Week 14 DFS DraftKings Milly Maker Breakdown

The dynamic game of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) requires much more than simply knowing the sport for which we’re entering contests to be successful. We must be adaptable, precise, and open to learning from previous endeavors, the latter of which will be the primary focus of this weekly written piece. Game Theoretic methodologies will allow us to analyze and dissect the previous week’s winner of the largest and most prestigious Guaranteed Prize Pool (GPP) tournament on DraftKings – the Millionaire Maker. These same tenets of Game Theory, which can most simply be explained as the development of decision-making processes given our own skill and knowledge, assumptions of the field based on the cumulative skill and knowledge of others playing the same game, and the rules and structure of the game itself, will allow us to further train our minds to see beyond the antiquated techniques of roster building being employed by a large portion of the field. Approaching improvement through these methods will give us insight into the anatomy of successful rosters and will help us develop repeatably profitable habit patterns for the coming weeks. We’ll start by looking at the previous week’s winning roster, extract any pertinent lessons for future utilization, and finish with a look ahead towards the coming main slate.

Winning Roster

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Lessons Learned

Reduce Variables Through High-Confidence Plays

Our goal when building GPP rosters is to win GPPs, that much is understood. But the process of developing a repeatable habit pattern to place ourselves in the best position to achieve that goal is largely misunderstood by the field. Every slate is going to have an optimal roster, or a roster that organizations the top combination of raw points with salary. The thing is, there has not been a single instance of an optimal roster winning a GPP in the 14-year existence of daily fantasy sports. That very clearly tells us that we don’t need optimal to win these contests.

The process of stacking and correlating is thusly misunderstood. The goal of those optimal practices is not to increase upside, it’s to reduce variables. But we can also reduce variables by attacking spots that are going to achieve a higher hit rate than their expected ownership implies. This is one of the primary points of emphasis of the oft misunderstood theoretical concept of leverage. As DraftKings user hishboo demonstrated on their winning roster, the 49ers were the single highest confidence team on the slate, but we typically see players from their team garner lower ownership than they otherwise should be due to the relative low confidence we have on singling out the player (or players) from their roster that have the best chances of succeeding on a given slate. I covered the fact that Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk, and Christian McCaffrey were the players most likely to succeed in other places around the industry leading up to the Week 14 slate, so I won’t belabor those assertions here. Suffice to say, the field has not demonstrated an above average ability to single out the top on-paper plays this season.

The other high-confidence spots I singled out last week were the Colts-Bengals game, the Bills-Chiefs game, and the Lions-Bears game, all of which were accounted for by hishboo on his Millionaire Maker winning roster outside of their one potential theoretical misstep – the absence of D.J. Moore. That is splitting hairs with an elite roster build, but bears weight considering the heavy theoretics involved in this discussion.

The Field Isn’t as Good as We Think at Identifying Top Plays

I started tracking chalk hit rates five weeks ago, defining a player “hitting” as returning a 4x salary multiplier on DraftKings and a player as “chalk” as being a player projected for 20 percent or more in ownership. The hit rate of chalk players over the previous five weeks of the 2023 NFL season is 24.3 percent. The hit rate of all players at all salaries over the previous three seasons on DraftKings is right around 25 percent. In other words, the DraftKings pricing algorithm attempts to price players such that they will return a 4x salary multiplier about 25 percent of the time, meaning that the field is about as good at identifying the top plays on a slate as if they had chosen players at random. Obviously, there is more nuance to that discussion, but the prevailing theoretical assumptions remain. Which points us back to the processes of identifying top plays and the theoretical idea of leverage moving forward.

Looking Ahead

Amari Cooper

In the spirit of identifying the top plays on a slate, we’ll start with a player that saw 14 targets after leading the team with five targets prior to departing Week 13 with a concussion – Amari Cooper. The field completely missed him as a top on-paper play in Week 14 after the uncertainty surrounding his health and who was going to be under center for the Browns. Should Flacco start again in Week 15, Cooper is the likeliest player to lead the slate in targets and is highly unlikely to be treated that way, particularly after David Njoku sprung loose for two touchdown receptions a week ago.

49ers

Same thing as last week – the 49ers carry the slate’s highest Vegas implied team total but continually see suppressed ownership. Simply play the best plays. Now, it is highly likely that Christian McCaffrey is amongst the highest projected ownership plays after his 50-burger the last time the 49ers played the Cardinals, but the pass game options are highly likely to go largely overlooked in this spot, and chances are good that one (or more) of them return GPP viability.

Kyren Williams

Kyren Williams currently boasts the second most valuable workload of all backs in the league, behind only McCaffrey. He has a likeliest range of outcomes of 22-25 running back opportunities on a team implied for 28 points, the second highest on the slate. This is another “don’t overthink it” spot for Week 15.

Noah Brown

This one is pending Nico Collins’ status after the third-year wide receiver left the team’s Week 14 game with a calf strain and did not return. With Tank Dell also out, the absence of Collins would immediately vault Noah Brown into the primary pass-catching role for an offense led by one of the top offensive minds in the league (Bobby Slowik) against a pass-funnel Titans defense. Another “don’t overthink it” spot for Week 15.