NFL DFS Strategy: Goals, Bankroll Management, Contest Selection

September 3, 2021

Mark Kieffer gives some tips on how to be a successful and profitable NFL DFS player in the first part of his NFL DFS strategy series.

This is the first installment of my NFL DFS Strategy Series. I will be writing a weekly article highlighting tips and general strategies to help you with your NFL DFS Tournaments, too!

Hello, RotoBallers, my name is Mark Kieffer and I'm ready to reprise my DFS strategy content here at RotoBaller with an eye on NFL DFS this time instead of the content I did for MLB DFS this Spring and Summer.

Thanks for taking the time to read this NFL DFS strategy piece! If you're here, it's likely because you want to be a better DFS player and learn more about how to be a sustainable DFS player who doesn't have to deposit more money in their account every week. I hope to help you do that through this series!

Background

If you’re reading this, you are someone that is looking to play NFL DFS and have a successful year. The top players and analysts in the industry often make it seem as though being profitable in NFL DFS is easy, but I can assure you it is not. 

I am someone that has a lifetime 89% ROI playing NFL DFS on DraftKings. I haven’t won a Milly Maker (yet), I’m not rolling in a G-Wagon. I am someone just like you: someone that deposited a few hundred dollars with the goal of never having to redeposit again and hoping to make a few dollars along the way.

I started my DFS journey losing and losing often. Nothing crazy because I only had a few hundred dollars but it took me until my 5th season playing NFL DFS before I was an all-time winning player. See the chart below and the years of me collecting ‘L’s:

I’m going to share in this guide some tips and strategies along with bankroll management and contest selection that can help you potentially turn the tide and help you become a winning player.

What Kind of Player Are You?

Before jumping into depositing money and building lineups, you have to come to grips with what kind of a player you are and what kind of a player you want to be.

Are you someone that wants to play sporadically in the big events, hoping to win $50k or $100k that night, and are OK with losing otherwise? In other words, do you want a Sunday sweat for fun?

Are you someone who enjoys the hobby and wants to have the hobby be self-sustaining?

I will be honest - I used to be very jealous of the top DFS grinders that were winning 5 figure and 6 figure contests that seemingly were living a luxurious lifestyle funded by DFS. My original dream was to win 6 and 7 figures, have this be my main source of income and be a professional fantasy player. I was not making a lot of money, I was having financial difficulty, and I considered myself decent at fantasy sports. 

But then recently I stepped back and thought about my life: I have a family, a mortgage, kids, bills, etc., that need to be paid for. I have a job I love with benefits such as health and dental insurance, and retirement including a pension. I’m not a twenty-year-old kid anymore.

Even if I won an NFL Milly-Maker, I do not think I would step away from my career because of the stability it provides my family and the satisfaction I get from it.

I play fantasy sports as a hobby and my new goal is to have it be a self-sustaining hobby, which it has been for the past 4 years or so. When I make a big score, I pay down a bill or take the family on vacation or something like that.

Your goal might be different but all of my advice and mindset is through this lens: becoming a winning player, self-sustaining a hobby, but being realistic that my lifestyle will not change.

Your situation might be different than mine. Assess your life, your lifestyle, and go from there. Only play DFS with amounts of money you can afford to lose.

Bankroll Management

This isn’t always discussed enough but it’s one of the most important pieces into becoming a good DFS player. The advice most give is “play no more than 5-10% of your bankroll in a given week, play 80% cash games and 20% GPP”. What that boils down to is playing 4-8% of your bankroll in cash games and 1-2% of your bankroll in GPPs. Because I do not play cash games (more on this later), I just take that idea of 1-2% of my bankroll and play that.

The beginner’s method: figure out now how much you are willing to lose in NFL DFS this season. Take that amount and divide by the 18 week season. That’s how much you play each week. You are guaranteed to have entries every week because you won’t run out of money.

Contest Selection

While bankroll management is important to ensure you won’t run out of money, contest selection is going to be what determines your DFS playing fate in the long run. You have to track your results. If you are like me in my early days, you might be playing everything from 50-50s,  Head to Heads, Double-Ups, Triple Ups, GPPs, Live Entry Qualifiers, etc.

I recommend using Rototracker.com. It’s a fee-based service, I make no money off of it, but it helps me see where I am strong as a DFS player and where I am not.

Key Rule: Play what you are good at. If you play what you are good at, you can win at it consistently. Do that. I am a tournament player, maybe you find you are a great cash game player. If that’s the case, play cash games.  Don’t try to be someone you aren’t. Be the best version of yourself. 

I went through my results and found I was good at GPPs in NFL, especially single entry tournaments. It wasn’t easy to see because my entries were spread so thin that I was seeing myself bleeding cash out slowly, which was blinding my successes. Tracking results and using filters allowed me to see what I’m good at.  I keep my entries focused on what I am good at because I want to win, and I need to win to continue playing. This is fun for me! 

That said, let’s talk about why I am a tournament player and why I think tournaments, in general, are a pathway for new DFS players to build up a bankroll more than cash games.

Let's Do Some Math

Let’s say you have a $1000 bankroll, and you decide to grind 50/50s to build it up per the advice of 99% of analysts out there.

A 60% win rate in 50/50s is considered pretty good. I personally can’t get to that rate, I stink at cash games, but I know there are some that can get there while others might be better than that even. A professional gambler wins at about a 52-55% rate with their bets on sides and totals for some context.

DraftKings operates at a 10% rake in cash games -> 10% of your buy-in goes straight to them. Because of this, if you “win” a 50/50 you aren’t doubling up but you are profiting 90% of your buy-in instead of 100%.

If you have a 60% win rate, this means you will lose 40% of the time. If you take that $1000 and decide to play the 10% of your bankroll on a slate, that’s $100/slate. If you won all of your $100 in 50/50s, that would be a profit of $80 because of the 10% rake.

The game is really:

60% chance to profit $80
40% chance to lose $100

Doing some quick calculations: 

0.6 * $80 - 0.4*$100 = $8, $8/$100 is a 8% ROI.

If you had $1000 in bankroll, you stuck to 10% of your bankroll on a given slate, and you were consistently winning at a 60% rate (which is pretty good), you could expect to earn 8% ROI or $8/slate.

I didn’t play DFS with the hopes of winning $8/week for a grand total of $144 during an NFL season.

Now let’s say you have $100,000 to play DFS with and you are able to play $10,000 a slate and you have the same win rate. That 8% ROI translates into an expected $800 a week which would be $14,400 an NFL season. $14,400 sounds like a lot of money to you and me. $14,400 isn’t that much to someone that’s playing $10,000 a week.

Because tournaments offer the opportunity to 1.5x, 2x, 5x, 10x, even 100x your buy-in if things land right, that’s the recommended pathway for those wanting to build a DFS bankroll.

Tying it all together: because I am a winning player in tournaments and tournaments are very volatile, I will play 1-2% of my bankroll each week in GPPs. If you have a relatively small bankroll, such as $1000 or less, I would consider playing 5% of my bankroll in GPPs. I generally stick to single entry, 3 max, and contests that have a little flatter payout structure.

Another tip is to play as many entries in the lowest dollar field you can. The sharks can’t play below $5. If I had $100 to play, I would find as many $1, $2, $3, $4 contest and set lineups in those as opposed to playing a single $100 buy-in contest. The pay lines are generally higher as the entry fee goes up. Lower dollar contests give you better chances to cash in your contest.

Milly Makers and Live Final Qualifiers

These are fun events. It’s crazy to think every week there is at least one person taking down a $1 million grand prize and it’s easy to talk ourselves into thinking “hey, this could be me”. These contests are so top-heavy that they are -EV (negative expected value)  in the long run. If you are interested in playing these (I play the Milly Makers as well), create a separate budget for that and learn how to make lineups that give you a chance to get to the top but give you an even greater chance of finishing at the bottom. If you’re going to be hundreds of thousands of lineups, you have to take some risks!

Summary

Set a budget, create a realistic goal for yourself this season, track results or used track results to play what you are good at. If you can do those three things, you will find yourself with a profit to your bankroll come season's end more often than not.

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