(Editor’s Note: Very Long!)

Most people who play fantasy football play in one league. Some play in two. I usually do three (one with friends from high school, one with friends from college, and one I do with a friend in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s league). Between setting lineups, managing free agents, and trading, three leagues is all I care to handle.

In 2022, I did a handful more drafts. 150 more. But unlike traditional fantasy football leagues, all I had to do was draft and move onto the next one.

What is Bestball?

I drafted those 150 teams in a bestball format. Bestball drafts look like normal ones with a few extra bench slots. But once the draft ends, that’s your team. You cannot add or drop players. If a breakout player goes undrafted, nobody gets them. If your star player gets injured, you must keep them on your roster. You also don’t set your lineup — each week you automatically get your best possible lineup applied.

There are a few appeals to me. One, you can draft more teams (that’s the fun part anyway). Two, you avoid a lot of the headaches and stress of lineup-setting — you never worry about a player on your bench going off. Three, bestball leagues are traditionally scored on season-long points rather than weekly matchups, meaning it’s more likely the best teams will actually win.

I’ve been playing bestball in small volume since 2016, mostly on MyFantasyLeague.com which carried the flagship $10 12-team leagues (called MFL10s). Underdog Fantasy emerged in the last few years and really popularized the format by running huge tournaments with hundreds of thousands of entries and six- or seven-figure top prizes. Other fantasy football sites took notice and began offering their own tournaments, providing more options and growing the player pool.

Game Selection

I changed jobs that summer and had a two-week block in late August where I would have some down time. I’d already knocked out my summer travel so I was looking forward to a staycation, and chose to spend some time experimenting with max-entering one of the big NFL bestball tournaments. The maximum number of entries is typically 150 per person, though many people who enter will do substantially fewer drafts than the max. Tournament prize structures are so top-heavy (most of the money go 1st, 2nd place, etc.), so the idea behind max-entering is that you want as many shots at winning as possible.

As I mentioned, thanks to Underdog’s success, there were a few options available in terms of which site to play on and which tournament to enter. Underdog had a few big tournaments, notably the $25 Best Ball Mania III and the $5 Puppy (they ran a few of these). DraftKings had a $5 Best Ball Millionaire tournament as well. I decided to go with DraftKings. There were a few factors that influenced that decision.

Cost

Each of the tournaments had a max of 150 entries, which I wanted to hit. But without having a measure of my actual skill advantage, total entry fees of $750 for one of the $5 tournaments sounded better than $3,750 for the $25.

Timing

Because Underdog wants to fill the one massive $25 tournament, they’re less incentivized to open new $5 tournaments as the summer comes to a close. The days I’d need to draft to enter the Puppy didn’t align well with my time off, whereas the DraftKings tournament would be open through Labor Day.

Player Pool

If you have the chance to play easier opponents, you should do that. And the consensus opinion (which my personal experience corroborated) was that opponents on Underdog were much tougher than on DraftKings. A few reasons why include that Underdog has a much better app and features that appeal to the serious players, and that DraftKings will give free entries to daily fantasy or sportsbook customers. The people who enter for free tend to not be very good. I believed I could draft better teams and face more teams with low chance of success on DraftKings.

UX

As I said above, Underdog has a remarkably well-designed app and draft room. DraftKings’ draft interface was embarrassingly bad. But beyond just the cosmetics, the DraftKings app actually had a few aspects that would actively hurt many players unless they took steps to mitigate. These included an unreliable timer and notification system and shoddy default player rankings. These meant my opponents would be more likely to time out and autodraft (usually a suboptimal player) or when they did make their pick, they would be biased by bad rankings. The fact that I’d be dialed in at my computer looking at better player rankings and projections gave a small competitive advantage.

Bonus: Roster Spots

Underdog drafts have 18 rounds, DraftKings drafts have 20 rounds. Most DraftKings opponents, I found, didn’t know all the names available once we drafted 200 players. To be fair, I didn’t either at the beginning. But once you develop a knowledge advantage, more rounds gives you more opportunity to apply your edge. Additionally, having more bench slots makes some draft strategies like Zero RB more appetizing in that you can take more shots at high-upside backup RBs.

Bonus: Full-point PPR

Underdog’s scoring system gives a half-point for catches, DraftKings gives a full point. I prefer the latter, but it wasn’t a big deal for me. DraftKings also gives some bonuses for 300 yards passing and 100 yards rushing/receiving, which I didn’t factor much into my strategy. Underdog also listed QB/TE Taysom Hill of the Saints as a TE, which meant he was going to break scoring if he started at QB. I preferred to avoid the situation entirely on DraftKings, where he was listed as a QB (and wouldn’t be a cheat code if he started at QB).

DraftKings $3.5M Best Ball Millionaire Tournament Structure

Let’s talk about the tournament itself. It had a $3.5 million prize pool, which at $5 entry per team meant that I was competing against 837,000 of my closest friends for the $1 million payout to first place. It wasn’t structured as a free-for-all, but rather in stages.

First, you’d be paired with 11 opponents when you draft. In the 14 week regular season, you play against them in season-long points (like we discussed earlier). There are thousands of 12-team leagues, from which the top two scorers advance.

If you advance from the regular season, you move on to another 12-team league for week 15. You can only advance to week 16 by having the top score in your group.

Week 16 actually has the same deal. Another 12 team league and you need the top score.

Only 969 teams survive to the final round in week 17, where it’s a free-for-all. That’s also where all the money is. It’s super top-heavy.

Okay, we’ve now reviewed how bestball fantasy football, the tournament, and game selection worked. Let’s move on to the draft strategies I applied.

Draft strategies

Adjusting strategies to winner-take-all tournament formats

In normal redraft fantasy football or even in traditional bestball leagues, where you just need to beat 11 other teams, a lot of strategies can work. You could fill your bench with kickers, you could draft the entire starting lineup of the Buffalo Bills, or you could just try to pick the best players. More thoughtful strategies, of course, will have better chances to win, but in a game with lots of randomness, the best team doesn’t always win. In fact, recently I won a redraft league with maybe the fourth-best team. I just had a few players get hot at the right time.

In leagues where you have a small number of opponents, you don’t necessarily need to draft a 95th percentile team to win. In a 12 team redraft league where four teams make the playoffs, maybe you have the third-best team, win two weeks in a row, and are crowned champion. It’s not that hard to beat one other team in one week.

But with the structure of the DraftKings tournament, you didn’t just need to beat the other 11 teams you drafted against. In the playoffs, you needed to beat the teams that beat their 11 other teams, and then the teams that beat those teams.

We’re talking superteams at this point. You’re going to be drawing very slim odds against those teams if you drafted with a strategy designed or best suited for beating just the 11 teams you drafted against.

That’s part of what appealed to me about this tournament. It’s fun to draft a team designed specifically to beat superteams.

What do I mean when I say that I want to draft teams that can beat the superteams? For me, this meant that I optimized for the strength of my teams that made the playoffs, rather than for the number of teams that would make the playoffs. I wanted to increase my variance, by a lot, and hopefully get a team or two to place very high on the overall leaderboard.

Structural drafting

Like the stock market, the average draft position (what # pick a player is drafted in fantasy drafts) of a player in fantasy football is largely efficient. You’re not going to get a huge edge just by thinking you can pick the right players. There are definitely some inefficiencies, but they don’t last forever. Think Saquon Barkley, a third-round pick for most of the summer, creeping into the late first round by September.

In my opinion, where the edge really lies is in roster construction. Every DraftKings bestball team has 20 spots they can allocate as they choose, knowing that each week they need to field one QB, two RBs, three WRs, one TE, and one FLEX (RB/WR/TE) in their starting lineup. Nothing is stopping you from selecting six QBs, but you can only use one per week. Nevertheless, I drafted against opponents who did this. Their teams didn’t look very good.

The quantities of players matter, but when you draft them is also a big deal. If you have four RBs, and they were your first four picks (ex. Christian McCaffrey, Leonard Fournette, Nick Chubb, and Travis Etienne), you’re probably set. If you have four RBs, and they were your last four picks (ex. Tyrion Davis-Price, Sony Michel, Boston Scott, and Jaylen Warren), you’re probably in trouble.

The writers at Rotoviz, particularly Conor O’Driscoll and Shawn Siegele, have been the leaders in the space for exploring how to optimize a fantasy football team via structural drafting, meaning you are much more intentional with how you allocate your draft capital across positions and rounds.

I keyed in on three of the high-volatility strategies they espoused, and set the goal that each of my 150 teams should fall into one of these buckets.

Why didn’t I develop my own strategies? Well, they have put way more quantitative research into macro strategies than I have, and having taken down big tournament prizes recently, had some proof that their strategies could succeed in practice. I preferred to follow the main tenets of the strategies and make smaller adjustments as I saw fit.

Was I going to face a bunch of similar teams by others following the same strategies? On Underdog, maybe, but at that time I don’t think we had reached the point where these strategies were overused by the field. Anecdotally, I often saw people on Twitter post teams claiming they followed a strategy but had not really done it (ex. a “Zero RB” team that drafted its first RB in the 4th round vs. the 8th). Anyway, on DraftKings this was irrelevant as there would be 1-2 other teams max applying a structural draft strategy in my draft rooms.

Did I get all 150 teams into one of the buckets? No, I had a bunch of teams that didn’t perfectly align with one of these strategies. I didn’t want to force myself to stick to a strategy if it meant making a clearly suboptimal pick (ex. if I wanted to take a QB in the sixth round, but the top 10 QBs were all off the board, I didn’t select the 11th-best). I also had not realized in advance that some of the strategies require much more luck in terms of everything falling into place. So it was much easier to draft an Extreme Anchor RB team, for example, than a Hyperfragile one.

Anyway, let’s move on to the strategies themselves.

Extreme Anchor RB

The Strategy: Here, you take 1 RB in the round 1 or 2 with elite upside, but wait for your 2nd until round 9 or later. You get an elite TE, great WRs, and 2 QBs in what Rotoviz calls the window (rounds ~6-10).

Anchor RB, where you take a RB in the first two rounds and then wait, has become a very popular strategy in the last few years. Many Zero RB drafters were already doing this (you can improve your RB production and still get good WRs), but there’s also a reactionary wave of anti-Zero RB drafters who believe they stumbled onto an improvement of the strategy.

In the Rotoviz writeup on Extreme Anchor RB, they call out that Anchor RB drafters are still drafting their 2nd RB too early, usually in the 6th or 7th round. Especially in 2022, the QBs and WRs in those rounds were too appealing to pass on. Waiting a little longer on RB was fine with me.

As I said earlier, Extreme Anchor RB was my most-used draft strategy. I rarely went into drafts trying to do this one specifically, but it was really easy most drafts to select a RB I liked in the first two rounds.

And with the pressure this strategy puts on your top RB, it’s no surprise the results largely depended on who that pick was. It helped that I strongly preferred Christian McCaffrey to Jonathan Taylor (often the #1 pick), so most of my teams that had an early draft slot got McCaffrey and performed well. My late draft slot teams ended up with a lot of Saquon Barkley and D’Andre Swift, with mixed results.

Zero RB

The Strategy: Zero RB is technically no RBs until round 7. I usually took it further to round 8 or 9. With my 1st 7 picks, I could get an elite QB/TE and 5 great WRs. Then draft up to 9 RBs.

Zero RB has certainly evolved since Shawn Siegele’s groundbreaking article in 2013, but the 2022 writeup on Rotoviz tuned towards bestball tournaments echoed a lot of the same thoughts. It’s one of the strategies best suited towards building a superteam, because RBs offer a ton of potential for antifragile results. And when you don’t get sniped on the late round RBs, these were the most fun teams for me to draft.

In 2022, it was still an effective strategy. You were much more likely to have a top QB or TE on your team, the early-round WRs were great, and there were late-round RB hits like Kenneth Walker Jr., Raheem Mostert, Jamaal Williams, Jeff Wilson Jr., Jerick McKinnon, and D’Onta Foreman that paid off big. Depending on when you drafted, Rhamondre Stevenson, Tony Pollard, Miles Sanders, or Dameon Pierce may have been Zero RB picks as well.

A common recommendation for Zero RB teams is to balance out late-round RB picks among different archetypes, like pass-catcher, committee back, or pure backup. The theory behind this is you can balance your floor and ceiling. But in my opinion, pass-catchers (one of the floor options) did not fit on a Zero RB tournament team. If you do hit on late-round RBs, those pass-catchers are dead weight in the playoffs. I prioritized late-round RBs that had the most potential for three-down roles should they hit — over 30% of my teams had one of Rachaad White and Eno Benjamin for this reason. But I didn’t always stay away from pass-catchers, as Jerick McKinnon and Ameer Abdullah were also among my most-rostered players (Abdullah busted but McKinnon was a huge help in the playoffs, more than that later), because I thought the price was more reasonable and they had potential to break out of that archetype.

Hyperfragile

The Strategy: Hyperfragile teams get 3 RBs before round 5, then a 4th after round 8, and no more than 5 total. It’s better to get an elite TE and ideally a QB, too. Then draft 9-11 WRs.

With Zero RB, you draft strong QB, WR, and TE corps, and your success largely hinges on whether your late-round RB picks hit. It’s easy to reflexively say that Hyperfragile is the opposite (Zero WR). But your success with Hyperfragile does not hinge on whether your late-round WR picks hit. It’s whether your early-round RB picks hit.

Mike Beers posited Hyperfragile in 2016, where you lean into the fragility that early-round RBs have with respect to injury, and build the team that is a sure thing to win should your RBs stay on the field. Conor O’Driscoll wrote last May suggesting how to use Hyperfragile in bestball tournaments.

My biggest takeaways from Conor’s article were that too many Hyperfragile drafters were taking their 4th RB too early, and too many were not thinking about QB and TE the right way. For a strategy like this to work, you need to have just one weak spot on your team, surrounded by very strong spots. Having one weak spot surrounded by mediocrity caps your upside.

This wasn’t my favorite crop of RBs to chase Hyperfragile builds with, as the RBs available in the 3rd-6th round were pretty rough. James Conner, Ezekiel Elliott, David Montgomery, Cam Akers, Josh Jacobs, and Elijah Mitchell were all players I was lower than the field on, to name a few.

The three players that ended up on a great portion of my Hyperfragile teams were Breece Hall, Travis Etienne, and JK Dobbins. Those were the only ones I thought had a good enough chance to return 1st round value.

It was hard to land this strategy in drafts. A lot of teams aiming for Hyperfragile ended up as Extreme Anchor RB or Superhero RB (RB in both rounds 1 and 2, then wait) teams, since I didn’t want to reach a few rounds on a RB just to stick with the strategy.

These were the three strategies that guided a lot of my draft decisions. Next, I’ll go into some of the lower-level tactics and perceived edges.

Tactics

I thought the draft strategies would help me draft teams that had a lot of upside if they panned out. but they are how you construct your roster, not build a portfolio of teams. here were some other things I consciously did.

Stringent draft capital allocation at onesie positions, particularly TE

Each of the draft strategies (Extreme Anchor RB, Zero RB, Hyperfragile) emphasized an elite TE. Why? In the playoffs, you play against stacked teams. If you hit on a breakout RB but your TE is Gerald Everett, there will be teams with that breakout RB, but with Travis Kelce. As Shawn Siegele pointed out, elite TE production has been one of the best ways to separate yourself in the last few years.

There’s also a (perhaps nihilistic) approach some take to TE drafting, where you draft more TEs so you have a greater chance at more TE points. Sure, you do get a greater chance at more TE points. But it’s at a huge opportunity cost. TEs that hit are still not going to outscore solid RBs or WRs. And you need to fill several RB and WR spots in your lineup, and only one TE spot. Conor O’Driscoll highlighted this as a mistake to avoid, particularly with Hyperfragile teams.

If you have two QBs and two TEs on your roster and are debating a 3rd, you’re only going to use them if your first two don’t pan out. If that’s the case, your team probably isn’t the best of 837k teams.

I tried to push my luck only drafting two each of QBs and TEs in as many drafts as possible. That left 16 of 20 roster spots to divide among RB and WR. I usually went 7 RB/9 WR or 8 RB/8 WR depending on the profile of the team.

As for the actual elite TEs I drafted, really only Kelce paid off over the whole season. Mark Andrews started off hot, Kyle Pitts never caught on before getting hurt, George Kittle shined in the playoffs but didn’t help you get there, and Darren Waller was a disaster. Each of the top five had their flaws in draft season, so I didn’t go all in on any one in particular and just leaned on the structural drafting approach — my teams were far likelier than the population to have a top TE.

Stacking offenses

”Stacking” offenses, meaning you draft correlated players from the same team, has existed for years but has especially gained in popularity the last few years after its widespread success in daily fantasy sports. But bestball allows you to take it to a bigger extreme.

In a redraft league or daily fantasy sports team, drafting Jalen Hurts, Miles Sanders, AJ Brown, Devonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert onto the same team is likely suboptimal because they’re unlikely to each have a huge game in the same week. That caps your upside.

In bestball, this isn’t as much of a problem. In the regular season, you capture all of the high scores (because your best lineup is played each week). In the playoffs, you now have multiple paths/combinations to a very productive one-week lineup. I was happy to take a big bet that an offense would be strong enough that several of its players would hit. Usually, I correlated with QBs — for example, if I had Jaylen Waddle, I’d prioritize Tua Tagavailoa over players in a similar tier like Justin Fields or Trevor Lawrence. And if I had Waddle and Tagavailoa, I’d also try to use a late pick on another Dolphin.

Something others did but I didn’t was reach for stacks. Similar to what we talked about with breakout RBs, if you reach for a stack that succeeds, another team in the tournament will have that same stack without having had to reach, meaning their team on average will be better than yours.

Stacking playoff schedules

Stacking offenses was somewhat controversial but now largely accepted. Stacking playoff schedules is still a hot topic, though.

At a high level, it makes sense. You don’t get a big payout for winning your regular season league. You get a bigger payout for winning in week 15, an even bigger one for winning in week 16, and a massive one for winning in week 17. So if you were to start at the end and look backwards, you’d ask how you could maximize your chance of a big score in week 17.

One thing you’d try is to get as close to a daily fantasy tournament lineup as possible — likely meaning a QB paired with at least one pass-catcher and a player from the opposing team. You’d also aim for some of your RBs and WRs to be facing each other. These both also make sense — you want to correlate in case a game goes nuclear, like the 2021 Lions-Seahawks game that saw huge performances from Rashaad Penny and Amon-Ra St. Brown.

This tactic was super polarizing. I fell towards the middle, closer to the pro side. Like with stacking offenses, I wasn’t going to reach to correlate a week 16 or 17 game. But it resembled Pascal’s Wager in that if it’s helpful, I had enough exposure to it that it would reward handsomely, and it isn’t, then I didn’t really make any sacrifices. Mike Leone’s research suggested it was impactful in 2022.

One thing I realized dozens of drafts in, though, was that it was sometimes too easy to stack some players, particularly in the middle rounds. If you take Travis Kelce at the 1/2 turn, Courtland Sutton or Jerry Jeudy would usually be at the top of my queue in rounds 3-4. I didn’t mind if almost all my AJ Brown teams had a teammate like Jalen Hurts as well, because they correlate every week. But did I want to have Broncos on every Kelce team, or Bucs on every Christian McCaffrey team? Probably not. Later on, I tried to differentiate a little more.

Avoiding value-changers

Just like I said earlier about reaching for stacks, I was very mindful about other teams having the same players at cheaper costs. There were a handful of players who rose several rounds in value, that almost regardless of what I thought of them, did not make sense to draft in a tournament like this one.

Some examples include Dameon Pierce, Rhamondre Stevenson, George Pickens, Isaiah McKenzie, Romeo Doubs, Brian Robinson, and Isiah Pacheco. On the date I did my first drafts of 2022, I was in on all of these players. But several rounds higher, either the price was not palatable or I knew that someone else would have that player at a cheaper price.

Drafting late in the summer meant that I didn’t get to draft some of those values, but I also avoided plenty of players who lost value over the summer. That’s a risk you run with drafting earlier — you have a ton of upside in closing line value but at the risk of some of your teams being dead before the season even starts.

One case where I exempted myself from this rule was Saquon Barkley. For reasons I still don’t understand, he was a round 3 pick for most of the summer, eventually settling in as a borderline round 1/2 pick. I had him as a solid round 1 value, and continued to select him in round 2.

Splitting exposure to multiple RBs on the same team

It usually is a bad idea to roster multiple RBs from the same team on one fantasy team (usually!). That’s true across both redraft and bestball leagues (though there is growing sentiment that this can work if done strategically). But one thing that changes between playing a handful of redraft teams and 150 bestball teams is that it’s now much easier to spread your bets.

Sometimes we know an environment is good for whoever emerges from a situation but not know who it will be that emerges. In the last few seasons, the 49ers and Patriots have been good examples of this.

I wasn’t scared to have Leonard Fournette on some teams and Rachaad White on others, or Christian McCaffrey on some teams and D’Onta Foreman on others. Same thing with backups — I overindexed on both Kenneth Gainwell and Boston Scott from the Eagles and Isaiah Spiller, Joshua Kelley, and Sony Michel from the Chargers. This was a great example, I thought, of where thinking probabilistically provided an edge on other teams.

Prioritizing young players with elite upside

I’m sorry, I wish I had better references for this section. Rotoviz in general has a lot of good material here.

Rookies and young players were already the key ingredient to winning your normal redraft and bestball leagues. No other category of fantasy draft pick frequently produces outsized outcomes at the same rate. When we’re aiming for a superteam, they become even more important.

One of the tradeoffs you make with rookies in traditional redraft leagues is that they are more likely to start slow and pick up steam around midseason. In a redraft league where you still need to manually set your lineup, your depth can run thin early on. However, in bestball, it’s much easier to navigate around that.

We talked earlier about building the best possible team for the playoff weeks. Devaluing the early weeks and putting the playoffs at a premium, the profile of a rookie is a great fit. And once again chasing upside, I wasn’t afraid to stack several rookies on one roster.

Rookies I was well above the market on included: Travis Etienne, Breece Hall, Drake London, Chris Olave, Skyy Moore, Jahan Dotson, Rachaad White, Christian Watson, and Wan’Dale Robinson. Only Etienne and Hall cost relatively premium picks, so my mindset here was that I was willing to roster these players well more than the expectation. I had London, White, and Robinson on more than 30% of my teams, and the rest on at least 16% (except Etienne a little lower). Again, expectation is 8% (1/12), so I was 2-4x more likely than other teams to have these players.

Second-year players were also a crucial bet. I had over 32% exposure to Justin Fields and Trevor Lawrence — 4x leverage on the field. The fact that several of those teams also rostered Trey Lance as the lone other QB shows how powerful that upside can be when you drill the breakout players. It is a weird dynamic at RB, where most of the RBs who have success in their rookie year are premium picks in year 2. I was completely off Najee Harris at the 1/2 turn, for example. At WR, I loved the upside offered in the mid rounds by Rashod Bateman, Elijah Moore, Devonta Smith, and Kadarius Toney — although in this case only Smith really panned out.

Beyond that, there were a handful of other players that had situation changes, producing uncertainty. JK Dobbins and Chris Godwin were returning from injuries, suppressing their draft positions. If they made full recoveries, I’d be getting 2nd round players at a steal. Ceedee Lamb and Darnell Mooney saw their biggest target competition leave town, and each were paired with an exciting QB. Marquise Brown, Christian Kirk, and Marquez Valdes-Scantling all changed teams after being underutilized. DJ Moore and Jerry Jeudy had new QBs.

Cohesive round 18-20 strategy

We touched earlier on not burning extra picks on QB or TE. One thing I noticed in early drafts was that my opponents didn’t seem to know all the players in the late rounds. There were 240 picks in these drafts, well more than you’d see in your typical redraft league, so it was understandable. My opponents were sometimes picking known veterans instead of under-the-radar, younger players with more chance of upside.

After pick 200, there were some really appetizing backup RBs that I found myself taking way more than everyone else: Eno Benjamin, D’Ernest Johnson, D’Onta Foreman, Hassan Haskins, Jeff Wilson Jr., Chris Evans, Jaylen Warren, Sony Michel, and Ameer Abdullah. I felt like on each of these players, I was somewhat ahead on the news of their prospective or potential role.

I had Benjamin on nearly 40% of my teams — he was underpriced by several rounds as the backup to an injury-prone starter (James Conner) in a potent offense and frequently dipped two rounds below his average draft position. We’ll always have week 7. D’Ernest Johnson seemed likely to be traded in the preseason and could have found himself a round 3 pick, but that never materialized. I ignored my earlier advice about splitting exposure on backups and had a ton of Evans but no Samaje Perine, a bad miss (and something I kind of realized while drafting). The Abdullah pick I regret somewhat — he seemed like he was the passing down starter for the Raiders, and I was telling myself he could be a three-down player, but I don’t know how realistic that was.

My late-round WR strategy was all about stacking, either with QBs or week 17 opponents. If I had Bengals or Bills, I took a lot of Jamison Crowder and Khalil Shakir. If I had Packers or Vikings, I took Randall Cobb. If I had Trey Lance, I took Danny Gray, and if I had Jalen Hurts, Quez Watkins, etc. I felt decent about the process here but didn’t really hit anything big.

Results

As a reminder, I needed to place in the top two of my 12-person league to advance past the regular season. If everything were random, 8% of teams would finish 1st and 8% would finish 2nd, for 16% of teams advancing in total. That would be about 25 of 150 teams. I’ve tabled up the count of teams that placed in each rank, a running count, and that running count out of 150 teams.

Looking at the frequencies of where my teams finished, it was nice to see that the most common placement was 1st, with 20 teams. Adding in my 15 2nd place teams, that meant 35 (23%) of my teams advanced. A few of my teams floundered in the last few weeks of the regular season, so it wasn’t as good as it was pacing, but I’ll take it.

I really was trying to avoid my teams placing in the middle of the pack, so I was surprised to see that 18 teams finished in 4th and 19 finished in 5th, compared to only 16 teams total placing 10th-12th. As it turned out, 2/3 of teams finished in the top six.

Two thoughts here:

1. This probably meant that even with some of my adjustments, I was still not drafting aggressively enough to chase boom-or-bust outcomes.
2. With the exception of Josh Jacobs, I was ahead of the market on most “league winners” and breakout players — buoying some teams that would have otherwise finished near the bottom of the pack.

Quarterfinal Results

Now that we entered the playoffs, only 1st place matters. And with 35 teams, you’d expect three to advance. Here’s the same table of counts.

Six teams advancing is great, but it could have been so much better. I wasn’t ready for the variance of these 12 team leagues — my 2nd-best score out of 35 teams actually finished 2nd in its league. I already knew to expect that my best scores may not come from my best teams, but I hadn’t fully considered that my best scores weren’t necessarily the ones that would advance.

So what was my secret to doing so well in week 15? Well, it probably wasn’t anything skillful. A lot of my teams had one of Jerick McKinnnon or Zay Jones, late-round picks that were the top RB and WR that week.

Here were the six teams that advanced to the semifinals.

Team 1: Extreme Anchor RB with WR depth

Throughout the first half of the season, I had one team that I thought was a monster. It had Kyler Murray and Trevor Lawrence at QB and then Saquon Barkley, Breece Hall, Cordarrelle Patterson, and Jeff Wilson at RB. The WRs included Justin Jefferson, Jaylen Waddle, Christian Kirk, Drake London, and Garrett Wilson, and then rounding out with Mark Andrews at TE. But it lost a lot of its luster by playoff time.

In comparison, this team was just so fun to look at around playoff time. It started with an early draft slot, where I took Christian McCaffrey. And then with the next eight picks, I selected Jalen Hurts at QB, six WRs, and Dalton Schultz (who fell past his usual midround price). I wasn’t able to pair Hurts with a teammate, but I did get Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle paired with their QB Tua Tagavailoa (plus RB Raheem Mostert).

Consistent with what I said earlier about rookies, this team had three of them — Drake London, Chris Olave, and Christian Watson. Watson was one of the most electric players in the league in the second half of the season, and as a bonus — he played against the Dolphins in the semifinals week. It also had one of the “uncertainty” targets I mentioned in Ceedee Lamb.

This team didn’t have the week-winners in Jerick McKinnon or Zay Jones, but did find boosts from late-round picks Russell Gage and Raheem Mostert.

Team 2: Extreme Anchor RB turned Hyperfragile

In this team, I started with a middle pick and selected Austin Ekeler. I added three elite WRs in Ceedee Lamb, AJ Brown, and DJ Moore next. But then, to my surprise, the values just piled on. Jerry Jeudy, Darren Waller, JK Dobbins, Trey Lance, Tony Pollard, and Miles Sanders just fell into my lap in the middle rounds. I drafted 10 players that I think should have been taken in rounds 1-7.

Very few teams would have this collection of RBs, and the ones that did were not going to have four WRs as good as mine. And while Lance and Waller didn’t pan out, the Bears stack of Justin Fields and Cole Kmet more than made up for it. As a bonus, this team got big scores from Jones and KJ Osborn to advance in the playoffs.

Team 3: Advantages wiped out by injury

This team was a tweener. It started with Justin Jefferson, Aaron Jones, and Kyle Pitts (starts with one of RB, WR, and TE were the most flexible, in my opinion). And then the next six picks were Breece Hall and five WRs. It didn’t settle in any of the strategy buckets I prioritized.

It’s a little funny how most of this team’s best picks were boosted in my draft queues because of stacking. I ended up with Justin Fields because I had Darnell Mooney. Hall got hurt, but having him made Tyler Lockett an easy click (he was already the best player on the board) when they played each other in week 17. Kyle Pitts busted, but I drafted Hopkins chasing the week 17 matchup. I already had Jones and Jefferson in the week 17 Packers-Vikings matchup, so I added Christian Watson.

And again, the week 15 boost came from Jerick McKinnon and Russell Gage.

Team 4: Out of QBs

Here was another Justin Jefferson/Aaron Jones team, this time with a big game stack centered around the Eagles/Saints game in week 17. I had Jalen Hurts, Miles Sanders, AJ Brown, Devonta Smith, and Quez Watkins from the Eagles, and Jameis Winston and Chris Olave from the Saints.

This team got the most mileage it could out of the star players, but was fortunate to go as far as it did. It advanced mainly because the Eagles went off in week 15. But the big issue was that neither of my QBs were playing in week 16 — Hurts was injured and Winston had been benched long ago.

Seeing this did bring some second thoughts about what I said earlier about sticking to two QBs. But I don’t know if this will end up changing my strategy going forward. You wouldn’t draft a QB if you think they’d get benched. Usually, if I whiffed on Fields, Lawrence, and Tagovailoa, I’d make sure to get Winston or Daniel Jones — the latter of whom would’ve been just fine on this team.

Team 5: Effective stacking

This was a fun team that despite limping to the playoffs, fought well. Both of my QBs were stacked with pass-catchers — Patrick Mahomes with Travis Kelce (plus Courtland Sutton for week 17 correlation) and Trevor Lawrence with Evan Engram and Zay Jones. The opportunity to backdoor stack (taking the pass-catchers after the QB) in the late rounds with Lawrence was always nice in case you under-correlated early.

I don’t really love how I handled RB on this team. I was okay with Breece Hall as an anchor RB, but then took opportunistic swings at Tony Pollard and James Cook. Pollard ended up providing a lot of the fuel this team needed to advance past the regular season (as did Cowboys teammate Ceedee Lamb).

This team got the week 15 boost from Jones and Raheem Mostert.

Team 6: Hyperfragile RBs hit

This team’s bench is so goofy. Really the only bench players that contributed in any way were Trevor Lawrence and Zay Jones. It also lacked the WR star power that many of my other advanced teams had.

Semifinal Results

Week 16 was awful. My teams finished 5th, 7th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 12th. I knew going into the week that I’d have stacked odds because Jalen Hurts, declared out during the week with an injury, was on two of my six remaining teams. One of those teams only had Jameis Winston (benched) at QB, so I took a zero from that lineup slot.

At TE, TJ Hockenson and George Kittle had huge games. I was at or above market on each among my 150 teams, but they weren’t on any of my semifinal teams.

At WR, Ceedee Lamb, Devonta Smith, Justin Jefferson, Tee Higgins, and Jaylen Waddle were the leading scorers. In a vacuum, that’s great news – I was 2-3x above market on each among my 150 teams. However, I ran into teams that had three or four of them together, and none of my six remaining teams had more than two.

At RB, it was a low-scoring week, which meant there wasn’t much way to make up for not having the optimal TE or WRs.

Despite all that, I was actually live to advance one team if Tua Tagavailoa, Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle, and Christian Watson combined for about 100 points in the Dolphins-Packers game. The game started off great for that hope, but couldn’t sustain the pace.

With no teams to the finals, my results were finalized. $750 in, $400 out.

Takeaways and conclusion

Well, I didn’t win. I earned some Sklanksy Bucks by advancing enough teams to the quarterfinals and semifinals, but lost money overall. And it felt like I was coming out of drafts with solid teams, but admittedly it’s tough to actually quantify how much of an edge, if any, that you have.

I’ll probably revise this section later with some more high-level takeaways. But overall, it was a lot of fun to draft and then follow the teams. And maybe in a future NFL season I’ll take another crack at max-entering.

And several rapid-fire thoughts:

• Fast drafts were better than slows. By knowing your stuff and keeping track of the clock, you let your opponents make unforced errors. And from multi-tabling online poker, I was comfortable enough doing two or three drafts at the same time.
• The player pool on DraftKings was definitely very weak. I rarely found myself in drafts with more than a handful of sharper drafters.
• Drafters on DraftKings were not tailoring their strategy enough to the tournament aspect, particularly with regard to roster construction.
• I thumbed through my opponents’ rosters in the quarterfinals and semifinals, and found far fewer superteams than I expected.
• I wish I forced in some random (and uncommon) player combinations so that my rosters could be more unique. I felt like a lot of my playoff opponents would have the same blocks of players that I did, giving me fewer outs to having the best score in the playoff weeks.
• I should have done more stacking of players on the same offense (especially with non-mobile QBs), but limited how often I’d stack with their week 17 opponent. Maybe a bit reactive, but too many of my Chiefs teams got dragged down by Broncos WRs.
• I felt pretty good about my tactics with round 9-15 RB picks and thinking about how the top RBs available would fit in with the players I had already drafted.
• I liked taking big stances to really leverage the spots I thought were +EV. There probably is a limit to how much you should draft a player you have max confidence in, but 40% Eno Benjamin as a late-round pick I’d probably do again.
• You can’t draft every player without capping your upside. You need to fully fade a good number of players to get enough exposure to your priority targets.
• The playoff variance was brutal.

Player Targets

This section is mostly for me. Here is a rough list of the players I targeted in drafts.

• QB: Jalen Hurts, Kyler Murray, Trey Lance, Joe Burrow, Russell Wilson, Justin Fields, Trevor Lawrence, Tua Tagavailoa, Daniel Jones, Jameis Winston
• RB: Christian McCaffrey, Saquon Barkley, D’Andre Swift, Travis Etienne, Breece Hall, JK Dobbins, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Rhamondre Stevenson, Rashaad Penny, Damien Harris, James Cook, Devin Singletary, Cordarrelle Patterson, Melvin Gordon, Darrell Henderson, Rachaad White, Kenneth Gainwell, Isaiah Spiller, Khalil Herbert, Jamaal Williams, Zamir White, Raheem Mostert, Tyrion Davis-Price, Jerick McKinnon, Eno Benjamin, D’Ernest Johnson, Joshua Kelley, D’Onta Foreman, Hassan Haskins, Jeff Wilson, Chris Evans, Jaylen Warren, Sony Michel, Ameer Abdullah, Boston Scott
• WR: Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Stefon Diggs, Ceedee Lamb, AJ Brown, Tee Higgins, DJ Moore, Mike Williams, Courtland Sutton, Jaylen Waddle, Marquise Brown, Jerry Jeudy, Juju Smith-Schuster, Rashod Bateman, Darnell Mooney, Chris Godwin, Amon-Ra St. Brown, DK Metcalf, Elijah Moore, Brandon Aiyuk, Drake London, Devonta Smith, Christian Kirk, Kadarius Toney, Chris Olave, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Skyy Moore, Tyler Lockett, Rondale Moore, Russell Gage, Josh Palmer, Jahan Dotson, Michael Gallup, Nico Collins, Christian Watson, KJ Hamler, Wan’Dale Robinson, Alec Pierce, Parris Campbell, Sammy Watkins, Zay Jones, Jamison Crowder, Randall Cobb, Danny Gray, Khalil Shakir, Velus Jones, Quez Watkins
• TE: Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, Kyle Pitts, George Kittle, Pat Freiermuth, Robert Tonyan, Hayden Hurst, Evan Engram, Brevin Jordan, Mo Alie-Cox