The Daily Spin – Cash Game Selections – Week 1

I hope that you had some time to digest my column on cash game strategy that I posted last night. If you are going to play in cash games at a serious level, you really need to sharpen your process and keep honing it week after week. You are going to run into players at all contest levels that do this for a living and have their lineup building process locked down so if you get complacent about it, you are going to be in trouble. While many people use cash games as a place to hedge against the big swings that take place in GPP contests, it is far from free money. Fortunately, if you have been on this journey with us over the last few years, you have seen that once you unlock the formula to building cash lineups in PGA or NFL, you will have a fairly significant edge over casual players who wander into the mix for a few weeks at a time during the season.

Now that I have your attention, there are a couple of things that we need to be thinking about as we prepare for the first week of the season. Every year, in an attempt to get DFS players excited for the NFL season, DraftKings and FanDuel each release salaries for the first week about a month early. This gives all the podcasters and content providers a good 4-5 weeks to ruminate over match ups and build out their models and projections to prepare for the season. As someone who has been around the game for a long time, I understand why they do this. The NFL is king when it comes to DFS and the money that pours in from these contests is enormous. By getting the salaries out early, they generate a lot of buzz which helps to attract new players. I just think back to the first time I got involved with DFS on FanDuel back in 2012. My manager, Ted was walking through the office and as we normally would do, we stopped to chat about his beloved Seahawks and my Vikings. I was asking him about whether or not he was in a fantasy league and he showed me the FD app on his phone which I had not seen before and started to explain why he liked the weekend contests instead of the season long. Of course, the rest is history and here I am running a fantasy sports website…err, two fantasy sports websites today.

While the early release of the salaries is great for promotional purposes, it does make Week 1 a little bit different than any other week of the year. Throughout the season, the texture of the pricing will change. Sometimes, it will be soft due to injuries. Other weeks it will challenge you due to many teams having bye weeks or there being particularly poor match ups at a specific position. Week 17 is always a weird one as well when teams begin to rest their starters or have gone into full on tank mode to secure their place in the draft. Week 1 is always going to be known for its incredibly soft pricing. It makes complete sense as to why this is the case. If you are playing DFS for the first time, the last thing you want to deal with is a puzzle that is far too complex to complete. You do not want a rookie player trying to build a lineup where they have no idea who the last few players are on their team. That is a sure fire way for them to get frustrated and they will give up on the game quickly. No, you want them to be able to put together a roster full of players who they like and can root for and even if they do not build an optimal roster, it likely makes the first experience a lot more fun overall.

What this means for all of us folks who gather here every week to make some money is that we need to control our emotions and our bankrolls for the first week of the season. If you are like me, you have reached the point in your life where your love of holidays, and even the definition of what constitutes a holiday has shifted. The first NFL Sunday of the season is a holiday to me. The NFL is the one sport that is gone long enough during the offseason to where I actually miss it. You could cut the regular season in half for every other major sport and vastly improve the product immediately, but the NFL is the one sport that got it just about perfect to where every game is meaningful and the first Sunday represents so much hope and possibility for fans of every team around the league. Sorry Chicago.

As DFS players, we need to control our exuberance this first week. The soft pricing makes cash games easier in terms of building our lineups, but tougher in being able to differentiate them as even the bad players are going to be able to pick up on the obvious value plays available this week. Rather than building a team where the difference between winning and losing will come down to several players, this week, it might come down to one spot where you took a misstep. In order for our edge to be larger across the entire season, it must necessarily be a little smaller to start the year. A good rule to live by for bankroll management is to build up to your normal outlay over the first few weeks. Start with about half of what you would normally play and then work up to your normal amount over the first 2-3 weeks. This allows for pricing to stabilize and also gives us a few weeks to digest how offseason roster changes have changed the identity of each team.