DFS 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Daily Fantasy Sports
New to daily fantasy sports? This DFS 101 guide covers salary caps, scoring, cash games, GPPs, ownership, chalk, stacking and the basic strategy you need to get started.
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This is DFS 101: how the contests work, what the terminology means and what you actually need to know before building a lineup.
Daily fantasy sports can look like complete nonsense the first time you open a contest lobby.
There are thousands of contests, players have fake salaries, somebody is apparently “chalk,” and grown adults are arguing about whether a $4,300 wide receiver is a good value.
It gets easier pretty quickly.
At its core, DFS is simple: build a lineup of real players, stay within the rules of the contest, and score fantasy points based on what those players do in actual games.
That’s the game.
Actually getting good at it is where things get interesting.
DFS 101: What Is Daily Fantasy Sports?
DFS stands for daily fantasy sports.
Unlike traditional season-long fantasy leagues, you aren’t drafting a team in August and then spending four months wondering why you trusted the Jets.
You build a new lineup for a specific slate of games. Depending on the sport and contest, that could mean one night of NBA games, a Sunday afternoon NFL slate, one MLB schedule, or a golf tournament.
The players in your lineup earn fantasy points from their actual performance.
Your score is then compared with everyone else entered in the contest.
DraftKings, for example, offers salary-cap contests where every player has an assigned salary and your lineup cannot exceed $50,000. FanDuel uses its own roster and scoring rules, so the two sites should not be treated as interchangeable.
This guide is mainly about classic salary-cap DFS, which is the foundation you should understand before worrying about all the other formats.
How a DFS Contest Works
The basic process is:
1. Pick a Slate
A slate is just the group of games included in the contest.
An NFL main slate, for example, typically centers on a group of Sunday games rather than every game played that week.
Only players from games included in your contest can be used.
2. Build Your Lineup
Every player is assigned a DFS salary.
The stars cost more. Lesser players cost less.
Your job is not simply to cram as many famous names as possible into the lineup. You have to find the combination of players that gives you the best chance of scoring enough points to beat the people you’re playing against.
On DraftKings salary-cap contests, that means staying at or below the $50,000 cap.
3. Your Players Score Fantasy Points
Fantasy points come from real statistics.
The exact scoring depends on the site and sport.
In DraftKings NFL scoring, for example, a reception is worth one point. FanDuel awards half a point per reception. Both also award points for things like yards and touchdowns, but even relatively small scoring differences can change which players are more valuable on each site.
This is why blindly copying a DraftKings lineup into FanDuel isn’t much of a strategy.
4. Beat the Field
When the games start, your lineup accumulates points.
Where you need to finish depends on the contest you entered.
And this is where DFS starts becoming a strategy game instead of just fantasy football with a shorter attention span.
Cash Games vs. GPPs
This is probably the first major DFS concept worth learning.
There are two broad styles you’ll hear about constantly:
Cash games generally have flatter payouts and require you to beat a smaller percentage of the field. Head-to-head contests and 50/50s are common examples.
GPPs, short for guaranteed prize pools, are tournaments. More people enter, fewer lineups make meaningful money, and the biggest prizes are concentrated near the top.
The lineup you want in one isn’t necessarily the lineup you want in the other.
In a cash game, I generally care more about dependable opportunity and avoiding unnecessary risk.
In a big tournament, simply scoring a decent number of points isn’t enough. You eventually need to beat thousands of other lineups. Ceiling, correlation and uniqueness become much more important.
We’ll go much deeper on that in our DFS Cash Games vs. GPPs guide.
The DFS Terms You Actually Need to Know
You don’t need a dictionary of 80 fantasy terms before entering your first contest.
These are the ones that matter.
Salary
The amount of your fictional salary cap required to roster a player.
A higher salary usually means the site expects that player to be one of the better fantasy options. It does not mean expensive automatically equals good.
Value
How much fantasy production you’re getting relative to salary.
A cheap player stepping into a much larger role can become extremely valuable because his DFS salary may not fully reflect his new opportunity yet.
This is one of the biggest ideas in DFS.
You’re not trying to draft the best real-life team.
You’re trying to buy fantasy points efficiently.
Projection
An estimate of how many fantasy points a player is expected to score.
Projections are useful. They are not prophecy.
Football has a nasty habit of reminding everyone of that around 1:17 p.m. on Sunday.
Floor
A rough way of describing the safer end of a player’s expected outcomes.
Players with steady volume often have better floors than players who need one huge play to pay off.
Ceiling
How good the player’s fantasy result could realistically get if things break right.
Tournament players care a lot about ceiling because first place generally requires more than nine guys having a perfectly respectable afternoon.
Ownership
The percentage of lineups in a contest that roster a particular player.
If a player is 30% owned, roughly three out of every ten lineups in that contest have him.
Chalk
A player expected to be popular.
Chalk isn’t automatically bad.
Sometimes the obvious play is obvious because he’s a really damn good play.
The question is whether the player’s expected production justifies using him at that ownership.
Leverage
A way of gaining ground on popular lineups by making a different choice.
If a highly owned player fails and your lower-owned alternative goes off, you’ve gained on a large chunk of the field at once.
That’s leverage.
Stack
Using players whose fantasy production is connected.
The easiest example is pairing an NFL quarterback with one of his receivers.
If the quarterback throws a touchdown to that receiver, both players score fantasy points on the same play.
That correlation can be extremely valuable in tournaments.
What Actually Makes Someone Good at DFS?
It isn’t knowing more player names than everybody else.
The best decisions usually come from understanding a few things better than the field:
Opportunity. How likely is the player to actually touch the ball, take shots, receive targets, get at-bats or play meaningful minutes?
Price. Is the salary reasonable for that expected role?
Matchup and environment. What kind of game is this likely to be?
Ceiling. What has to happen for this player to produce a tournament-winning score?
Ownership. How popular will the play be, and does that change how I want to use him?
Contest type. Who am I actually trying to beat?
That last one gets ignored all the time.
A lineup built to beat one opponent should not necessarily look like a lineup built to finish first out of 50,000.
Five Mistakes I’d Avoid as a New DFS Player
1. Picking Players Because They Scored a Ton Last Week
Fantasy points don’t carry over.
You’re trying to predict what happens next, not give out Employee of the Week awards.
2. Ignoring Salary
A superstar being better at football than a cheap quarterback does not automatically make the superstar the better DFS play.
Price matters.
Everything in salary-cap DFS eventually comes back to price.
3. Thinking You Have to Spend Every Dollar
Your goal is to build the best lineup, not make the salary-cap number hit exactly zero.
Sometimes that happens. Sometimes leaving salary unused creates a better lineup.
4. Entering Contests Without Understanding Them
Before clicking Enter, look at the field size, number of entries allowed per person, payout structure, entry fee and whether it’s single-entry, limited-entry or multi-entry.
A beginner throwing one lineup into a giant multi-entry tournament is playing a very different game from someone entering a beginner 50/50.
5. Playing More Money Because You’re “Due”
Nope.
Set aside an amount you’re completely comfortable using for entertainment and stick to it.
Good DFS strategy can improve your decisions. It can’t remove variance.
Sometimes you do everything right and your running back leaves in the first quarter.
Sports remain extremely rude.
Where I’d Start
If you’re completely new, don’t worry about becoming a lineup-optimization psychopath on Day 1.
Learn in this order:
- Understand the scoring.
- Understand the salary cap.
- Learn cash games versus tournaments.
- Learn what value means.
- Learn basic projections.
- Learn ownership and chalk.
- Learn stacking and correlation.
- Get better at contest selection.
Then start worrying about the advanced stuff.
DFS gets much more complicated eventually, but the foundation never really changes:
Find good players at good prices, understand the contest you’re entering, and build a lineup designed to beat that specific field.
That’s DFS.
The rest is figuring out how to do it better than the guy sitting on the other side of the leaderboard.