Macro vs. Micro: FanDuel Week 5

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Imagine being significantly overweight on the best raw points scorer on the entire slate last week, but building so poorly around him that you take a small loss on the slate. Couldn’t be me.

Not only did I flag-plant CeeDee Lamb on the FanDuel Examination show last week, but I also wrote him up in the Macro vs. Micro article.

Of course, one player is simply one piece of the larger puzzle. Many of us realize that; however, it got me thinking a bit about how many people might actually not be aware of that in the Macro section this week. Or, better yet, how many people have ever had their takes come through about a particular player or two, but then still not had a successful slate?

All of this got me thinking about slate preparation, and, more specifically, preparation throughout the week. We will discuss that more in this week’s macro section, and sorry, all, this also winds up as a bit of a homework assignment this week!

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Macro: Your Weekly Schedule (a homework assignment)

Some of the best advice I ever heard when building for tournaments was that players don’t win DFS tournaments, but rather, lineups win tournaments. I’m not sure I fully knew how to digest that at first, as it seemed kind of obvious. As time went on, though, and I gained more experience in tourneys, that finally clicked for me at some point. It was actually probably more of a “gradual” click than a true “ah-ha” moment.  

This point is perfectly illustrated by my CeeDee Lamb flag plant last week. Any joker can call out a player who they think will have a good game that week. Sure, there were several factors that went into the Lamb call last week, but at the end of the day, that’s only one player out of nine needed to win a GPP. That one player can be a nice start to a lineup, but they aren’t going to go a long way in taking down a top-heavy payout for a tournament.

So, that got me thinking a bit more about my own building process this week, and I’m going to challenge you to do the same here in just a moment. To be clear, I’ve been doing this a long time and have a meticulous process in place already. However, I’m also regularly making tweaks and adjustments to that process to try and improve. If you aren’t doing that, then you are falling behind, in my view. What I was specifically after was trying to figure out what about my process allowed me to be significantly above the field on Lamb but yet lose money on the slate. Again, that isn’t as hard to do as you think it is, because, as we said above, it is only one out of nine players on your roster. What I was more after, though, was whether or not this was due to variance? Building poorly? Missing certain things along the way when building?  You get the idea.