Daily Fantasy 101 - GPP Strategies for MLB New Users

Opening Day for the 2018 MLB season is just around the corner and that means another great year for daily fantasy baseball. In this article, I am going to cover some of the basics but most important strategies when making your lineups for GPP tournaments across the industry. While these are separated into sections, there is a lot of intertwined ideas between it all.

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Stacking

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way early. Stacking is a vital strategy when it comes to building your tournament teams.

What is stacking? This is when you take anywhere from three to five batters that hit in succession and use them all in the same lineup. The reason you do this is that if that team scores a bunch of runs, you are most likely to cash in on that as you’re going to get points for every hit, run (R) and run batted in (RBI) that occurs with your players. For example, if your first player gets a single, your second player gets a single and your third one hits a home run (HR) with your first two on base, you are going to get all of those points and jump up the standings really quick.

Of course, there is the downside of stacking as well. If you have four or five batters from the same team and that team only puts up one run, you are not going to cash anything. This is a volatile strategy but it is also the most commonly used in tournaments as it has the highest upside. Take a look at the top of the leaderboard over the first couple weeks of the season and you will notice that almost all of the teams in the top 10 will have utilized this strategy.

Take a look at this example of a stack of Phillies players that put up great numbers, but individually they may not have been that valuable because there were no home runs hit.

Another aspect I want to bring your attention to is the three runs that the Phillies scored in the ninth inning. If they were the home team, they would not have gotten to bat in the bottom of the ninth so. Using teams that are on the road is another strategy to use because they are guaranteed nine innings of at-bats even if they are winning, whereas if you stack a home team that has run up the score you are going to only get eight innings worth of scoring opportunities. And because every batter has a floor of zero and cannot go negative, there is only more upside by having more at-bats.

Pitchers

While you do want to use safe pitchers when possible, it is rarely going to be possible to jam two ace pitchers into one lineup, so you will have to dig deeper and be a bit more creative. Pitchers are more consistent game to game, generally speaking, so paying up is more than likely going to be the right play, however that is not always the case.

One of the most important stats to look for when deciding on a pitcher is their strikeout rate (K%). Strikeouts (K) are so valuable on a site like DraftKings as just one K makes up for one earned run and just two K’s are equal to a win. So while you always want to try and pick up the win from your pitcher, K’s are still more important. When looking at cheaper pitchers to roster, using a high ERA, high strikeout pitcher is a strategy I like to implement because of how quickly you can rack up your score if your volatile pitcher has a couple big innings in the K department.

Take a look at the below example of two completely different types of games that ended with a similar point production on DraftKings.

Dallas Keuchel had a great real-life game. He went six innings allowing just four hits and one earned run, walked two batters while picking up four strikeouts and the win.

Carlos Carrasco on the other hand went six and a third innings, allowed six hits and five earned runs while walking two batters and didn’t pick up the win. However, he struck out 10 batters in the process which allowed him to rack up the points to make up for the earned runs he allowed.

Remember, one strikeout (+2 DKpts) makes up for one earned run (-2 DKpts).

Ownership

There are certainly some players that ignore projected ownership and just jam in their favorite plays. However, ownership is a very important factor especially in large field GPP’s. If you know that there is going to be a team that will be especially chalky in a given matchup, it may be in your best interest to look elsewhere for your batters. If you have a stack full of 25-30 percent owned players that means you are competing with 25-30 percent of the field with a similar stack meaning your other batters and pitchers need to be perfect. On the other hand, if you have a different stack in the five to seven percent and the chalk team busts, now you’ve got 25 percent of lineups being dead and you need to beat out a much smaller percentage of the field. Also, when you have a lower owned stack you are going to vault up the leaderboard much quicker when they pick up points for you rather than if your 25 percent owned does.

A good way to know who is going to be chalky is looking at Vegas’ projected run totals and game totals for teams. Many daily fantasy players look to Vegas first when they start their research so this is a quick and simple way of gauging what the general public could be on.

Another reason why looking at different options other than what is likely to be the most popular is that hitters are volatile. Even a hitter like Mike Trout can go 0-for-4 in a dream matchup. No hitter is a lock to put up a big number (no pitcher is either, for that matter) so there is always a reason to look to a different option than what will be the chalkiest.

These are some of the more general strategies for tournaments, obviously, everybody has their preferences but these should be your starting points when building GPP teams.

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