Ticket tournaments and jackpotted Target contests aside, bagging top place in a large-field tournament is the pinnacle of the Draftstars experience for the vast majority of DFS players.
Watching domino after domino fall in your favour, seeing your line-up projections rise and your potential payout rise with it, sweating the last game while you hold off the fast-finishers – nothing beats it.
But in fields of thousands, it’s not easy.
The beauty of DFS is that regardless of playstyle, every dog has his day. I’m here to help you have those days more often, whether you’re a deep-pocketed multi-entry sharp or a single-entry superstar. In this How To Win article, we’re going to focus on the dart-throwers.
BE UNIQUE
If you’re on Draftstars as a fun way to make your sport-watching experience sweeter or if you just have a stricter bankroll, you’re probably playing 1-3 line-ups in the “Main”, Fiver or Mini contests and following your pool of players throughout the day or evening.
Of course, the recently-announced $750k AFL Star from Draftstars has spawned a whole new type of contest that’ll keep the single bullet bettors interested for the coming months.
My biggest tip for low-entry players in big fields is to be unique. You simply can’t win if you follow the field, because the max-entry players will drown you out by hitting the perfect permutations of the same strategy you were going for.
WRITE A SCRIPT
The easiest way to do this is by picking low-owned players of course, but often these players are low-owned for a reason. So, a much smarter way is by building line-ups that “tell a story” – you should be able to clearly summarise each of your 1-3 entries in a sentence or two.
Let’s use a very rich “Hoff_n_Spicy” and their single bullet from Round 4’s Thursday Night Brisbane vs Collingwood clash as an example:
If I were to sum up this line-up, I would go with something like “double-ruck strategy with Nick Daicos in a Brisbane stack”. It’s very easy to see this script playing out – Ash Johnson was always going to get some ruck time with Collingwood without Darcy Cameron and Mason Cox, which would obviously make Oscar McInerney’s job easier along the way too. If Brisbane win – which they did – their players will generally score more freely which covers the Joe Daniher, Jarrod Berry, Josh Dunkley, Will Ashcroft and Cam Rayner selections, while Nick Daicos is arguably the best player in the league and can score in a flurry regardless of game state.
In the end, Hoff_n_Spicy went home $7,950 richer whilst only banking on one player under 22% ownership, hitting the 8% Cam Rayner in a breakout performance.
LIMIT THE LUCK FACTOR
One of the best things about this strategy is that it allows you to remain “unique” whilst also reducing the number of significant events that you need to go your way. Of course, anyone can pick 9 random guys, and they all upswing on the same week, and you romp in a GPP – it’s just very unlikely. Flip a coin 9 times and you know what the chance of calling each flip correctly is? Roughly a 0.2% chance.
That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it, but if you can reduce the number of flips, your chance of success increases, right? In the example above, Brisbane had to win – first flip. Then Ash Johnson had to return value to justify the double ruck strategy. Two flips. Then Nick Daicos had to buck the Brisbane trend – three – and you arguably throw a Cam Rayner upswing in there as a 4th flip. Suddenly the 0.2% chance is now a 6.25% chance – roughly 30 times more likely.
Ignoring all the mathematical murders I just committed in that paragraph above (those events weren’t independent, nor were they 50-50 chances, etc), the basic strategy remains the same – limit the number of events that need to go your way and you increase the odds of all the events going your way – something that you essentially need to do to reign victorious with a single bullet.
CORRELATE
This is why “stacking” is so popular, and why correlating players is so crucial in AFL DFS. I used a single-game slate for simplicity in the example above, so let’s check out one from a multi-game slate instead. This is the single bullet line-up that won me a Golden Ticket many moons ago:
As you can see, hitting the 5-man Gold Coast stack paid huge dividends here, with none of those players in the top 15 selected on the slate. A big tick for uniqueness, and another big tick for correlation. Add in the standout ruck play for the slate (Grundy) and the most popular basement-priced player (Poulter), and all I had to do was add in two underpriced Saints for some extra script synergy and voila! A single bullet that “hit” and brought home a big bounty.
So, what are you waiting for? Jump into those big boy contests armed with this blueprint and pull off your own heist!
Tbetta.
Chances are you’re about to lose. For free and confidential support call 1800 858 858 or visit gamblinghelponline.org.au
