Peter Overzet

There's nothing better than DFS on Thanksgiving.

The dopamine that comes from checking your teams and pick 'ems just hits harder when it's mixed with shoving your face with appetizers, martinis, and turkey.

But to maximize that sweat experience, we need to be prepared.

What I have for you today is a quick strategy guide for my three favorite ways to play DFS:

  • Underdog drafts
  • DraftKings salary cap lineups
  • Underdog pick 'em contests

Let's dig in…

🏆 Underdog Strategy Guide: Rush Hour

Underdog has stuffed the lobby with a cornucopia of tournaments for us to play. Best of all, the flagship contest, The Turkey, is rake-free. 

Regardless of which contest you play—The Turkey just filled, but Underdog just added the $7 Turkey 2—this slate offers us some unique angles to attack … provided you have the stomach for it.

The reason I say that is because these drafts shake out in a very specific way. Because they are 4-person drafts and there are six teams on the slate, two starting QBs (Cooper Rush and whoever starts for the Giants) and two starting TEs (typically Theo Johnson and Luke Schoonmaker) go largely undrafted.

Of course, there's a reason they are QB5 and QB6, but this presents us with some awesome leverage angles if we are willing to embrace the risk.

To drive this point home, let's do a blind-item quiz and you tell me which QB you'd rather play:

Hopefully you said QB 2, because even a three-point projection gap isn't big enough to justify a 65% gap in ownership. 

Answer: QB1 is Caleb Williams and QB 2 is Cooper Rush.

So even though the most likely scenario is Williams outscores Rush, when Rush does outscore Williams you are competing against far less rosters with a more unique team.

These are the exact spots we want to lean into in these specific contests.

A few other quick tips for this slate on Underdog:

  • I generally prefer 2-RB teams, but on a shorter slate like this I like the 3-WR teams more than usual. Especially if you are using Williams or Jordan Love–who have lots of viable WR options–I don't mind leaning into double stacks and 3-WR teams. 
  • Don't be afraid to scroll down at non-onesie positions, either. Guys like Jameson Williams, Keenan Allen, and Jaylen Waddle will get drafted at a near 100% clip, while Tim Patrick, Kavontae Turpin, and Darius Slayton will get drafted at a near 100% clip. Embrace that uncertainty on some of your teams.
  • Feel free to overstack. With only three games, it's not far-fetched to think only one offense will have tons of success. Take advantage of this by over-stacking a team. For example, you can get away with a highly correlated QB-RB-WR-TE build from the same team on a small slate like this.

🏆 DraftKings Strategy Guide: Fade Recency Bias

I think this slate sets up extremely well to fade some small-sample noise because the field is going to be highly impressionable to things they just witnessed on Sunday. Here are three ways I'd be looking to exploit that on DraftKings tournament lineups.

1) Sam LaPorta ($4100) > Jonnu Smith ($4300). Jonnu has been on fire lately (Dwain covered it in-depth in the UR this week), but I think he's going to get overplayed on Thursday because of this recent hot streak. I like the idea of pivoting to LaPorta in tournaments. Not only are the Lions banged up—Kalif Raymond is out and Amon-Ra St. Brown and David Montgomery are both nursing injuries—but the Lions are expected to score 10 more points than the Dolphins. This presents us with a great spot to go TD hunting with LaPorta and fade the Jonnu boxscore chasers.

2) Packers passing game > Josh Jacobs ($7000). Jacobs has been a monster this year, but Matt LaFleur is already on record as wanting to limit his touches on a short week. 

Instead, I "love" the idea of pivoting to the passing game here. Jordan Love ($6300) double–or even triple–stacks to some combo of Jayden Reed ($5700), Christian Watson ($4900), Dontayvion Wicks ($4200), and Tucker Kraft ($3700) all look great to me. With no Romeo Doubs, things could condense here in a really fantasy-friendly way. 

Wicks is the best bang-for-your-buck. He leads all of the aforementioned pass catchers in TPRR (targets per route run), which is especially bullish when you factor in extra opportunity with no Doubs:

3. Rome Odunze ($5000) & Cole Kmet ($33600) > Keenan Allen ($5100) & D.J. Moore ($5600). This is a classic GPP bro angle. Allen and Moore are coming off monster games and project better than Odunze and Kmet, but they are going to be far more popular. When you look at the Utilization scores for all of these guys over the past three weeks, no one is separating in a big way:

  • Allen (7.8), Moore (6.0), Odunze (6.3), and Kmet (6.7).

All of them are playing the majority of the snaps and getting mostly equal opportunity, outside of Keenan's 16-target spike last week.

Because of this, I want to embrace the slightly lesser and trendier plays, knowing it won't take much for Odunze and Kmet to lead this team in receiving at low ownership.

🏆 Pick 'Em Strategy Guide: Turkey Sliders

One of my favorite things to do in the Pick 'Em streets these days is to take advantage of sliding the lines for better payouts.

The thought behind this is that the standard lines are very efficient, but often have a hard time capturing tail outcomes. 

I like thinking through scenarios where players could smash their "median" projections with an outlier performance.

Here are three outlier scenarios I like for the Thanksgiving slate:

1. Rome Odunze higher receiving yards (79.5) for 2.92x.

Not only does Rome lead the Bears WRs in aDot (13.92) and market share of air yards (34%)—both of which point to big-play ability—but the Lions also give up the third-biggest receiving yards boost to opposing WRs:

Put it all together and I love capturing a big Odunze day through this multiplier.

2. Jahmyr Gibbs longest rush (higher than 29.5) for 2.49x.
 

Gibbs has three rushing plays over 45 yards in his past six games. Now he gets a Bears run funnel that allows the sixth-biggest rushing yards boost to opposing RBs. Couple that with Montgomery nursing an injury and this gives us a great way to capitalize on Gibbs' big play ability.

3. Dontayvion Wicks higher than 4.5 receptions for 2.36x.

With Wicks' high TPRR, I want to lean into the increase in opportunity in this spot. He's struggled with drops at times this year, but it's not hard to envision things coming together for a 5-catch game similar to what he did back in Week 4 vs. the Vikings (5-78-2). 

If you play all of these together, it pays out over 100x. Not too shabby for a pretty cohesive narrative to the entry:

 

Feel free to round-robin those, as well.

Good luck and enjoy the games.