Are you ready for DraftKings NFL Showdown slates this year?
My name is Josh Thomas, and I am the resident NFL Showdown Expert here at DFS Army! Last season was the first foray into these Showdown/Single Game slates on both Draftkings and Fanduel and while the learning curve was high at the beginning of the season (like with any new game style), we found some edges and exploited them. While we had an extremely successful season last year with major GPP wins on both sites, we want more! Lots of those wins were split with tens or hundreds of other lineups, meaning that we were able to build ‘chalk’ lineups that could split with others, but on the slates where someone won the top prize by themselves, we weren’t as successful. Was it just variance that these players built such a unique lineup that they were able to win them by themselves? Or was there actually a DraftKings NFL showdown strategy and an edge in doing so?
To find out, I dove in and analyzed the top three lineups from every single primetime slate (Thursday, Sunday Night, Monday Night) along with others (Thanksgiving, Saturday games in week 16) to learn more about what these lineups did and if it was something we could replicate. I analyzed 165 lineups in total, and in the article below I will give you a free preview into the successful strategies and lineup construction tips that I found in my research. I truly believe we’ve found a few new edges that can be exploited for our first SIX FIGURE win in NFL Showdown!
Below you are going to find a preview of a 6k+ article I did breaking down pretty much every aspect you could think of from these showdowns last year. This is just a taste of what we offer at DFS Army and I really hope you find this info helpful, even if you don’t become a DFS Army VIP and I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards!
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NOTE: When I refer to a ‘winning lineup’ in the following, I mean a lineup that was one of the three best of each slate. Typically you need a top-three lineup when MME’n to have a positive ROI.
How Does DraftKings Showdown work?
First, let’s have a quick refresher on how DraftKings Showdown works and it’s scoring. Each week, DraftKings typically has five showdown slates, Thursday Night Football, two on the main slate Sunday, Sunday Night Football, and Monday Night Football. Occasionally they will throw a few more in there, but for the most part, these are the main, with the primetime games having the biggest contests and prize pools.
When building a DraftKings lineup (NFL) for a showdown game, you choose 6 players, and they must be a QB, RB, WR, TE, K, or a DEF and you must have at least one player from each team. There is also a salary cap of $50,000. You don’t need to spend all of it (in fact you shouldn’t but more on that later) but you can’t go over.
The big difference between showdown and a normal slate is that there is a Captain slot in each lineup. The player you choose for your Captain gets 1.5x points for each point he accrues, but his salary is also 1.5x. This is the real key to showdowns, choosing the right Captain. A cheaper captain lets you fill the rest of your lineup with studs, but he also needs to produce. So how do you choose the right captain? There’s a strategy to that, but more on that in a bit.
2018 Draftkings Showdown Results
As I said earlier, I went through 165 lineups from last season and pulled some very interesting nuggets that can help us build winning lineups, particularly BIG TIME winning lineups, so let’s get into the results.
First things first, some of the basics, I looked at 165 lineups which included a whopping 990 players (though not all different players). The average lineup salary was $48518 or about $1500 under the max salary. The average points per lineup were 134.6 and the average value was just under 3x at 2.77.
The big takeaways from this is that the average salary was about $1500 under the max. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t any lineups that used all of the salary and won (12 out of 165 or 7%) but when building lineups with the goal of taking down one of these big-money GPP’s with 90K+ entries, any sort of uniqueness you can create is important. One way to do that is to build lineups under the salary cap, and clearly, with 93% of these ‘winning’ lineups being under the max, it’s a smart strategy.
Positional Breakdown:
Now that we have the basics out of the way, we can look at what positions showed up most in DraftKings showdown strategy lineups. Each game script is going to change what sort of lineup construction you will have in terms of the players, but in general, this can give us an idea of a base lineup.
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Seeing the WR being a Captain almost 25% of the time isn’t surprising, but seeing that there are on average there are 2 in each winning lineups is vitally important information. What this tells is how important the WR position is, and in turn, how important PPR (points per reception) is in this format. When you dive into this a little deeper what you find is that it is often a stud WR1 paired with a cheaper WR2 or WR3. Think Michael Thomas and Tre’Quan Smith or Tyreek Hill and Chris Conley, but it’s not always two WR’s on the same team, in fact only 27% of the time was this the case, but more on that when we get to QB stacks.
The rest of this a for DFS Army VIP’s only but I break down:
- How often the other positions end up in the captain spot
- Is Kicker a viable captain?
- When can you play a Defense at captain?
- What sort of TE tends to end up as a winning captain?
Captains and Vegas:
One thing I wanted to look at was if there was any sort of correlation between the captain slot and vegas odds. Is it more likely that a captain is on a team that’s a dog or favorite? Does that vary by position? Here’s what I found from last year.
What this really tells us, is that game script is important. One of the keys to building NFL showdown lineups is that they need to tell a story about what is going to happen in the game. When we look at how these positions rank out in terms of Vegas odds you find that often players on teams that are behind on the scoreboard tend to end up as winning captains because they are likely airing the ball out and trying to score to catch up.
Dog WR’s show up around 13.3% time which is right in the middle of the pack. What’s interesting though is that the average over/under in the games those WR’s play in is around 50.6 points. Is there a correlation between Vegas game totals and which players are more likely to be winning captains? You’ll have to become a DFS Army VIP to find out.
RB Captain and QB:
Another thing I wanted to look at was if an RB was captain, does their QB show up too? It would make sense that if an RB has a big game, his QB wouldn’t be as productive.
Interestingly, 60% of the lineups that RB captain, had a QB paired with them. What this doesn’t necessarily show is how many of those RB’s are what we would call a ‘Pass Catching’ RB? The reality is that with the state of the NFL today, almost all running backs are pass-catching backs. Very few starters get less than 4-5 targets a game if not more. The ‘third down’ back is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
What this means is that their value isn’t separate, and can often be tied together. There are a few cases where we have an RB that doesn’t catch passes and could be the only scorer for that team in the game, Mark Ingram comes to mind, but for the most part, the vast majority of running backs have points connected with their QB’s.
If the QB is terrible it doesn’t matter though. An RB can go off without a QB regardless of if they are a pass-catcher or not.
The other situation where we could have an RB without a QB is when the game is low scoring. QB’s need lots of points on the board to score whereas WR/TE/RB’s don’t necessarily need that.
Essentially I wouldn’t shy away from stacking a QB with an RB captain unless the game is projecting to be low scoring or their quarterback just isn’t very good and isn’t a great play regardless.
WR Captain and QB:
I gave you guys the RB/QB section free, You think I’m going to give you this too?
Alright, I’m going to get in trouble if I give away any more of our edge. Want to see the rest of this article? You’re going to have to become a DFS Army VIP, but here’s at some of the remaining sections that you’re missing out on!
Captain and Opposing Defense:
Should you be playing a defense AGAINST your captain? You might be surprised to see the results
Quarterback Stacking:
- How many Quarterbacks should you have in your lineup?
- Who should you be stacking those Quarterbacks with? Running backs? WR’s? TE’s?
- How often are Quarterbacks captains? How many pass catchers are with them?
- What about zero QB? Was that ever a winner and how often? Was there a game script that we can identify that tends to support those types of lineups more than others?
Team Stacks:
An important piece of lineup construction is how many players from each team you have in your lineup. You have three options: A balanced approached with three players from each team. A favored approach with four players from one and two from the other. Or an all-out approach with five players from one team and only one from the other
- Which construction happened the most?
- If you use a favored or all-out approach does it need to come from the winning team?
- Who appears more often in each type of build?
Salary and Ownership:
This my friends may be the most important piece of information in this entire article, how salary and ownership come into play with winning lineups and you are MISSING OUT BY NOT BEING A DFS ARMY VIP!
I’m seriously not being hyperbolic here. This information completely changed the way I’m going to play showdown this year, and I think it’s truly the path to big wins in showdown.
Coaches Notes:
Another thing our DFS Army VIP’s get is an inside look at exactly how the coaches are planning on attacking the slate on both DraftKings and Fanduel with our Coaches Notes.
Captain options, Confidence Rating, anticipated MME exposure, and notes about every single viable player in the game! Our VIP’s get all that for EVERY SINGLE SLATE, plus access to our coaches in our coaching channels!
Final Thoughts:
Showdowns are incredibly high variance if you are going to MME them you have to be willing to get completely shut out. A one player switch can be the difference between 50K and $50. It’s wild. You honestly are better off not looking until the game is over (unless you wanna know who you need to cheer for or against). Hopefully, this deep dive can give us a chance at some of these big wins this year.
My final nuggets of advice are this.
- If you are entering a contest with 250,000 entrants and 150 max entries, get CRAZY. Don’t try to min-cash it. Play your defense against your captain. Roster someone ultra-cheap. Stack the studs. Do something to make your lineup unique. With 250,000 lineups it’s likely that someone has the ‘perfect’ lineup so don’t make something chalky and expect to win the whole thing.
- If you are playing cash in showdown, disregard everything I said above. (ok not all of it but most of it). Cash you need to build for a floor. 2 QB, 2 RB, 2 K if possible is the ideal cash build with the RB at the captain slot. You are essentially locked into all of the scoring for the game and this type of build ‘should’ get you across the cash line.
- While there is a huge edge in showdown and something that I think we can exploit, because of how variant it is, you need to be willing to lose because it’s going to happen. Don’t play your whole bankroll on one slate. Spread it out, play within your means, and build your way up to the bigger contests. The smaller 20 max contests are perfect for those looking to break into showdown.