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DraftKings Showdown Strategy
Weekly Contests on Draftkings are great but single game Showdown tournaments are a whole different strategy. There’s a lot to consider when setting your lineups.
Showdown Captain mode is a DraftKings tournament where you have $50,000 to create a lineup using 6 players from a standalone single game. One of those players will be your captain. The captain costs 1.5 times their salary and will accumulate 1.5 times the points. As with every slate, GAME THEORY IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. Even more so in Showdown, you want your lineup to tell a story of how the game will go. If you think the WR1 is the best play, obviously he can’t produce without his QB & both have to be in that lineup. If you use the QB as captain you’ll likely want to link him with his pass catchers. Maybe you think it’s a low scoring game where only one team does the bulk of scoring. You can play that teams RB as captain paired with the Defense and only 1 player from the opposing team. There are a lot of options based on how you see the game going but ALWAYS make sure there’s correlation between your players.
So it’s important to determine who will be the highest scoring player in the game while taking the salary into consideration. Many people just use the QB who generally scores more as their captain. The problem is if they are higher priced it limits the rest of your lineup and they will likely be one of the higher owned players.
Also the presumed best play isn’t necessarily the optimal captain when considering salary.
Example for the season opener:
Cooper Kupp is $12,400 as a flex and as a captain he’s $18,600. That leaves an average of only $6,280 remaining per player. You can see how that can hamper your options.
It also leads to the next point. Everyone is choosing from a limited player pool in a single game. The likelihood of duplicate lineups is an option so you will want to be unique. Using a less popular player as captain can help but obviously make sure he’s a good play. Don’t just do it for the sake of being different. Other ways to differentiate include using multiple RBs from the same team in the same lineup. Especially for teams that have a committee approach and a high projected team total.
Example:
Many people will focus on the Rams passing attack but if you think the running game is the strong point you could focus there. Akers and Henderson could very much split time and if you have both in a lineup and they’re the primary scorers on the Rams you have significantly differentiated yourself from the field.
One of the key ways to avoid duplicate lineups is by simply playing in contests with less people. The likelihood of winning a contest with 1,000 people is far greater than 20,000 people all picking from a small player pool. Yes winning a big contest is great but if you end up splitting the top prize with 100 other people it loses a bit of it’s luster. Not to mention it’s just obviously easier to win against less people.
Leaving salary on the table is another great way to differentiate since most players will max out their salary.
Using Kickers & non elite TEs isn’t always a sound strategy. Especially as a captain. Kickers are very hard to predict anyway. TEs can be ok if cheap to help you afford higher priced players. Hope they score a TD. In larger fields where you’re playing a bunch of lineups and want to be different, go for it. Just don’t invest too heavily.
There is a ton of strategy when setting lineups for showdown but make sure that your lineup tells a story on not only how the bulk of your players score but how they contribute to a game environment that makes your captain the top player in the game.
Good Luck out there!!!
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