GPP Leverage: Week 1

The NFL regular season is back! Best ball drafting season is over, our season-long leagues have been finalized, and even our beloved preseason DFS has come to an end. It’s time to focus on one of the greatest peer-to-peer games ever created: NFL DFS.

Welcome to the first NFL GPP Leverage column of the season. This will be my second year writing the Leverage column after inheriting it from its previous authors, Drew Dinkmeyer and Gary Hartman. I wrote last year that I hoped I could also inherit Drew and Gary’s ability to win a DraftKings Milly Maker, but alas, that part has yet to come to fruition. Maybe this is my year.

Since this is the first week of the season, I want to start out by covering the purpose of this weekly article for those that are new to ETR, new to the article, or maybe just need a refresher. The Leverage article is intended to focus on broad macro concepts while discussing some micro options, primarily as examples. I generally play small-field, single-entry and three-max tournaments on DraftKings, but the broad concepts discussed here should be applicable to any contest size, entry limit, or DFS platform. To quote one of my favorite lines from one of Drew’s past editions of Leverage: “The examples I highlight will be in my portfolio of lineups, but if you want to improve considerably as a GPP player, mastering the concepts are more important than copying the answers.”

The Leverage article is also intended to be an early-week look at how to gain leverage in NFL DFS tournaments. I emphasize “early-week” because, even though this article is published just two days prior to the slate, projected ownerships and market sentiment will always move from Friday to Sunday, sometimes drastically. Many players don’t do their NFL DFS “homework” until Saturday, and there’s a significant amount of content that is not available until late Friday or Saturday, so it is expected that some of the micro examples discussed here will no longer offer strong leverage by Sunday morning. I strongly suggest that you follow our ownership projections, check in on Evan Silva’s Update Log, and tune into our Wake and Rake and Last-Minute Livestream shows on Sunday morning, in order to keep up with market movements. If you focus on the broad ideas discussed here rather than the individual leverage spots, you should be able to adapt with (or against) the market by the time projected ownerships settle in on Sunday morning.

As noted above, I primarily play on DraftKings. Although the individual salaries and ownerships I reference will be specific to DraftKings, I hope that the topics and ideas covered here will also be beneficial to those of you that play on FanDuel and other sites. For more content focused specifically on FanDuel, I highly encourage everyone to check out our new FanDuel Examination show with Andrew Wiggins and Mark Dankenbring.

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves, let’s dive into the slate.