Every week, some lucky person takes home $1 million by winning the DraftKings Millionaire Maker contest, aka The Milly Maker. The contest is $20 to enter with a maximum of 150 entries per person. I looked at a few key trends from two years of winners this summer and pulled some key trends that can be found here: Five Key Trends from Million Dollar DraftKings NFL DFS Lineups. In this series, we’ll look at what the winning lineup did each week with its NFL DFS picks on DraftKings and see if it aligns with prior trends or if there are new ways to take down the contest.
NFL DFS Week 6 DraftKings Millionaire Maker Lineup Review and Strategy
The Winning Lineup
The winning lineup of Week 6 featured a Matt Ryan stack with Julio Jones and Hayden Hurst. It also ran it back with Justin Jefferson on the opposite side of Atlanta’s game and a secondary stack of Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Ronald Jones. The Ryan stack was the key to winning the slate outside of a Deshaun Watson stack, which also performed well enough to win tournaments. Ryan was the ultimate instance of locking up points in a high total game with low ownership. The line for the Falcons – Vikings game closed at 53.5 points. That was the highest total of the main slate, but Ryan was still owned by less than one out of every 20 fantasy teams.
The secondary stack didn’t smash, but getting a running back who cost $6,000 or less was the key to affording Derrick Henry. There were a handful of running backs who could have filled that role, but Jones was the only one who went off.
- Ronald Jones – 9.2% – 29.1 points
- David Montgomery – 24.1% – 13.7 points
- Antonio Gibson – 8.9% – 9.5 points
- Myles Gaskin – 26.1% – 16.6 points
The Importance of Late Swap in NFL DFS
Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette was slated to play a limited role according to an Adam Schefter report on Saturday. Then he was announced inactive after the early games had already passed halftime. Because he wasn’t likely to see the bulk of the carries prior to the Fournette news, Jones’ ownership was projected to be lower than Gaskin’s. Looking at the most popular plays of the slate, all three were expensive running backs in the early games. Knowing that players needed to save somewhere to afford all of those backs, Gaskins’ ownership could have been projected to be even higher than expected after the early games locked. Montgomery’s 24.1% ownership would have also worked as a good proxy for Gaskins’.
With all of these puzzle pieces lined up, swapping off Gaskin or other late-game backs onto the second-best value per Awesemo’s projections was easy the optimal move. It paid off with tournament wins for sharp players.
Late swap is an obvious advantage when news breaks after the 1 p.m. games. It is also an invaluable tool for finding leverage after the first slate of players have their ownership revealed. Finding the popular roster constructions and creating leverage off of them doesn’t end at lock. Jones was a great example of both breaking news and late-game leverage.
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Double Stacks and Run Backs
Every DraftKings Millionaire Maker-winning lineup this year has featured a quarterback, one of his receivers and a second receiver or tight end from the same team. All but one of the best lineups have also featured a bring-back from the opposing team. This isn’t because that always creates the perfect lineup. It’s because the high amount of correlation reduces the number of decisions a DFS player needs to get right to win $1 million. The winning lineup from Week 6 used Hurst at tight end. Hurst wasn’t in the top 10 values at tight end with just 15.7 points. He finished as the fifth-highest scoring tight end.
Hurst wasn’t the perfect play after the fact. In a game where Atlanta puts up 40 points, he’s likely to be good enough. That was the case this week. Pegging Atlanta as a team to stack got lineups a top-scoring quarterback, receiver, opposing receiver and a good enough tight end. Keep stacking and don’t let a 99.99th-percentile lineup be the enemy of $1 million.
A Final Note on Getting Unique
The Atlanta – Minnesota game didn’t go overlooked. Adam Thielen and Alexander Mattison both clocked in at 23% and 27.1% ownership. Kirk Cousins and Irv Smith were the No. 3 quarterback and tight end by ownership. This lineup leveraged the popularity of those plays incredibly well while still targeting this game. Jefferson had topped 100 yards in two of his previous three games but was far less popular than his teammates. Atlanta had been one of the most pass-heavy teams through five weeks and was getting their star receiver back. Despite this, Ryan and Jones saw modest ownership.
Simply building lineups that aren’t common isn’t enough to win tournaments on most slates. Rosters that directly benefit from the chalk failing are more likely to take down a GPP. In a game where the Vikings trailed but Jefferson was the focal point of their comeback effort, the winning lineup from this week was in an incredible position. That scenario doesn’t happen every week, but when it does, a lineup like this stands to profit disproportionately compared to the odds of it hitting.
Bad news fokls. @pahowdy was right for asking about Julio. With grown👏ass👏man👏 games defined by >150 receiving yards. Julio Jones at 11.9% is the true G👏A👏M👏 https://t.co/A1Jz645JEo pic.twitter.com/GXXh0dMWDX
— Kyle Dvorchak (@kyletweetshere) July 30, 2020
Also, Julio Jones was $6,700 and owned by less than 10% of teams. Do better, DraftKings players.
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