How to win dfs basketball
NBA DFS Strategy Guide for FanDuel & DraftKings
This is a strategy guide for how to select top plays, lineup advice, NBA DFS strategy, contest tips, and more for NBA DFS on DraftKings and FanDuel. For further questions, please join our Discord channel.
This strategy guide is not intended to go in-depth on the intricacies of the NBA, nor is it going to give DFS picks. Instead, it's meant to be a high-level strategy road map for FanDuel and DraftKings slates.
Overview While NBA is a common DFS/fantasy sport to play, it is completely different from many of the other sports on DraftKings and FanDuel. Instead of relying on stacking like in football and baseball, NBA DFS relies more on your ability to monitor injury situations, evaluate matchups, and maximize projections. If you can incorporate these into your daily routine, NBA DFS has the potential to be a very profitable sport.
The Daily Process A big component of NBA DFS strategy is how closely you need to monitor injury situations throughout the day.![]()
In sports like NFL or MLB, we see injuries announced hours (or days) before game time. This allows a nice cushion to adjust lineups before the slate starts. However, in NBA DFS, teams can make an injury decision just minutes before tip-off. This creates the challenge of keeping up with news throughout the day and having back-up plans in place for last-minute injuries.
After years of playing NBA DFS, we have broken down what the daily process should look like:
Mornings:
Review the injury news for the upcoming night. By recognizing which players are questionable, you can start to come up with back-up plans and which value options would jump into the “must play” category.
Afternoon:
Check up on injury situations. Normally if a team has not alerted the media of a player's availability by 3 pm EST, then we likely will not know until around game time. We normally begin to build our lineups during the afternoon, but you should often build multiple lineups based on potential inactives.
Pre-Lock:
Injury news begins to roll in around 6:45-6:55 PM ET (yes, it's inconvenient). At this point, we can start to make adjustments to our lineup or select which pre-built lineup fits the mold.
Post-Lock:
Another key difference with NBA DFS strategy is that our job is not done at lock. Most of the time, late game injury news is not out by 7pm EST. If we are waiting on late game news, we have two options:
- Purposely leave some salary for maximum flexibility to make a late swap -- a high risk option as the lineup could easily fold if the injury news does not go our way.
- Fade late game news -- a lower risk option, as you do not need to pray for the right news to be released and you can focus on the best players available before lock.
Generally, the best NBA DFS players are monitoring news throughout the night and adjusting their lineup(s) until the final tip.
Important Terms for NBA DFS Strategy If you're new to NBA DFS, some terms we use in our content may be foreign.
Here's a quick rundown.
Usage Rate:
According to Bleacher Report, Usage Rate calculates what percentage of plays a player was involved in while he was on the floor, provided that the play ends in one of the three true results: field-goal attempt, free throw attempt or turnover.
Now what does this mean from a DFS standpoint? We love to target players with a higher usage rate because it shows that they are touching the ball and are more involved than other players on their team. While NBA superstars obviously have higher usage rates than their counterparts, an important metric we look for is how much a player’s usage rate rises when a star player is out. This helps us decide which players become top options when an injury arises.
Minutes:
This one should be pretty self-explanatory, but each player on a team will see a certain amount of minutes per game. Out of a 48 minute game, most starters will see around 32-35 minutes. The more minutes someone sees, the more opportunity they have to score fantasy points.
Unlike other sports where players can reach value on a single play, extensive playing time is required in NBA DFS because of the incremental scoring. Another key metric we use is how many minutes bench players see when their teammates are injured.
Value Option:
When we call someone a “value option” we are referring to cheaper players who could hit 5-7X+ value on a slate. The “X value” metric is simply fantasy points scored divided by salary times 1000. For example, if a player is priced at $5000 and scores 35 fantasy points, that is 7X value.
In NBA DFS, these options are normally must-play popular options, especially in lower risk contests.
Defense by Position:
Another key metric we look for when picking players for our lineups is how well they match up with the opposing defense. Normally when a player is going up against a bottom three defense against his position we recommend them as a lower risk option, as historically other players in the same position have had recent success in the same spot.
DK/FD Points per Minute:
A final metric we like to utilize in our lineups is DK/FD Points per Minute, which is simply fantasy points divided by minutes played in their current situation. Obviously, the higher this number is the better. We use this metric routinely when looking at injury situations because it shows how efficient a teammate is when someone is forced to miss a game. For example, a player’s DK Points per Minute may rise significantly when a star player is off the court. So if that star player sits out a game, we know his teammate is in line for a decent production boost based on historical on/off court trends.
Scoring and Site Rules Before you start building NBA DFS lineups, you must know the rules of the sites where you’re playing. Fortunately, most sites are extremely similar with the exception of a few minor scoring differences, roster limitations, and salary ranges.
All sites:
- Require you to roster a player from each position: PG, SG, SF, PF, C.
- Award 1 point per actual point and 1.5 points per assist.
FanDuel specifically:
- Requires 2 PG, 2 SG, 2 SF, 2 PF, 1 C.
- Awards 1.2 points per rebound, 3 points per steal, 3 points per block, and -1 point for turnovers.
DraftKings specifically:
- Requires just 1 player per position with an extra spot for Guard (PG/SG), Forward (SF/PF), and Utility (any position).
- Awards 1.25 points per rebound, 2 points per steal, 2 points per block, and -0.5 points for turnovers, and bonus points for 3-pointers (0.5 points), double-doubles (1.5 points), and triple-doubles (3 points).
Yahoo specifically:
- Requires just 1 player per position with an extra spot for Guard (PG/SG), Forward (SF/PF), and Utility (any position).
- Awards 1.2 points per rebound, 3 points per steal, 3 points per block, and -1 point for turnovers.
For the most part, the scoring is somewhat similar between sites, with a couple key differences. For one, it’s easy to notice that DraftKings offers bonuses for Double-Doubles, Triple-Doubles and for every 3-point field goal made. While it’s super nice of DK to throw us a few extra points, we do not have to specifically target players who fall under these categories. The other main difference in scoring is Blocks/Steals and Turnovers. FD/Yahoo offer an extra point per block/steal but they also punish mistakes by taking a full point away for turnovers.
Now that we covered the rules and scoring, let’s move onto how to specific NBA DFS strategy.
NBA DFS Strategy Low-risk contest selection:
- The best ROIs will likely be found in single entry 50/50s and h3Hs, so look there first. Try to find h3Hs and small field double ups with inexperienced entrants.
Low-risk NBA DFS strategy:
NBA is one of the easiest sports to play low-risk contests due to the heavy concentration of ownership.
When there is a big injury in the NBA and the backup option’s salary hasn’t increased, this player could be as high as 95% owned in double ups. With a vast amount of games per night, it is common to see a player in this situation on a daily occurrence.
In NBA low-risk contests, you do not fade the chalk. In NBA DFS specifically, the chalk is chalk for a reason and many of these cheaper back-up options will end up hitting 7X+ value. After locking in the players that are affected through injury, you fill out the rest of your lineup with higher owned (20%+) players from our Occupy Model, players highlighted as low risk in our content, or players you expect to be popular when doing your own research. Normally, these players are seeing a boost from an increased role or a favorable matchup.
High-risk contest selection:
- Satellites, satellites, satellites -- look to play contests that award tickets to future contests first and foremost. This is especially useful for cross-sport contests (satellites for non-NFL contests), as they are slower to fill and usually come with overlay.
- Stick to Quintuple Ups, 10x boosters, Single Entry GPPs, Leagues -- especially later posting ones with less than 500 entrants -- and 3-Max tournaments unless you plan on making 20+ lineups.
- Do not enter a contest unless you can enter the maximum number of lineups allowed.
- For NBA DFS, we have found that Leagues are the best high-risk tournaments to play.
High-risk NBA DFS strategy:
Usually in a high-risk DFS contest, there is leverage in fading popular plays. However, NBA DFS is a completely different beast. As we highlighted earlier, most of the chalky options end up being in the winning lineup. So how do we differentiate?
In high-risk NBA contests, we like to keep a core of 3-5 low-risk players. The Model is a great tool for high risk, as it was specifically created for this type of contest. Normally we target players in the 6% to 20% ownership range to round out the lineup.
On average -- and this will vary from slate to slate -- but the average ownership of a winning high-risk lineup is in the 20-30% range.
That is, if you add up the ownership of every player in your lineup and divide it by the number of players in your lineup, that figure will be between 20 and 30 percent. This is much higher than other sports, but it’s also significantly lower than the average ownership for winning low-risk lineups. It’s a perfect representation of playing the chalk while getting different in a few spots, so keep this number in mind while building for high-risk contests.
Mass multi-entry NBA DFS strategy:
Step 1, use our Lineup Builder. Step 2, adhere to the above high-risk lineup strategy rules. There are a variety of ways to successfully build 20-150 NBA DFS lineups. Playing multi-entry tournaments is a completely different game than playing in smaller low-risk (or high-risk!) contests. By studying what top NBA DFS players do when they max-enter a contest, we can easily determine the best way to use our Lineup Builder to create a dedicated multi-entry strategy for specific slates.
Utilizing Leverage
In simple terms, leverage in DFS is benefiting when our opponents are wrong - about anything. Mass multi-entering is less about predicting player performance and more about playing against the field.
- As stated above, chalk is chalk for a reason. Because NBA is not an event-based sport (unlike other sports where a single event can exponentially increase a player’s fantasy point total e.g. a touchdown in NFL or a home run in MLB), ranges of outcomes are much tighter. As a result, the effects of variance are reduced and it’s much more difficult for the most popular plays to fail.
- Therefore, our leverage in NBA DFS tournaments will come from a lower ownership tier.
- Speaking of ownership tiers, it’s best to think about NBA DFS ownership in buckets: chalk 30%+, leverage zone 10-30%, low-owned 0-10%.
What the Pros Do
With excellent free resources like Fantasy Labs Contest Dashboard and RotoGrinders ResultsDB, we can easily look at historical slates and see what top NBA DFS pros did.
Each NBA DFS tournament player has intricacies to their approach, but almost all of them do the following:
- Match the field on chalk players. If a player is 40% owned, they will play 40% of that player in their lineups. They rarely, if ever, play way more (or way less) than the field does on chalk players.
- They get leverage in the, wait for it, leverage zone. They play anywhere from double to 4X the field’s exposure on players in that 10-30% zone. E.g. if a player is 10% owned, and they want leverage, they will play 20-40% of that player in their lineups.
Core Plays
Pick anywhere from 3-6 players in that leverage zone that our Occupy Model (or your own projections or research) believes are great plays. Go overweight on them as the core of your lineups.
Player Pool Size
Most top NBA DFS pros include 40 to 70 players in their 150-max pool on a normal-sized slate.
For top 20-max players, that range drops to 25 to 45 players. The min/max player pool size decreases as there are less games on the slate. Top NBA MMErs have wildly different strategies here -- some routinely fall on the low end, some exclusively have large player pools, while others slide up and down the range depending on the slate. The key is to find what works best for you as long as you stay within the above recommendations.
Lineup Rules
Because correlation isn’t as big of a factor in NBA DFS as other sports, we don’t need to implement too many rules when building lineups. The two main ones are:
- Max players per team: outside of situations where teams are decimated by injuries, you’ll only want 1-2 players from the same team in the same lineup.
- Blocking players who cannibalize each others’ minutes: if two players share the same role or position, setting rules so they don’t appear in lineups together -- since you likely need one to outperform the other to hit value -- is important.
Single Game NBA DFS Strategy:
Many of the same principles from classic NBA strategy remain in NBA single game contests. Ownership is usually very predictable, and narrow ranges of outcomes dictate different lineup constructions than other sports.
Note that on FanDuel, there is no salary multiplier with only 5 roster spots. DraftKings includes the salary multiplier and an extra roster spot.
Our Occupy Model has incredible predictive power when it comes to single game contests, so lean on it heavily to build lineups while following the guidelines below.
CPT/MVP selection
On FanDuel, you have three fantasy point multiplier spots: MVP (2x FP), Star (1.5x FP), and Pro (1.2x FP). Because we don’t get a salary break for rostering cheaper players in these spots, always spend up at these multiplier positions. You need players who will score the most fantasy points in the game, so play studs in these spots.
For DraftKings, we have two main options: play a stud CPT who will score the most points on the slate or roster a value CPT who allows us to fit the maximum amount of studs in our FLEX spots.
Value Plays
Outside of rare situations where there is legitimately zero value, a stars and scrubs approach is the most viable lineup construction on both sites. Play 1-2 cheap values in your FLEX spots that are guaranteed to see minutes.
High-Risk Contests
For high-risk contests, you need at least one low-owned player in your lineup. On FanDuel, this can be as simple as swapping a popular MVP with a popular Pro selection. On DK, you’ll need to either roster an unpopular CPT or 1-2 low-owned FLEX plays. Like classic mode, chalk is chalk for a reason, so we can’t fade every popular option in single game -- we just need to be smart about how we pivot with 1-3 roster spots.
Uniqueness in Larger Contests
If you’re playing large-field single game GPPs, you must also consider lineup uniqueness. Unlike other sports where you can leave tons of salary on the table or have uncorrelated lineups that, while unique, still have a shot to win, there is a dead zone in NBA single game DFS where your unique lineups have 0 chance of winning.
So every lineup that is created must be carefully crafted to not only ensure that a ton of other people don’t have it, but also so that it’s not completely dead after the first tip.
Here are a couple ways to not tie with hundreds of other entries:
- Leave $500 or more on the table, but with good reason. Ideally, you’re leaving salary for 1 of 2 scenarios:
- A mid-priced player outscores a lower-tier stud (and you opt to leave salary instead of paying up for that lower-tier stud).
- A low-priced option outscores a mid-priced option (and you opt to leave salary instead of paying up for that mid-priced player).
- Playing lower-owned options, usually a mid-tier player, at CPT on DK. As stated above, you almost exclusively want a stud or value option at CPT, but playing a low-owned mid-tier player at CPT can automatically make your lineup unique-ish without being horrific.
- On FD, the lower-owned MVP/Star/Pro route can just be to play a lower-priced stud in a higher multiplier position than a higher-priced stud (e.
g. If a stud is $15K and another stud is $14K, playing the $14K player at MVP and the $15K player at Star immediately makes your lineup different than the majority of the field). In fact, this is the single biggest leverage point on FanDuel. Our friends over at numberFire have access to FanDuel data that isn’t publicly available, and they wrote this fantastic guide to single game contests that you absolutely must-read. - The last option is to play value players whose minutes are not guaranteed. Whether it’s matchup-specific or late breaking news, if a player who isn’t expected to play a ton of minutes actually plays and contributes, you now have a unique stars-and-scrubs lineup. Often, this player scores a 0 and you lose, but sometimes the risk-reward trade off is worthwhile in larger contests.
NBA DFS is a projections-heavy sport where you must be agile before (and after!) lock when news breaks. By having a solid process, a reliable model or projections system, and a fundamental strategy, you’ll be more prepared than the field every night.
This NBA DFS strategy guide was produced by our NBA manager Tom Boyle with help from Occupy Fantasy co-founder Brian Jester.
Daily Fantasy Basketball 101: Tips and Strategies
Derek Farnsworth (Notorious)
Created 8 years ago, Last Updated 6 years ago
Whether you are new to the daily fantasy sports world or whether you have been around for ages, it never hurts to sharpen your skills.
Daily fantasy basketball is a completely different animal than any other sport and should be treated as such. Here are the best tips that I can give you Grinders for NBA DFS.
Get to Know Your Site’s Scoring
First and foremost, you need to learn everything you can about the site that you are playing on. That means studying the scoring system, roster construction, player flexibility, and whether it has the late swap feature. In terms of scoring, all sites have subtle differences and being able to apply them in lineup creation can help you set yourself apart from the competition.
Whether you play on one site or on multiple sites, you need to know the scoring so that you can apply it when creating your lineups. Here’s a quick look at both DraftKings and FanDuel scoring for NBA:
Notes
— Simple, straightforward scoring system
— No negatives for missed shots
— Turnovers negate 1 fantasy point each
— No milestone bonuses
Notes
— No negatives for missed shots
— Turnovers negate -0.
5 fantasy points each
— 3-point made bonus
— Milestone bonuses for double-doubles and triple-doubles
Create a Value System
When I first started playing daily fantasy sports, creating a system for value really helped me simplify the lineup creation process. It allows you to give each player a baseline of how many fantasy points they need to score in order for them to pay off their salary. The first step is to create a fantasy point goal that is realistic and high enough to cash on most nights. This goal will vary by league type, as you’ll need a much highers score to cash in GPPs than you will in cash games.
Once you determine your fantasy point goal, simply take the total and divide by the total salary cap of the site that you are playing on. For instance, if you determine that 250 points is your goal on DraftKings, divide that by $50,000 (total available salary). This tells you that you need roughly 5 FPs per $1,000 of salary in order to reach your goal.
When you hear experts say that a player should reach 5x their salary, this is what they are talking about. Using a simple value system can be extremely useful, as it will help you spot players that are over or under-priced. Keep in mind that you generally need more than 5x salary from your cheaper players and less than the 5x salary from superstar players.
Injuries / Opportunity
If you have never played daily fantasy basketball before, you will quickly learn that in the NBA, opportunity is everything. Minutes directly lead to opportunity and opportunity leads directly to production. Due to this, injuries impact daily fantasy basketball more than in any other fantasy sport. When a player is injured, his minutes and his production are both going to get picked up by his backup and the rest of his teammates. One of the best strategies in daily fantasy basketball is taking advantage of backups that see a boost in production due to injuries. You don’t want to be the one player that doesn’t have the extremely cheap backup player making a spot start.
In order to keep up with the numerous injuries around the league, you should constantly monitor player updates throughout the day. My advice is to open up a separate tab in your browser that has Rotoworld’s NBA Player News. Throughout the day, read each and every player update so that you are on top of all of the NBA news when it’s time to create your lineups. Once it gets closer to tip-off, this is where Twitter takes over as the best tool for injury updates. The best follows on Twitter are the team’s beat writers as well as reputable fantasy sources. Don’t trust random sources though! Anyone else remember the fake update last year?
Pace of Play
Pace of play is another key component of daily fantasy basketball, and once again it relates to opportunity. Pace of play measures the number of possessions that each team averages per game. The faster the pace of play, the more possessions a team has. The more possessions a team has, the more opportunities there are for the players on that team to score fantasy points.
There are two ways to predict the pace of play in the NBA, and they are both fairly simple. You can average the two team’s possessions per game or you can simply look at the point totals in the Vegas lines.
Defense vs. Position Rankings (DvP)
NBA Defense vs. Position rankings are another great tool to use in the NBA. These rankings measure how many fantasy points each team gives up to each position on the floor relative to the rest of the league. You will quickly see popular trends in daily fantasy basketball, such as targeting opposing PGs against the Sixers, targeting big men against the Nuggets, or whatever it may be. The DvP rankings help you spot these favorable matchups each night.
When looking at the rankings, it’s typically best to look two sets. Looking at both season-long DvP rankings as well as recent DvP rankings will help you spot any new trends in how teams are defending each position.
Targeting Hot / Cold Streaks
Basketball is one of the “streakiest” sports around.
In MLB, players can go on hot streaks, but momentum typically only goes as far as the next starting pitcher that a player faces. In the NFL, there are too many factors that go into the plays each week to make a hot streak worth any value.
But in the NBA, momentum plays a huge role for both teams and for individual players. When a player has confidence in his game, he’s likely going to be more aggressive on both ends of the floor. Targeting players on hot streaks is a good strategy as long as you are not overpaying for that recent production. Likewise, it can also be a good strategy to target players that have had a cold streak whose salaries are extremely depressed.
Using the “Experts”
As the industry grows, so does the amount of coverage for daily fantasy sports. There are a ton of “experts” out there that give out their opinion on the games each and every day. With so much information out there, it’s nearly impossible to compile it all into a single optimal lineup.
My advice is to read or listen to as much advice as you can and to look for common plays. The more experts that agree on a player or a matchup, the better.
One of the best tools on RotoGrinders is the NBA Consensus Picks from the experts. You can quickly see each expert’s favorite plays at each position based on the salaries for each site.
Be Ready for the Madness
After you’ve spent hours monitoring injuries, breaking down matchups, and studying player salaries, be ready to throw it all out the window in the last 15 minutes before lineups lock. There are so many last minute scratches in the NBA that you have to constantly be ready to change your lineups.
Whether you play as a hobby or for a living, you need to carve out the last 15-30 minutes before lineups lock and devote them solely to DFS because they are the most important 15-30 minutes of the day.
What’s next?
Hopefully this was a solid introduction to DFS NBA. To continue to sharpen your strategies and build the best possible lineups each night, you might want to check out some of these other tools and content here on RotoGrinders:
— NBA Daily Research Tools No matter which site you’re playing on, our research consoles have the daily projections, stats and picks you need each day.
— Grinders Forum – Our Main Forum is a great place to talk NBA strategy and ask questions, including dedicated threads to each night’s games.
— GrindersLive and Podcasts – Join our experts for daily videocasts and podcasts. Perfect for those of you that don’t like to read!
— RotoAcademy – Both paid and free strategy courses from some of the sharpest minds in the industry.
— Incentives – Our premium content. Tailored to a specific site and sport, this is a great way to take your DFS games to the next level. (Use one of our daily fantasy promo codes when signing up and get a FREE one-year subscription to that site’s Incentives content.)
CHEERS TO A PROFITABLE NBA SEASON!
3 Tips for Winning Daily Fantasy Basketball
Daily fantasy sports pro player Peter "DraftCheat" Christensen gives 3 top tips for beginners on how to start winning at daily fantasy basketball.
Before we get into the NBA Daily Fantasy winning strategies, let me tell you how interesting and exciting it all is.
Two years ago, I would have had to work hard to name 30 NBA players. Now I can shoot out the roster of every NBA team, and now it's my favorite fantasy sport. The feeling of fighting for the big prize in the GPP, when you have Stephen Curry in your roster, who literally starts pouring three-pointers and dragging you to victory, is simply indescribable. Add to this the significant edge that can be gained in daily fantasy basketball (if you know what you're doing), and you have a recipe for a very interesting and profitable activity. Or rather: an activity that becomes profitable.
1. Trust the bookies
Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Have you been to these huge, posh casinos? These monsters were built by smart people who knew what they were doing. One of the first steps to success in NBA daily fantasy (and even fantasy sports in general) is checking NBA quotes at bookmakers. You should aim for games with high Total Over and Total Under, which are predicted to be even games.
If you have starters on your roster from a game that is far from being played by the end of the match, it is much more likely that your guys will play in those minutes.
If one team is beaten by another, you will often see starters going to the bench early to rest for the next game. Games predicted by the bookmaker to have a high total are likely to score more fantasy points as this is based on the teams' pace of play. High Total games tend to not only earn more points for your players, but also more rebounds, assists, blocks and steals, and more possession time. Finally, in a tied game there is always the potential to get bonus minutes in overtime. Owning players who have played in overtime can be a big advantage in big-field tournaments in the NBA's Daily Fantasy.
2. Minutes are everything
If you've never played Daily Fantasy Basketball, one lesson you'll quickly learn is that you should chase minutes. Given the nature of basketball, and the fact that only 5 people from each team can be on the court at a time, fantasy points are earned in almost every possession, be it through baskets, assists, rebounds, blocks or steals.
This means that in daily fantasy basketball you need a roster of players who are likely to be on the court for the majority of the game. It can be hard to predict at times, but in general you should target starters in games that are predicted to be even, and players from teams that have few players left. Perhaps this statement sounds strange to those who do not follow the NBA closely. But as the season progresses, teams inevitably pick up injuries and suspensions, and there's often a team or two that don't have a lot of players available to play at the moment. When the team drops to 8 or 9healthy players, you can almost be sure that regardless of the score, the starters in this game will get a lot of minutes. Choose such players and reap the rewards.
3. Who owns the information owns the world
One of the most important aspects of Daily Fantasy Basketball, which is unique in the NBA, is the need to be at the computer until the start of the competition. Unlike other sports, in NBA daily fantasy, a lot of important information pops up much more often before the game starts.
And if you play often enough, there will be times when you will frantically press the buttons, as a couple of your guys unexpectedly dropped out of the game a few minutes before the lineups closed. Even worse, if you ignore this news and end up drafting a player who will serve the entire game. You need to be vigilant and follow all NBA news on news sites and related sources on Twitter. Although it may sound complicated, if you know where to look and improve your information gathering process, it can really be a huge advantage in daily fantasy basketball and in the NBA in particular, as you are less likely to have zeros in their roasters.
Conclusion
There is much more to building winning rosters in Daily Fantasy Basketball. But the three points listed above are critical for those who are just starting out. Follow them and you will build a solid base to which you can add other profitable strategies and tools, such as individual matchup analysis. For starters, build a roster of high-scoring, tied-match players who are likely to play many minutes, and try to avoid dead players.
This is already half the battle. The rest will come with time and experience. Just start playing daily fantasy basketball.
Good luck!
Read more: Sites where you can play NBA fantasy
How to win the NBA Daily Fantasy GPP with one entry?
In , unlike Daily Fantasy Football, the variance in NBA Daily Fantasy is much lower, which means that for those who love basketball and are good at it, the chances of winning a GPP tournament with just one entry are much higher.
And the first thing you need to understand if you want to be successful in NBA Daily Fantasy GPP tournaments is that you need to be sure that you can win with one team. This may seem trivial to some, but it is extremely important. Many players mistakenly believe that they cannot compete with players whose bankroll allows them to register many teams in the same tournaments. However, this is not true.
If that still bothers you, you can play single-entry tournaments (one-entry tournaments) where everyone has the same chance of winning.
Otherwise, you must overcome this obstacle. Of course, in terms of mathematics, a person with 50 tournament entries is more likely to win than someone with only 1 team. However, the costs of participating in the tournament, and therefore the possible losses in the first case, will be much higher. Those players who register many times in a single tournament will most often build their lineups around a certain pool of players, thereby limiting the number of unique lineups that a player with one entry will play against.
In any case, you should first of all overcome the psychological barrier that makes you think that you cannot succeed with only one command, since this statement is false.
Master the lessons in this article and you'll be competitive with a single entry in the NBA Daily Fantasy GPP tournaments.
Build a GPP Lineup Based on Cash Game Teams
The good news for daily fantasy NBA players is that you can use your cash game lineups to register and into big tournaments.
A good pick is always a good pick because there is no need to stack players in NBA Daily Fantasy. Except in rare cases, which were discussed in the last article about staking in the NBA. Some players simply duplicate their lineups from cash games to GPP tournaments. Although this approach is somewhat simplistic, it works.
The approach that allows single-entry GPP tournaments and is explored in this article is based on a slightly modified cash game lineup. Below you will find a few tricks that are used when adjusting the composition for tournaments with a large field.
If there is an obvious pick, use it
Often strategy advice in daily fantasy sports suggests that it is better to avoid players with a high percentage of possession in GPP tournaments. And in certain cases, this advice really works. If you don't take a player that 50% of the tournament participants have included in their rosters and he fails that night, you will be able to extract a lot of advantages from this situation.
The only problem is that such players don't usually fail . The percentage when they perform successfully is much higher than the percentage of owning them. This means that you will be in a losing position if you refuse such players every day.
Use obvious top options and then diversify your lineup with less popular players in other positions.
If the latest news can help you find a value spade, put him on the team.
One of the most essential principles of playing NBA Daily Fantasy is to follow the news all the way to the start of the game. Yes, we have already written about this several times, but nevertheless, many players do not like to make late substitutions right before the start of matches. This is especially true of the European pool of players, since the start of matches in the NBA for many occurs late at night.
In addition to the late start of matches, many are hampered by a sense of concern that the new squad will be worse than the one that was assembled initially, and substitutions made just before the start of the game may not be as well thought out as we would like.
This is another psychological obstacle that you need to overcome .
Be sure to stay tuned for the latest news before matches start. If a team has two starting guards out and the coach is forced to play a 40-minute substitute on a low salary, use that to gain an advantage over the field.
Don't expect to win every night
GPPs are fickle. When you play with only one tournament entry, you won't always win. The main goal is to get into the top players and take most of the prize pool, and this cannot be done every day. However, when this happens, you can easily recoup your previous less successful gaming days.
Since you only play with one entry, you won't risk much of your savings every night. Learn to cope with emotions, do not fall into tilt in difficult situations, and do not fall into euphoria in case of victories. Both can play a cruel joke on you. It is better to take a few days off after such an event and restore your mood for the game.
Look for players with a high ceiling
This is one of the best ways to transform your team from a cash game to a GPP tournament. In cash games, players with a high gender bring stable results, the choice of which gives the very security. At the same time, the ceiling for such players is usually quite low precisely because of their stability.
GPP lineups, on the other hand, are great for players with low floors and high ceilings, who can also have the advantage of an affordable price or low ownership percentage. If you take a couple of these players on your team and they show a great game, getting into the top is guaranteed to you .
Don't think about what others are doing
If you're playing a big tournament with only one entry, it's very easy to overthink yourself. It's easy to convince yourself not to take LeBron James or Kevin Durant because the other members will take them too. Try not to think about it. Try to overcome the psychological barrier that makes you think you can't win the tournament with one entry.
