FantasyPros has put together a glossary of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) terms for readers to reference. More and more players are taking part in DFS contests. We’re providing the glossary so that you can easily reference terms and strategies as you get started playing DFS. Below we’ll take a look at daily fantasy football 101.
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In daily fantasy sports, roster stacking has become one of the most widely talked about strategies currently being used. It’s often widely misused, too. By knowing how to use it correctly, and being able to spot opportunities where it can help you, you can gain an advantage over the many that are not using it right.
Roster stacking is often referred to as synergy because it involves using the players on your roster together to improve your fantasy point total. It can be a risky move, but when it works well, you will have great results. This strategy only works if the team you are loading up on has a good shot of winning. It relies on a team’s performance over one day, and that can be dangerous because even a huge favorite can have an off day. If your team of choice does not perform, you will more than likely not finish in the money in your given contest. This is one of those all-or-nothing deals, unfortunately. So, with that in mind, you need to be sure that you are going to be a winner with this more than often enough to create a profit. Long-term expectations need to be accounted for, and that means there will be some ups and downs over the short term.
When does roster stacking work?
Roster stacking is at its most successful when it affords you the chance to combine a couple great players with players that you would never consider drafting normally. These players should have a cheap price associated with them, but because they have a great core of teammates and are going against a particularly weak team, they will perform much better than normal. In this sense, you are looking for cheaper players that are going to perform at a much higher level than they usually do. This allows you to get great talent at full price in other spots on your roster without having to resort to hoping that a no-name player has an exceptionally rare performance. In other words, it reduces your reliance upon sheer luck by taking into account team and player matchups.
Let’s take a look at the NFL first. It makes sense that a good quarterback is good in part because of good teammates. If you look at the No. 1 QB in the NFL from the 2014 season, Tony Romo, you will see that he had the NFL’s No. 8 wide receiver (Dez Bryant) on his team, the No. 1 running back (DeMarco Murray) and the No. 10 tight end (Jason Witten). There’s no coincidence that these players were all successful. They are all great athletes, but when put together, they were able to do even better.
Now place them against a weaker than average team. On November 9, 2014, the Cowboys played the Jaguars. Romo had a QB Rating of 138.8 for that game and Murray had 19 carries and 100 yards. However, a lesser known RB on Dallas also had a great game. He could have been acquired in your daily fantasy league for just a fraction of the price of Murray, too. Joseph Randle had seven carries and 56 yards giving him a higher yards per carry figure than Murray. This is thanks almost entirely to a great team playing a weaker team. Romo didn’t need to rely on his studs quite as much and found other openings. Randle benefited because of this, and if he was on your daily fantasy roster, you would have too.
The same concept can be applied to any team sport. You can find a high-powered MLB team and put them up against a weaker pitching matchup. Suddenly, players with mediocre batting averages that might not have the consistency to be used in a normal daily league become very attractive simply because there’s a better chance of a hit. And because they are power hitters, there’s a chance for a disproportionate payout in your point total.
Finding these kinds of opportunities makes roster stacking very lucrative.
Making it work
The math behind successful roster stacking is pretty simple. If you are playing in a 50/50 league, you need to finish in the money more than 50% of the time to reap a profit. Other types of leagues are a little more difficult to predict. If you are playing in a 3x multiplier, you need to be correct about 34% of the time. If it’s a 10x multiplier, you will want to be correct more than 10% of the time. Basically, figure out what your payout percentage will most likely be, and then go up a tiny bit with your projected level of success so that you are just above the profitable margin. Do this correctly enough times and you have a long-term profit.
This math assumes that you have a firm grasp on the types of scores necessary to finish in the money in your particular league and that the holes in your lineup are filled in correctly. If you don’t have this mastery of daily fantasy sports strategy, roster stacking will not work for you. In this light, it is an advanced strategy, but one that is very easy to learn once you are at that level, hence its popularity.
Matthew Young is a correspondent at FantasyPros with 10 years of fantasy sports experience, and is the author of “2015 Fantasy Baseball Manual.” You can read more from Matthew’s archive and his blog at www.windailyfantasy.com. Plus, you can follow him at @AuthorMGYoung.
