Dinkmeyer’s GPP Leverage: Week 7

Welcome to the seventh edition of GPP Leverage for NFL DFS. This article is going to be a catch-all space for my GPP thoughts during the course of the NFL season. In this space, we’ll mix some macro and micro concepts to help improve your odds in tournaments. The goal is to differentiate your play in an intelligent and correlated way that gives you a better chance to get paid off when you’re right.

I think it’s important to note I’m not a football guy who plays DFS. I’m a professional DFS player who plays NFL. So my play is largely through the prism of using resources around me to do what I do best: Play the game of DFS within the context of the NFL. Whether this is you or you’re a football guy who has a better handle on the schemes and the mismatches, there should be something in here for you to improve your game as a DFS GPP player.

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WEEK 6 ANALYSIS

In hindsight, Week 6 played out in a way that this column has repeatedly identified throughout the season: Finding paths to differentiate chalky game stacks. The GPP winners were from two of the three most popular game environments we noted in Leverage (MIN-ATL and HOU-TEN) while the third game targeted had a secondary piece that was a GPP winner (D’Andre Swift) despite the game stack itself failing. The winners found a way to differentiate with the lower-owned QB stacks in those two games as Ryan-Julio and Watson-Fuller-Cooks stacks hit. The Cousins-Jefferson-Thielen combinations also spun up as they leveraged off of the big chalk play of Alexander Mattison. In retrospect, it all seems so easy!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the specific approach recommended in our Week 6 Leverage column. We did touch on the concept but highlighted it with the wrong game with the DET-JAC game. As is usually the case, the column had some solid recommendations (secondary Lions pieces, avoiding stacking chalk QBs with RBs, max 1 of CAR-CHI chalk) and some poor ones (ugly bring backs and Cam Newton stacks were a disappointment). If you were able to take concepts we’ve touched on in the past and applied them to the MIN-ATL game, you probably had a good week. If you were like me and loaded up on Cam stacks and secondary Lions stacks – it was a rough one. While it was a frustrating result for me in Week 6, the week was another reminder that you can attack chalk game environments in a sharp way in GPPs.

WEEK 7 OUTLOOK