its ownership, then decide which chalk you'll eat and which you'll fade.Full explanation ↗ build versus that. How do you want to look at this as some ways to leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ on this slate?

I just think some of the conversation like Kyler Murray, I guess would be an example. And we put Justin Jefferson on the thumbnail. Yeah, he's eight point six. He's your example. So this is a prime example, a little bit different, of course. But you go look at your wide receiver. You had Pittman last year at five percent. Well, what are we getting? Justin Jefferson, you know, twelve ish. Maybe it's up. Maybe that's right. But I'm just saying it's not twenty two.

It's not twenty one. It's not thirty. If you were to use Hawkins instead of your Tyler Warren last year, that might even make up a little bit of the money from the difference.

Three percent that he's showing up at and he's showing up optimal seven point seven percent of the time so if you are going that route depending on what you want to do I'm just saying running that type of stack is interesting I think another interesting thing would be then looking at okay what can I do within that stack by the way inside Minnesota you know pretty good offense you posted on x last night I follow everything you know I still see the tidbits out there but it was like it's kind of unfair having Kevin O'Connell up against Green Bay in this spot.

And you guys were chatting a little bit about that on X. Well, if that's the case and they do come out of the gates and start figuring this stuff out, well, it's, if you look at Green Bay, let me switch this here for a second. And go Marshall Lloyd is looking decent, but no one's playing value running backs this week. So that's something. And then you go to wide receiver and go, okay, what are these guys looking like?

And this is why I like having this just so easy to reference. It's they're not really popping, um, at high optimal rates, but like Watson Reed Golden, they're all okay, but they have decent projections in some ceiling, but they're ones that people are talking about, but they're not able to click these guys. It just doesn't fit.

Roster construction style so where do you want to go with this that's just a couple ways I like to show it off but how are you thinking about leveraging the chalk build this week some other thoughts you've got there Yeah, the first thing I will say on the Chargers stuff, I have QJ at eighteen percent and Ladd at sixteen percent. So I don't think they're going to be quite the pivot.

But my general theme of like, OK, how do I want to leverage the truck build this week? How do I want to get different? It's pretty much like entirely through the stack, whatever stack you choose. I think that's the best way to get different this week. And the point that I'll make here or the way I'll make this point, I should say, is like Think of the running backs on this slate.

If you wanted to play, for example, Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley at running back. So you don't want to play Gibbs. You want to play Henry and Saquon. Think about what you need for that decision to pay off. It's not just about Henry and Barkley doing well. You, of course, need them to do well. But you also then need Gibbs to not do extremely well, right? If you get...

If you get a hundred twenty yards and two touchdowns from Henry and a hundred forty and a touchdown from Saquon, that's great. But it's not great if Gibbs goes for one forty-two scores and also adds five receptions for sixty yards. Because then you're going to wish you had Gibbs instead of at least one of them anyway. So...

It's harder, I think, to get different in an effective way at running back this week because, my goodness, it's just so Likely that Gibbs succeeds, whereas from the receiver position... If Jefferson separates from Chase, for example, none of us are going to be surprised. If T. Higgins has a better game than Ja'Marr Chase, it's a little bit surprising, but that happens all the time in Cincinnati games. So I think there are just...

It's a much cleaner route to try and get different at the wide receiver position this week because the high end guys. So like, let me, let me bring this up for a second. Like I have chase at twenty two point four for his projection. I've gives it twenty five point eight. That's a pretty meaningful difference. I've got Gibbs seventy eight point seven percent chance to finish top ten at the running back position.

Chase at twenty Fifty five and a half percent to finish top ten at the wide receiver position. It's just a different range of outcomes for these guys. And and so for me, like the way that I want to attack this slate, the way I want to leverage this slate is through this stack, whatever that stack may be. Yeah, I got to call this out, too. I think it's just always interesting to me to think about this.

And week one, not so much because you get all these values, so I get it. But if Ja'Marr Chase truly hits his ceiling on this slate with all those wide receivers we've got behind, I'm just looking at the rest, like Olave, Aminra, Zay, Garrett Wilson, T. Higgins. There's a ton here. And then you go and look and Joe Burrow is, you know, barely owned versus the rest around him. T Higgins, moderately owned. You got the other side of that game.

You got some injuries actually to the secondary of Cincinnati. You still have the good total and all of that. But like, then where do you have your guy from last year at Buka and Godwin? Like, are they real? I don't know what you have a map, but like just looking around the industry, trying to see a couple spots here to see what we've got. I mean, maybe it's like closer to eight when we get there, maybe a Buka. Gets a little bit more of a boost.

I don't know. What do you got these guys at? I'm seeing them at like five, eight, six, seven. Like they're not really... Getting crazy ownership. Baker's not getting crazy ownership either, by the way.

So just flipping the build and going Baker with Egbuka, Godwin, and Chase and just using up all your wide receiver slots, that's a way I could look at leveraging because you're still using the popular receiver that you just said is going to appear almost sixty percent of the time in those top wide receivers. But what would make him move? What would make that happen? And so obviously you could do it the other way. You could have Burrow, Chase, Higgins with...

With Godwin or igbuka you could have no chase and play Higgins and just rob rob jamar to pay t it's like you people say rob peter to pay paul it's like that that's all you when people do that they again consciously it's like when I said earlier they're not playing jamar or uh Jalen Hurts And like, well, I don't like Philly, but you're saying you don't like Jalen Hurts because you didn't put him in your lineup or you must think he's not the guy.

Well, I don't necessarily think that, but you didn't play him. So you don't think he's the guy or you'd play him. So it's the same concept here. If you are giving it to T and saying, I want like a Burrow T Higgins like Buka, just run it single stack with a run backBring-BackIn the NFL, a bring-back is usually a wide receiver, tight end or running back from the team facing your quarterback stack.Pick the bring-back who gains the most when his team falls behind. In football that's usually the opponent's top pass catcher, not a running back who loses carries in a comeback.Full explanation ↗. And you're like, okay. I'm good with that.

Then you're kind of saying that T Higgins might just eat the lunch of Ja'Marr Chase and you, whether you see it on the screen, you're probably not physically changing the projection. You should be, but if you're not, I get it. You're just saying that's how the game's going to go. And then you can get a little bit more of a balanced bill, but give me, give me more thoughts on that. I guess like I see, I see those ownerships on those bucks.

Yeah. I mean, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I when you think about, okay, game stackingGame StackIn the NFL, a game stack usually combines a quarterback, one or two of his pass catchers and one or more players from the opposing offense.Target games where the spread is close as well as the total high. A high total with a lopsided spread can turn into a blowout where only one side keeps scoring.Full explanation ↗ Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, the number one thing people are going to say is, okay, but that's really expensive, right?

Burroughs, sixty-nine, and then you've got Chase at seventy-eight, Higgins at sixty-three. Okay, but look at the most popular game stackGame StackIn the NFL, a game stack usually combines a quarterback, one or two of his pass catchers and one or more players from the opposing offense.Target games where the spread is close as well as the total high. A high total with a lopsided spread can turn into a blowout where only one side keeps scoring.Full explanation ↗ on the slate. It's probably golf at six. So a bit of a, a bit of savings at the quarterback position, but then people are going to pay $8,000 for Gibbs. They're going to go on top of that, pay seventy five for St. Brown and sixty seven for Olave.

Maybe they'll save a little bit with going to Jameson at $6,000 instead of, you know, one of those big three. But But there's going to be plenty, plenty of ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗ and salary spent in that game. It's really not more expensive to get Cincinnati-Tampa in a really intriguing way. I think if you told me the ownership was exactly the same on both of those game stacks, I think I'd prefer Cincinnati-Tampa Bay anyway. So given the fact that we're getting a meaningful ownership discount...

Cincy Tampa Bay is definitely my preferred expensive game stack. I don't know if I want to spend that much on a game stack. I think there are some really cheap routes we can go this week, as I'll end up talking about. But I think if I was paying up for a game stack, it would be through Cincinnati and Tampa instead of Detroit and New Orleans. Yeah, this is what it's all about. This show is for looking at, you know, how can we leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ the talk?

Well, let's do this quick. I love this expert. You know, we can use this right off the screen and get some extra information. But $28,000 two hundred doesn't again, this can be off slightly, but it's eighty one point one points and ninety one point five. This is our initial ownership just to show up. But it's twenty eight to eighty one. So call it twenty eight. Eighty one. Ninety two.

Now you go back here, and I'm going to do the Borough side even. And I'm going to do apples to apples too, just because I want to kind of see roughly. I'll even do like a... Let's go Higgins, Chase, and then either... I think Godwin would probably be more popular as the bring backBring-BackIn the NFL, a bring-back is usually a wide receiver, tight end or running back from the team facing your quarterback stack.Pick the bring-back who gains the most when his team falls behind. In football that's usually the opponent's top pass catcher, not a running back who loses carries in a comeback.Full explanation ↗ than Ibuka. I do too. So it's about seven points off. Way less owned. And, but by the way, you've got a couple grand left to spend basically. Yeah.

Now, honestly, this is, I, not everybody does this and I get it, but I want to show something else too. This is just another way to do it. Even if you went apples to apples, I know people don't like stacking. They're running it. By the way, Joe Burrow and Chase Brown had a lot of successful games together last year. This is, you know, this is what's so funny too, is like about the, So I'll do two things in a second because I want to show both ways.

But just to show you this, we're getting closer to the money, but we can get almost exact money. So I want to see this too. And just so you guys know, the Godwin projection, it's easier if I go by price here. How much is Godwin again this week? Fifty-two? So he's eleven point eight right now for us. We've got Egbuka at thirteen. I'm just going to do this. So at basically the same money. Still way less owned. The other one was forty three sixty less.

This is $4,400. We're about five points off. But for that, you're almost cutting the ownership in half. And this is like apples to apples. You can still play Gibbs, by the way, for whatever you're worried about in the other lineup, this, that and the other. I'm just trying to show like maximum version of this and what you can do.

And then this is another thing I want to show quickly because I don't think people are stacking the quarterback and running back enough together. Sixty nine and $7,100. And I know it's different. I'm waiting for everyone to rant and rave about it in the chat, but it doesn't matter to me because it doesn't really not going to affect my gameplay. Oh, I don't like that at all.

I know you don't, but I'm saying like nobody ever does, but it's, it's, it's only because like, it's typically, I will say, and you're a Philly guy, it's your home team and all that, but it's almost always because they cannibalize each other at the goal line with the tush push. That's the, the number one thing people say about it. There's probably other guys behind it. That's not it for me. For me, the way Philadelphia is defended is so much more extreme than most teams.

Most teams are just out there playing defense. Against Philly, most teams make a decision. They're either going to try and take away the single high looks where Philly can get exposed from the passing game, or they're trying to take away the running game. And so what we've seen over the last few years, over and over and over again, is...

There's either a team playing defense like Kansas City did in the Superbowl or like Minnesota did last year where Saquon's not going to be able to run the ball, but Hertz is going to be able to find chunk play after chunk play through the passing game, or it's the opposite. And, you know, uh, like two years ago when Saquon just broke record after record and had massive, you know, these, these long runs after long run. Why, why was he given that much space?

Because he faced them like a significantly lower amount of stacked boxes and, uh, and single high looks than Saquon. You know, Derek Henry did, who was doing the exact same thing on the ground, even to a lesser extent, because teams didn't want to give Hertz, Devante and AJ Brown, those single high looks. So to me, that's where the inverse correlationCorrelationCorrelation describes how two players' fantasy scores move together. Positively correlated players tend to have big games at the same time, usually because one player's success directly adds points for the other.When you build a tournament lineup, ask which of your players need the same thing to happen. The more of them that do, the higher your lineup's ceiling.Full explanation ↗ comes more so than the tush push. Cause with the tush push, like you can make the obvious case. Okay.

Well, what if Philly just scores, you know, and there's enough for both to go around. For me, it's, it's about how the offense is actually performing based on what the defense is giving them. And from that standpoint, they've been insanely, insanely inversely correlated with, like probably more so than any other quarterback running back combo in the league. Yeah, that's why you won't get it a lot, but I think, again, it just goes back to the same stuff.

For all that you just said, which is right, correct, good, and awesome, means nothing on any given slate. On this weekend, I guess my point is more, to me, it's about price factors. I know last year, Mayo and Squirrel argued with me about this on, I think it was Justin Fields and Swift or whatever. I forget what the pairing was. It was like, there's no way these guys hurt each other too much. It's like the price.

It's And by the way, Washington, I don't even know if they can keep up. So this might just be like a ground and pound slog type game. But even then that could work in the favor of this because it could just be Hurts with Tush Bush and the other quarterbacks kind of put up their twenty.

He gets the thirty and then and Saquon could put up equal to gibbs lineups where most are going to have like hertz and gibbs and then a punt it's like there's just my point being this is not my leverage lane this is not my way it's just funny when people would look at certain things like the Burrow and Chase Brown one and last year we saw it with caleb and swift or manung guy a bunch we saw it with it's not to compare to this one I'm moving off this now I'm just saying more about the quarterback with running back It's not talked about enough and it's almost frowned upon.

No different, by the way, which is funny. And I mentioned earlier, I know it's in your roster construction data and I've used this to my advantage a ton in queues and satellites and all these factors with the pay up defense. Everyone thinks it's good to punt the D. In a winner take all or in a large field tournamentGPP (Guaranteed Prize Pool)A GPP is a tournament whose prize pool is guaranteed to pay out in full even if the contest does not fill. Payouts are steep: a small group at the top wins most of the money.Before you enter a tournament lineup, ask how it finishes first, not just how it cashes. If you cannot name that scenario, rebuild it.Full explanation ↗, you are going to need ceiling. And the punt Ds rarely put up ceilings for that.

Oh, if as long as they get me eight points for two grand, I'm good. Not always. No, it's not how it works. And as the pricing gets tighter, as the season goes on, then it becomes even more Likely that people punt the defense. And at least then I get why, right?

But when you have the free world to work with here and you say, I got all these options at every single position, You're going to need the defense that puts up thirty plus points or twenty plus points, whatever the big number is this week. Could it be a punt? Of course. Anything's possible. Ask my friend Kevin Garnett. But if you are going to play for a ceiling, typically the ceiling outcomes from come from the big boy defenses.

And I think there was a couple of different big Sample size studies done on that as well. Yeah, I think we've already talked plenty about Gibbs, but I do want to make one more point because someone in the chat has brought up the same point twice here, which is like four X for Gibbs. So four X is salary, thirty two points. And there are two things I want to say here. First is.

Getting to four X, four out of seventeen games, it's almost twenty five percent. That's a really good clip. So I don't totally understand why that's being used as like an argument against using him here. That's a really, really good ceiling rate. More importantly, though, I don't like the use of four X. And so even on even on on my site, like I've got a value column. It is not at all a multiplier because multiplier like multiplier.

Four X for Gibbs is so insanely more valuable than four X for Michael Mayer, for example. If you're going to use any type of multiplier, The one additional step that makes it significantly more useful is think about just the raw points ahead of like two and a half X, or even you can stretch it to three X. So there, right? Like if you, let's say just for simplicity sakes here, you're going to use three X. All right. Three X is twenty four.

So now how many points above twenty four? Is thirty to eight. Right. So four X is eight points better than three X for Michael Mayer down it like almost, you know, at less than $3,000. You know, if he were to go for X, that's only what, three, three points ahead of of three X or something like that. So it's just it's not a good way to measure his impact to the slate.

And I Again, I've already made the point that I really like Gibbs, but I think that maybe helps explain why, because the benefit you're going to get from even three and a half X from Jameer Gibbs is way more than even four and a half X from some of the $5,000 running backs or something like that. So I just wanted to make that final point. Yeah, there's just so many more factors to it.

Again, I always talk about Rob Peter to pay Paul. I used the joke earlier, like Rob Jamar to pay T. You can get it from other places. We saw lineups win the Mills last year with four Raiders. Remember the week Trey Tucker scored like forty. Remember that? And it was Jacobs Myers before he got traded to the Jags. And the lineup had the quarterback, Myers, and Tucker and Bowers and Bowers had like, and Myers had like nine.

They weren't even like two X their salary, maybe two and a half X, but your guy, Tucker, who made it all work. It was just like, look, they're going to throw to three guys and it's going to be these three. So I'm putting them together and I'll just take whatever I get from all of them in that block. So it's like, that's another way that people aren't thinking about.

I will say of note, this is something I've worked on in my own game. So maybe you can apply it to week one for yourself. It's that it's, There is just so many options when the pricing is this loose that I know people like to run, you know, a four-man stack with a run backBring-BackIn the NFL, a bring-back is usually a wide receiver, tight end or running back from the team facing your quarterback stack.Pick the bring-back who gains the most when his team falls behind. In football that's usually the opponent's top pass catcher, not a running back who loses carries in a comeback.Full explanation ↗. And they're like, yeah, at least if the game goes that way, I got it all. But like, that's an example where let's say you get the Gibbs fade right.

And you're like, I'm going to go with Goff, Amonrod, Jameson Williams, and LaPorta. Well, if LaPorta gets twelve and Jamison Williams gets sixteen and Amon Ra gets seventeen and Goff gets twenty and Gibbs only gets like fifteen and you're like, bam, I did it. I knew he wasn't going to come through. I got the stack. It's like, no, you're destroyed because there's a stack out there that's cost less and has a guy with like twenty five, twenty five, twenty one and eighteen.

And you're like not even close to the money, even though you got the Gibbs fade wrong.

And by the way, there's actually a chance they could, by product of entire roster construction, they could be sitting with a fifteen-point Gibbs in their lineup because they got some explosion from Aaron Rodgers, DK Metcalf, Pittman, and whoever else, and it's like, oh my gosh, how I would have never got to that lineup, and they could just fit Gibbs, and the fifteen to eighteen that you think he failed with still ended up on the winning lineup because you're not, you know, I do the takedown breakdown every Monday, you're typically thirty to fifty away from the optimal that you'll see.

Some weeks, people get really close but not always so that's just something to note Yeah, that's another thing that I've really kind of noticed just from using the contest sims over at Black Analytics so far is one of the categories you see when you evaluate any lineup is stack dependence.

And so essentially what this is saying is when your stack performs, and the stack includes quarterback, any wide receivers, running backs, tight ends on his team, and any bringbacks, when the stack performs between the fiftieth and eightieth percentile, What's your ROI like when the stack performs between the sixtieth and the ninetieth? So like you're getting very good outcomes in that in that section. What is your ROI like? And then finally, in the seventieth through one hundredth percentile.

And I've been really, really surprised to see just how much of the overall lineups ROI is packed into that final stack. Like ninetieth to one hundredth percentile of outcomes for the stack itself. And so one, you know, the way that or I should say the takeaway there for me is I really want to be focusing my lineups on the stacks. I want to prioritize the stack itself and then everything else kind of just flows from there.

But how can I make sure that I'm playing stacks that not only sim well, not only project well, But how do I feel about them? Do I really believe that they have the type of upside that the sim is seeing and that the projections are seeing? Can I see the game actually breaking in the way that it needs to for the stack to have that upside? And so that's, again, going to be my main focus this week.

I already said that's the number one way I'm trying to think through leveraging the chalkChalkChalk is the most popular, highly owned play on a slate. The term comes from sports betting, where the favorite is called the chalk.Don't label chalk good or bad. Ask whether each popular play deserves its ownership, then decide which chalk you'll eat and which you'll fade.Full explanation ↗ builds is just... Okay, how can I beat the chalk build by getting a, either a better stack or a stack that opens up more because it's cheaper.

And, and, you know, the important thing there is like, if you have a really cheap stack, the, you know, the seventieth to a hundred percent percentile outcome might actually be a little bit easier to get to because you're not running into the issue where, you know, your, your wide receivers starting to cannibalize each other, right? Like if, if you get a massive game from Jamison Williams, for example, uh, that probably makes it harder for Amon Ross St.

Brown because that means Jamison Williams might have a long touchdown or two, and that takes volume potential away from Amon Ross St. Brown. Whereas if you have like a really cheap stack, even let's go to the Chargers, like Ladd at $5,900, Quentin Johnson at $4,700. They're not cannibalizing each other in the way that QJ or not QJ that Jamison and Amon Ross are. So it's easier for the stack itself to get to that ninetieth percentile outcome. Right.

And I think there's other things we can look at. Is there any other game stacksGame StackIn the NFL, a game stack usually combines a quarterback, one or two of his pass catchers and one or more players from the opposing offense.Target games where the spread is close as well as the total high. A high total with a lopsided spread can turn into a blowout where only one side keeps scoring.Full explanation ↗? We talked about this last year on this show. Is there any other game stacks you're looking to play, fade? Any thoughts with late swap? Any other additional ads you can have? As people know, it's really about putting together the entire puzzle and not about the picks and the plays. Like I say, they always end up becoming important.

They're a result of the process, but we're kind of building through it and seeing what we can get to. I was checking this out just out of curiosity. This one's about, what is it, twelve points off what we looked at earlier, but $3,000 cheaper. It still uses up all of your spots. It's really intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. One, it only uses chase. But if you look here, Baker is also squeezed between.

And I know it's squeezed is such a light term here because every quarterback gets spread out. But golf and everything that goes with him. Herbert, and like you said, even higher ownerships than we thought on some of these guys like QJ and McConkie as the week goes on. Tyler Shuck, just down below it. So he's right there in the middle.

Trevor Lawrence would be another candidate for this because Trevor Lawrence, I think people think is super popular, but then I don't hear anybody really talking about playing Brenton Strange or Parker. Like Parker Washington is getting mentioned a bunch. I don't see the ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗ translating personally. People are playing the Jags D and just expecting that to be the thing.

So if the Jags D is turning the ball over, Are you expecting, I guess you're hoping that they're just running it in the box every time and you're good to roll with that. But if you're expecting them to turn the ball over and give some good field position to Trevor Lawrence, I think that is somewhat interesting.

But just to me, like when you see something like this, I haven't even got to running back yet, but obviously, you know, Likely to put Gibbs in, but also Gibbs is right here in the spirit of golf. I'm using Ja'Marr Chase and those guys, so I don't really need to think about Cincy or Tampa Bay at all. But who am I not using? I'm not going to build the whole lineup, but I'm just thinking about this.

I'm probably not going to Meyer here as much as he would give me more ceiling boost because I just think Gibbs and Meyer together, even though they're not associated at all, I think is going to be a very common pairing. And so I'm just looking at situational stuff, but what else can I do to get different? Well, now is where I might start thinking about, okay, Um, I like Colston Loveland or I like, okay, can I get now with forty two?

Let me just test this. I'm only testing may not fit. But, you know, I run out of money pretty quickly if I try and go up too crazy. Right. Like that's a bit aggressive. So this is how I look through it, though. It's honestly how I think about it. And then I'll go down and say, okay, what other running back? Do I like here? Okay.

You know, if we were looking through some of the stuff earlier, we talked about the Saquon, get me in the mix here. And then, you know, what does that look like? If I go down to the cheaper D, maybe I can get away with it with the Jets. Well, now I've got thirty seven fifty for a flex and a tight end. You can still make changes to it.

But I guess my point would be it's more looking at like when you're on a lineup and what are you not on and who are you not accounting for? And why, if you have good reason, you're like, well, that's just going to be a game that gets spread out way. Like, like you guys know my, for those that do follow long-term about never my homes when it was so spread out, it's like, I was never worried about it because I couldn't figure it out.

I didn't want to dedicate a hundred percent of my lineups to it. And most people didn't, therefore it would never happen. And he was never really on the Milly Maker winners for main slates because it was so spread out. So I just didn't feel like I was missing much there. Can you do something with this lineup for a second? Can you take out Saquon and the Jets? Yep. So what I love about this start here is it's going to be very difficult for...

Actually, there are two things I love about this. It's going to be very difficult to do a Burrow double... Where you also get Jamar, where you also get Jameer Gibbs. So this is going to give you access to that game where you can then still comfortably fit Gibbs. But the second thing this does is this gives you access to now like two really good game environments, right?

Where there's a run out for the Detroit New Orleans game to hit as a whole in the sense that you do get a high scoring fast paced game, which is another, you know, pointing Gibbs favor, like New Orleans boost opponent play volume. Another reason why I think we should have, a better outlook for him than just what he typically did last year, even though last year was already insanely good.

But now you can have Gibbs soak up a lot of that, where if Gibbs goes for, let's say, forty DraftKings points, it's going to be really hard for Amon Ra to hit. It's going to be harder for Goff to hit. It's going to be harder for Jamison to hit, for sure. And now you can get the other game environment that hits in a big way, and you get the passing upside from that. So I think...

Major point here being you're not just going cheaper in the Cincinnati-Tampa Bay game because it's nicer to have those savings and then you can go spend those on whatever spin-ups you want. It's like you're very purposely doing it for Gibbs. You're doing that because the other way to do Cincinnati-Tampa Bay makes it really hard to pair them with Gibbs. So you're getting a unique combination of access to this entire game stackGame StackIn the NFL, a game stack usually combines a quarterback, one or two of his pass catchers and one or more players from the opposing offense.Target games where the spread is close as well as the total high. A high total with a lopsided spread can turn into a blowout where only one side keeps scoring.Full explanation ↗ plus Gibbs.

And then you're also doing it in a way where You're kind of helping the Cincinnati-Tampa Bay stack separate from the Detroit-New Orleans passing versions of that stack. I really like this shell and just wanted to talk through the way that this shell is really good, more so than just, oh, it still projects really well and you saved money. Can you talk me through one quick thing?

You kind of hit on it earlier, but now I think this is a better way when we have a real life example with your stuff over at Black Analytics, like the example of ownershipOwnershipOwnership is the percentage of lineups in a contest that include a given player. Projected ownership is an estimate made before lock; actual ownership is posted once the contest locks.Ownership isn't something to avoid; it's something to build around. The goal is understanding how the field is likely to build, then finding your edge relative to that.Full explanation ↗ sensitivity and what you're seeing with an option like this. Igbuka versus Godwin.

If someone said, hey, I like what you're saying, Alex, but I got to go back to the single stack here because then I think I can do a little bit more with a different tight end, a lower price wide receiver. Maybe they can get a combo in there like a a Loveland and a Coker or something. And it's not because it's a second week. You talked about this a ton last year. It's not even that it's like just jam a secondary stack to jam it.

It's like, I like Loveland in a vacuum. I like Coker in this spot. I think that could make sense. And I'm interested in that game. How would you go about figuring out from your perspective, if you did have to select just one, what would your process breakdown be to say Igbuka or Godwin or does it even matter? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Well, the first way that I'll answer this question is I'm pretty much always going to double stack.

So I think if you were choosing between these receivers, then I'd want to either add, I personally like, I don't want Kate Otton, but if you want to go with the bet that Cincinnati is just as bad this year against tight ends as they were last year, I think he's playable. Um, but more Likely I would just put Bucky Irving in this, in this stack as well. And I'd probably go Bucky and Godwin.

Um, and this one for me is, is less about, you know, projection or roster construction. And this one is just purely last year. Cincinnati was a really, really difficult opponent for wide receiver ones because DJ Turner on the outside is really good. Uh, and a Buka is much more Likely to get that matchup all game long.

Than uh than Godwin so I'll just let I'll let Godwin and bucky kind of soak up all the usage instead and and I think they're like at least I'm telling a pretty clear story of how they're being defended and how they find success as a team yeah I was trying to see here what was uh what was the news on DJ Turner I thought we saw something about him did he end up practicing yesterday um I believe so but Oh, okay, so added to injury report, injury watch.

Hamstring practices Friday. DJ Turner will play versus Bucs. Will play six hours ago. Yeah, we got it. Okay, so yeah, there you go. I was going to say that could have been interesting, but this would make a ton of sense. He locks that down. And then now, like I say, you've opened up a lot more room. I'm not saying you have to go Jets. I'm just using the popular version for the spirit of time, and I'm not closing out the entire lineup.

But if we go to the Jets here, where were they? While you do this, I'll also say no McMillan for Tampa is really interesting because it definitely concentrates the target share among these receivers. But also, I don't love to target a stack when they're missing a key receiver. Sure, they're... It is then easier to predict where the success is going, but that quarterback is now less Likely to have a great game because he's missing one of his key players.

At least in this scenario, you're kind of just taking a step sideways from McMillan to Ted Hurst or Tez Johnson, whoever they're going to use to fill that rotation. So Baker's outlook isn't really changed. You're only getting the added benefit of having a better chance of guessing where that production is actually going to come from. Yeah. Agreed. I like that call. All right. I'm going to delete that.

I'll say quickly and then we'll go to our leveraged lane, but just some of the stuff I guess we did. Like I mentioned Lawrence stuff, the Lamar Jackson stuff is interesting. Not no Homer for that one for me. It's just noting it. Like I think Zay is a bit overlooked. I think the indie guys, I think that's indoors.

We've seen, I know Ravens new coach and whatnot, but- When you think about from the week one Ravens Sample sizes, they like to come out hot and then disappear when it becomes playoff time. But if Lamar is truly healthier, like he's supposed to be and looks and showing up early and doing all this stuff, and then you get the factor of, you know, his price still being really fair for this slate. We have all the value in the world. It's not really about salary to me.

He's $6,800. You know, that's another thing where I might I might play Lamar. And then immediately jump in with Saquon Barkley. And the reason, well, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Well, if I'm paying up a quarterback and most people are either going to Burrow Lamar or Hertz, or I might play Lamar and then think about Chase Brown or think about Saquon Barkley. Or both. You could do stuff like that.

And while they're not correlatedCorrelationCorrelation describes how two players' fantasy scores move together. Positively correlated players tend to have big games at the same time, usually because one player's success directly adds points for the other.When you build a tournament lineup, ask which of your players need the same thing to happen. The more of them that do, the higher your lineup's ceiling.Full explanation ↗ at all, it could be considered separation and leverageLeverageLeverage is the edge you gain by rostering a play the field is underweight on, compared with how often it ends up in winning lineups. When that play outscores the popular option most lineups chose instead, you gain ground on those lineups, though the rest of your roster still decides where you finish.Look for leverage on players connected to the chalk, like the other side of a popular game or a teammate who can steal the popular player's touches.Full explanation ↗ from a DFS perspective because when you're on Lamar, you're not on Burrow and you're not on Hertz. And I don't really want, again, anything can get there, but I don't really want $7,800 Ja'Marr Chase standalone. I'd kind of want him more to need that back and forth game that either really helps his quarterback for just a hundred bucks more. So that's what I was saying earlier.

This is actually a prime example for me to round my stuff out of like, I'm saying it's not going to be Joe Burrow here because why wouldn't I just spend a hundred bucks if I thought it could be? There is some stuff to that. Like if you went with, here's an example this week. Who plays, is it Miami and Las Vegas, right? Yes. Yes.

So you could play Kirk Cousins, Trey Tucker and Michael Meyer, but I might just play Malik Willis, Trey Tucker and Michael Meyer, because for three hundred bucks more, I want Malik Willis over. Oh, but he doesn't match up with their quarterback. You're right. But he might have more points in running yardage and touchdowns near the end zone than Kirk Cousins has for the first X amount of games he gets allowed to play. So it's just a note where I'm thinking about stuff like that sometimes too.

But in this case, I would think about it like where I'm saying that. So I might immediately say, look, if I do think it's not going to be Burrow, is it because I want Chase Brown to steal that thunder? Or do I like Bucky Irving on the other side and say, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be more of a Tampa Bay game. And that's the setup that I see happening there. And it's not that he's pushing him.

It's just Tampa Bay rolls and Bucky's part of it. So you can look at all different situational stuff, but that's all I got for today, Alex, before we get to our leverage lane, anything else you want to add for the week before we go at work, what we're doing in single entrySingle-EntryA single-entry contest allows each user exactly one lineup. It can be a cash game or a tournament.In single-entry, one or two contrarian decisions are usually enough. Pair a strong, popular core with a lower-owned piece instead of fading everything the field likes.Full explanation ↗ leverage lane time. All right, man, I'll let you go first. I got a couple options here, so I'll let you... Oh, actually, you know what? I do have one additional thing.

I think we wanted to talk through a bit more on contest selection, and I think a lot of people... Probably remember from last year that I'm somebody who really likes to just play one lineup at a time. And I had made the decision at least to start the season that I'm going to play multiple lineupsMulti-EntryMulti-entry means entering more than one lineup into the same contest. A contest's entry limit, such as 3, 20 or 150, sets how many lineups one user can submit.Set your total spend for the slate first, then divide it into entries. Multi-entry should spread a fixed budget across more outcomes, not raise how much you put at risk.Full explanation ↗ and I'm going to let the contests available dictate how many lineups I play. And so, you know, since satellites are such a big part of my, my overall DFS process.

So like, you know, I'm going into the lobby and, And I'm saying, okay, how many how many seventy or seventy five dollar satellites are there to get into these mega tickets to get into these megas? And like as of now, there's only there's a there's a seventy dollar showdown mega showdown.

For ten twelve and then there's a seventy five dollar just general um you know main slate mega so for me okay I'm probably playing two lineups right now maybe maybe I could turn that into saying okay this is actually a week where I'm just going to play one since there those are two different contests different tickets so like I I would love to to win both at a time and it would be just as valuable to win both at a time as it would be uh you know to Or I should say like each one, each ticket one there would be just as valuable as each other.

Whereas if I win two tickets at a time into the showdown mega, it's not equally valuable to have two lineups as it is one, so on and so forth. So I might end up just playing one, but... I did want to make that note at the jump and just kind of, I think, reiterate, because that's been such a big part of Leverage Lane is this discussion, and we know we're going to have a lot of new viewers this week.

So I think we did want to just kind of touch on how we're making that decision. And so reiterating the point that for me, why do I like to keep... The number of lineups that I play to close to a minimum. It's for me that I feel like I can do a much better job of building one lineup extremely well or two or three than if I were to try to build twenty at a time or something like that. Yeah, I think that's a good call.

I will say just on a counter of something I've talked about in the past, I wrote an article on X about this a while ago. For a skilled player like yourself that knows the game quite well, knows your personal game quite well, it's almost like, again, and I know people that don't know that you're also a professional golfer. You play golf at a very high level. So you can figure out your own schedule.

You know what works for you, your body, what you prefer, how you warm up, how you do it. You figure all that stuff out. You're doing the same in DFS. I think it goes the other way for some DFS players where they say, hey, I see this five dollar milli, like that's a chance to change my life. Let me jump in and do this thing. And it's like, you're still playing a very high variance game.

If you don't usually play seven hundred fifty dollars and use an optimizer. Well, it is a great chance to win a million dollars for seven hundred fifty bucks. How great is that chance actually? And are you playing it just because you saw a million bucks up top versus you're doing it for your own reasons and knowing your own game to say, here's what my best skillset is. Here's my best way to attack it.

And while I typically play one team, I think I could also do it this way instead, and then give myself more opportunities to achieve the ultimate end goal, which is to make as much money doing what you do as possible, which you can apply across from start to finish. Some people are just choosing that based on, oh, this contest looks good and has a good payout structure. All right.

How often do you play twenty maxTwenty-MaxA twenty-max contest lets each user enter up to 20 lineups. It sits between small-field formats like three-max and the largest 150-entry tournaments.Plan all 20 lineups before building any of them. Decide your stacks and exposure limits first, so the set works as a portfolio rather than 20 separate guesses.Full explanation ↗ or how often do you play a hundred dollar single entrySingle-EntryA single-entry contest allows each user exactly one lineup. It can be a cash game or a tournament.In single-entry, one or two contrarian decisions are usually enough. Pair a strong, popular core with a lower-owned piece instead of fading everything the field likes.Full explanation ↗? Well, I usually don't, but I'm going to try it out this week. All right. Well, that's not a good reason to do it that way. I don't know if you have any rebuttal on that, but just want to note it. Yeah, I agree with it. I don't have anything to add there.

Eric asked a good question, why I think it's more valuable to have tickets to two separate contests for being able to have two into one. The main point here is just like, Again, since this is a somewhat just personal preference, since I am already very comfortable building one lineup at a time, it feels like if I have one lineup into two separate megas, I have two distinct chances.

Whereas if I have two into one, it feels less like I have two chances to win and more like I have one chance to win with two lineups, if that makes sense. Let's use a baseball analogy. It's like I'm getting two full at-bats instead of just two pitches in the same at-bat, something like that. Yeah.

Uh, part of that too, is like the way that you build the, the two lineups when you're in just that one contest and you have two chances in it. And so, uh, you know, that's, that's certainly an argument for building universally correlatedCorrelationCorrelation describes how two players' fantasy scores move together. Positively correlated players tend to have big games at the same time, usually because one player's success directly adds points for the other.When you build a tournament lineup, ask which of your players need the same thing to happen. The more of them that do, the higher your lineup's ceiling.Full explanation ↗ lineups or at least differentiated lineups when you have two chances and not just treating it like a single entry where you're just changing out.

Like, Oh, I, I've got the same, uh, Same lineup, except for I'm not really sure about which cheap wide receiver one-off I want to use. So in one lineup, I'll use Trey Tucker. In the other, I'll use Dontavion Wicks, and that'll be the only difference between the lineups or something like that. I think it makes sense when you have two chances to actually differentiate them in a big way. But yeah, that's why to me.

I like feeling like I have the two distinct chances where it's an entirely different process. And a big point there is like, You can have two very differentiated lineups, but maybe you don't have Derrick Henry, and maybe Derrick Henry breaks off two seven-yard touchdown runs. It's like if you don't have Derrick Henry, you just have no chance, whereas if you're in two distinct megas with one ticket to each, one player's massive outlier game can't kill both of your chances.

I think that's probably a pretty full explanation of why. Man, my mind is just going right now. So now we can't end it. We can never end a show quick because you and I could talk for hours on this. We love this show for that reason because it's like two good friends just being able to riff back and forth. And a couple of things you said there. One, the personal preference factor is huge.

You don't know how many people I talk to, DFS players that are getting mentorship or learning or getting better at the game and trying to learn and say – man, I won like twenty tickets into this five dollar Milly Maker and you know, I got no clue I never use an optimizer. I only play single entry like this is blowing my mind. It's crazy. What do I do?

Well, you shouldn't play satellites intoSatelliteA satellite, also called a qualifier, is a contest whose prizes are tickets into a more expensive contest or a live final instead of cash. Tickets are free entries into that bigger event.Before building, compare the number of seats to the size of the field. The share of entries that win a ticket tells you whether to build like a cash game or a tournament.Full explanation ↗ that if it's not your game like you said like you're playing satellites Directly into your best skill set and game and the way you know how to handle it So that is what you should be thinking about when you're out there if you're not gonna play it accordingly if you win the ticket or or not going to feel comfortable playing. This is on a totally different topic of what you blew my mind with there. So that's one point for sure.

It's personal preference, but you're allowed to choose what satellites you play in. So don't play in ones if you're not going to be comfortable for what you're about to get into. Secondly, the best, I've never heard that one, by the way, and it was phenomenal of like two separate at bats versus one. With two pitches. And I want, my mind goes to something different and I want to elaborate on it, but I will tell you this.

If you're going to take those two pitches, swing for the fences on both because the stats don't care if you strike, if you have, if you have a strike on the first and a home run on the second one, it's a home run. It doesn't matter because you hit the home run. So make sure you're playing it.

Don't, you know, go to bunt it with the first lineup and then swing for a home or swing for a home run, come up short and then go to bunt it like your first lineup versus your second line. Like you've got to be swinging for the fences when other people have twenty two. It ties together what we talked about earlier in something like a mega. If you've got only and I'm saying only I'm congrats.

If you have seven tickets to the hundred dollar million, you did a phenomenal job getting those seven tickets. Those are hard to win. So I'm meaning like that's congrats. But it's also there's going to be people that have one hundred and fifty and lots of them. So like you got to play all those. For the fences, because this is your chance. So don't just saddle up and say, well, I kind of got in for like a hundred bucks.

So long as I can turn this seven hundred bucks into something. No, this is your chance to change everything. You need to get there. So do something from that perspective. And then lastly, I'll give a little bit of a thought process just on your point, and I'll bring it up from just this past Thursday. A couple notes. I said I would talk about it live. It's my first show live since I won the first fantasy football world championship seat.

I won first, but I tied with Ending, who's a very good player. So we will play a head-to-head. We played the first version of it on Thursday night football, the night after winning it on Wednesday night, and we had the exact same lineup. And people are like, how? What? When you have two sharp players, there was something very distinct. It was a horrible slate, by the way, for a head-to-head. Because it was Puka versus CMC. It's a coin flip for those two.

I'm not playing a one V one for like three grand versus a live final seat with, you know, it's still such a Delta between the two. I looked at a lot of the lineups that I could have played against his, assuming he's playing the optimal because he's a sharp player. They were all big dogs. So I'm not coin flipping for that. It's just not going to happen.

So I'll wait for it because I also know that DraftKings will usually say like two or three slates, the same format, and then we'll let you go to classic to finish this thing out. Well, I would much rather play him even with his skillset and how good he is. I would still rather play where there's so many different variables and outcomes that we can have opportunity and not be a one V one for a seat.

So we'll see on Sunday night, we could end up with the same lineup again, but I'm not moving and I'll say it publicly. Cause I don't care. I'm playing optimally to try and win a head to head. But at the end of the day, people don't think like that and balance their thought process and ranges of what they're doing before they apply it. The best players are thinking about that stuff and letting it run its course to get to that event.

So hopefully that helps you guys. Anyway, if you are playing this weekend, any of these bigger tournaments, really makers, et cetera, I really hope that you swing for the fences. I wish you the best of luck. If it's not me or Alex or anybody else that I know and care and, you know, I'm best, you know, good friends with that type of thing around the industry, then I definitely hope it's you guys. We really do try and give you as much information as possible.

So thanks for bringing that up. All right. I said it before, Alex, I'll let you go. We're still going to make it an hour and a half, so we're good. Ninety minutes usually for this or less. What is your leverage lane for the week? What's your angle of attack you're going in? I had this thought while watching the Niners game. As we kind of talked about last year, week one scoring was way down.

I think that's been a pretty common theme over the years, especially since we've gone to the abbreviated preseason and teams are resting the offense more and more. The teams that have had success like the, like the forty Niners the other night have predominantly been teams with really good offensive coordinators and schemes where the team is just more prepared for the season as a result.

And, and so I want to focus a lot of my time and effort and, you know, and, and preferences this week on, in, in my player pool on teams with good offensive coordinators and schemes. And I, a couple that really stand out, the Chargers, uh, I would love if the Niners had been on the main slate, but Ben Johnson with the Bears, I think, is another one. And the dark horse for me are the Las Vegas Raiders. And I don't like the Mayer Chark.

I hate the Mayer Chark, in fact, so I will certainly not be playing it. But Tucker, Gentee, and even Nailor. And I think, as you mentioned, you can play it through Kirk Cousins. You can also flip it and do Malik Willis with A-Chan and then bring it back withBring-BackIn the NFL, a bring-back is usually a wide receiver, tight end or running back from the team facing your quarterback stack.Pick the bring-back who gains the most when his team falls behind. In football that's usually the opponent's top pass catcher, not a running back who loses carries in a comeback.Full explanation ↗ Gentee and Trey Tucker or something like that. There are plenty of ways to do this.

Not only is Clint Kubiak one of, I think the best offensive minds in the league, but it's impossible to overstate how bad the coaching staff was last year. Not just Pete Carroll in general, but like, I think their offensive line coach was Pete Carroll's son, something like that. But it was an atrocious offensive line performance that, from an offensive line with the personnel to actually be decent.

If you took a decent coaching staff and then installed Clint Kubiak, I think you'd see a real meaningful improvement in the offense. When you go from potentially the worst offensive staff in the league to potentially one of the best, I think it's really hard to actually comprehend how much better this Raiders offense can look this season.

I think the Raiders offense could be something similar to last year's Colts, where it's like, man, certainly no one could have predicted that the Daniels Jones-led Colts could have been one of the better offenses in the league for the first ten weeks of the season. They really genuinely were, and I think that we could see something similar from the Raiders. It is absolutely a much...

Um, harder Hill to climb now that Bowers is out for the start of the year, but I think the pieces are still there for them to be quite good offensively, certainly in a matchup against Miami. And so, uh, if you're going like really cheap, I think the Raiders and just that game as a whole makes a lot of sense.

And then, you know, obviously like the Bengals, I think qualify as another one of those just really high-powered offenses, less so because of their scheme, but at least they've been together for so many years. We already know what that offense looks like. Burrow, Chase, and Higgins don't need a lot of time together to make sure that they're, you know, putting up a lot of points and doing well.

So that's kind of my leverage lane is just sticking to offenses and schemes that I believe in here for week one and trying to find some separation that way. And I got two. So one of them, you were pretty close on one. So I'll even give a third just because I'll just say at the end of the day, I like that. One thing I like this week is A-Chan and Jeanty in the same lineup.

Most don't even like running backs against each other. Most are deciding on like Meyer, Tucker, et cetera. I think those two just battling each other could be a good spot. If you're building out that way, you could still put Gibbs in there if you wanted. I like Burrow and Higgins.

As another one so it's it's like I talked about earlier I robbed jamar to pay t I mentioned it earlier and hinted at it I think it's it's a great way to get different and then you could still build a really balanced rosterBalanced BuildA balanced build spreads salary fairly evenly across a lineup, using mostly mid-priced players instead of a few stars and several minimum-salary players.Go balanced when the slate lacks trustworthy cheap plays. Forcing stars and scrubs without real value just fills your lineup with players who have no role.Full explanation ↗ around it yes we're gonna need like nine catches and you know whatever whatever we need from t is gonna we're gonna need something but his price is typically um you know in line with where I would expect it to be it's not like I think he's underpriced I just I've said this forever when those two are healthy and on the field together you can often get a situation where the numbers over long-term have actually still been pretty solid.

So I'm on T Higgins himself. And then the other one you mentioned earlier, I think you sold me on this without even knowing it, but Colston Loveland this week. And you talked about Ben Johnson. You talk about those Bears in general.

I'm definitely going to be doing some stuff with Caleb and Loveland this together and just go in that route with the Chicago side I think on the other side there's a lot of interest I have even in that spot I think like people no one can play Hubbard because you just don't need to this week and maybe he's not the guy so it's that but it's also like there's Tet there's Jalen Coker in the slot like there's a lot of ways I know people are trying to talk up the Bryce side too large field maybe but I would be I would prefer to have like even a Caleb Colston with Colston Loveland and Tet or Kalen, um, Loveland and Coker, and then fill the rest out.

It's like, I really do think that's going to be a bit that you can do. And if you want to have an extra guy in there, like Burden or something like that could fit it as well. So I'll land on that one as my finale, but I do like those other two just as much in ways that you can play some of those together too, and pair them up. But I think it's a good first leverage lane for the season.

Anything else from you before we get out of here? No, I think that covers it. All right. Check out Black Analytics, guys. If you want, you can use promo code Tambo as well. He'll hook you up. But I think just if you don't do anything else, make sure at least give it a shot, right? You got to be able to get in there, see what's going on. Alex is super sharp, covers a ton of fun stuff in there.

I said it off the top, but if you're still here, you're watching this on playback today, it's Twenty four hours until the Sabre SaberSim. We called it because you're saving on SaberSim. But the fourteen ninety nine deal for eleven ninety nine for starter works up to ninety nine a month. But it includes the entire Ship It Nation offering and gets you DFS Mastermind for free. Like we talked about earlier. So you get the four ninety seven plan included. You go down here, join the nation.

You can't get this. You have to email info at shipitnation.com or send me a message. The plan that's one forty nine a month or one nineteen on the annual, you get it for ninety nine a month. You get the free DFS Mastermind. And then for Ship It Games, you do actually also get entered into the week sixteen bonus contest for Ship It Games where you can have a shot at the final five.

Golden ship of tickets so guys that's going to do it for this one fun one as usual be back every week at ten a.m eastern on saturdays make sure you subscribe to the channel tomorrow it'll be hoop title and myself at nine a.m eastern on Sunday shippers the show's already live on the site you guys can go check that out it's the final thoughts of the week the game by game all the content going live on the site today under NFL you'll be able to start seeing it there and then also on Sunday we have a new show that's going to be called contrarianContrarianA contrarian play or lineup is one built around choices most of the field will not make, such as low-owned players, unpopular teams or an unusual salary structure.Pick one or two contrarian spots per lineup and ground each in a real reason. The rest of the roster can look like the field.Full explanation ↗ constructions with hamwich and

Belman eleven a.m eastern on Sunday following our show where you're going to get the inactives and it's going to go position by position as opposed to game by game to uh FanDuel and DraftKings top players especially when it comes to contrarian builds and playing for that million dollars on both sites so check that show out tomorrow as well alex thanks again as always man thank you guys for watching for alex for myself ToeTagginTambo good luck in your contest this week let's ship it