New contest formats bring both opportunity and risk.
When Showdown contests first came out, there were a few people who put a lot of thought into those contests and made a lot of money.
The Weekly Winners contest at Underdog is different for best ball in a similar way Showdown was different for DFS.
If we think logically through the process we can find an edge!
Best Ball Fantasy Football: Everything You Need to Know
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Weekly Winners Format
Weekly Winners is a contest where prizes are not cumulative over the course of the season.
All the money is given out weekly in equal shares for 17 weeks with 20k to first place. Only 7315 of 261,000 entries cashes each week, which is just under 3%.
That’s right. We are not playing to be good in the season, but each lineup should be prepared to cash once!
Fortunately and unfortunately, this means we need to really make some uncomfortable lineups to separate us from the field.
The advantage of doing something uncomfortable is that many will struggle to do it.
Strategy #1: Ignore Traditional Roster Builds
For usual best ball contests, there are roster-building guardrails. Almost every roster should have a minimum of two quarterbacks and tight ends, five running backs, and seven wide receivers.
For this contest, though, take those guardrails and toss them out.
Then burn them with fire
Why, you might ask?
Because people are going to struggle to realize we are not trying to advance over the course of a season
Guardrails are to ensure we get enough points from each position each week to keep us in the hunt to advance and give us options during playoffs against tight odds.
The key to this contest is to pick one player who is most likely to offer a super spike week and then build around them for the one to three times a year they are likely to hit that spike.
Think of it this way. In normal best ball, we need to advance, then jump two hurdles (Weeks 15 and 16) to get to the final, and then face hundreds of other finalists.
Of those hundreds of teams, players tend to be on 20% of rosters or under except for a few.
In Weekly Winners, if your stud player scores 40 points, you will be competing with 21,750 other teams with the same player! Of which only 7315 players will cash at all that week!
So when I say you need to throw out those guardrails, I mean it. And you can also throw out ADP at times.
We need to be thinking completely outside of the box so that the week or two during the season that our studs hit their ceiling we have the best chance of outscoring those other 21,750 teams.
Strategy #2: Ignore ADP
I am normally pretty strict about ADP.
In this contest, I am willing to throw it out the window in many cases in an effort to be unique. Not recklessly but in a larger thought pattern.
Strategy #3: Change Your Approach
To sum up, we need to be willing to throw out what we normally do in best ball.
While this contest has the name “best ball,” it is a completely different contest with completely different factors.
If we build smartly, we will have a huge advantage over a field that is still tied to tournament best ball strategies.