Winning big in daily fantasy sports (DFS) is no easy thing, with many people who have the most success at playing the game being full-time professionals at it, and the best have methodical processes that have led to year-on-year profitability.

The most difficult area within DFS is undoubtedly the guaranteed prize pool (GPP) contests, where the prizes can run into the millions. Likewise, you might be competing against hundreds of thousands of other people in the quest to win big.

This article will delve into some of the keys behind building winning GPP lineups and explain how they differ from other contests.

• Snake Draft Pick Strategy: Early | Middle | Late
• Draft Targets for Every Round: Early | Middle | Late
• Fitz’s Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
• 2023 Fantasy Football Draft Kit

How to Create GPP Lineups in DFS (2023 Fantasy Football)

Contest Selection

Before we dive too deep into the anatomies of winning rosters, one point applies to all forms of DFS, and that is to understand the contest you’re entering. DraftKings weekly Milly Maker contest has hundreds of thousands of entrants, each able to enter up to 150 times (at a cost of $3,000 in total). If you decide you’re okay with entering a contest akin to trying to win the lottery, then the way you construct your roster has to be much more cognizant of what it’s trying to achieve compared to a team in a 100-person contest.

Many people decide the huge field contests aren’t for them and instead focus on 20-max or three-max contests, which level the playing field somewhat and don’t require the same level of bankroll to attack weekly. We’re still looking to get virtually everything correct in these contests, but there is a little more wiggle room than in the Milly-Maker.

Be Mindful of Player Rostership

If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it means how often the field selects a player in their lineups. For GPP contests, we need to hit on a mixture of the best plays, which will inevitably be more common or chalkier, and find the diamonds in the rough that aren’t being rostered heavily by our opponents. Here at FantasyPros, we have several tools that can aid with this, including our player projections, which estimate how often each player will be rostered on each platform and the project points those players might score.

Historically, winning GPP teams have had a total sum rostership in the 110-130% range. This means when you add up the projected player rostership numbers for your entire roster, it comes out in this range. How you arrive at that total number is almost as important as the end result.

We have nine roster spots to fill out, and if you selected nine players who were all rostered at 13%, you’d arrive at 120%, well within the ideal range, but all of your plays have been commonly played, meaning you have no leverage on opponents. Instead, we should look for multiple players under 10% rostered and, ideally, one below 5% in larger contests. The likelihood of these players hitting is much less, but when they do, they propel you up the leaderboards and toward the serious money.

Handling The Chalk

We’ve established that getting different is key to a winning week, but one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is learning how to cope with chalky plays from one week to the next. In DFS circles, you’ll often hear the term “free square” when a running back is out injured, and their backup becomes the defacto large-volume replacement. Some weeks, it can pay to accept that chalk and lean into it. On these occasions, it’s not uncommon to see winning lineups with rostership levels up into the 150-160% range, as that one ‘free square’ could be rostered by 35-45% of the field.

That doesn’t always work out, though, and there is huge leverage to be gained by fading the chalk, as difficult as that might seem when you’re staring down the option of a running back costing you half the price of a typical starter.

A key element to fading the chalk is what it means for the rest of your lineup. If a huge percentage of the field is paying down at the running back position because they now can, is their newfound extra salary going to be diverted to another player in a great matchup? If so, we can flip the build and try to turn this “free square” against the field and create leverage for ourselves.

In this scenario, we can say J.K. Dobbins has been ruled out for a prime matchup. Gus Edwards is priced at $4,300, and the salary savings is now allowing people to cram in Travis Kelce, who is also in a great matchup. By flipping this build and paying up for expensive running backs and down at tight end, we’ll have enormous leverage on the field should Edwards and Kelce not deliver.

The key is being able to decide if chalk is good chalk or bad chalk, and a lot of the time, that is where DFS slates are won or lost.

Stacking

When we stack, we’re betting on a smaller range of outcomes, hoping we’re correct. If we have nine roster spots to fill out and we dedicate two to four to one game, then that’s several pieces that one needs one outcome to occur, which in this case is that the game they’re playing in has plenty of points.

Most DFS winning lineups involve not only stacking a quarterback with at least one pass-catcher but often they involve two pass-catchers from the same offense and a bring-back of a player on the opposing team. It’s also not uncommon for winning lineups to feature mini-correlations of two players playing against each other, in addition to regular stacks.

Quick Tips

Don’t leave lots of money on the table

It can feel like you’re finding a path to uniqueness by doing so, but very rarely does leaving more than a few hundred dollars of your salary result in good things.

Fade Chalky Defenses

For some ungodly reason, DFS sites still force you to pick a defense, and routinely the obvious ones get steamed up in popularity. Projecting DST scoring is incredibly difficult and routinely proves tricky. Fading chalky defenses works out more often than not.

Build Around Core Plays

Find the two to three players or a stack that you want to build your lineup around, and then try out several variations of lineups with other players in. You can also do this using the FantasyPros Lineup Optimizer, which will show you a variety of lineups at different projection levels. This allows you to consider whether you want to chase projected points or lower-rostered players.

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