Three Unique Ways to Leverage Best Ball ADP

Crafting unique combinations by playing the Draft Board

I’ve recently been focusing my best ball content on some of the player stands that I’m taking. You can check that out here.

For this piece I’m leaving such takes at the door. I am exploring some unique ways to create correlation and/or leverage in your lineup by taking advantage of the structure of the current ADP environment.

While these are some specific ideas that I’ve been actioning in drafts, there are surely countless more examples that follow the same general concepts.

I do want to place a caveat on this article off the top. Each example I address here is based on the *current* ADP environment. As we know, ADP will shift throughout the summer which could either make these pairing less unique or harder to achieve.

Therefore, if you are actioning any of these strategies in a way that reaches ahead of ADP, I recommend doing so in standalone tournaments rather than Best Ball Mania for now. That way, you know that you’re getting the best price available in that tournament. For Best Ball Mania, you may want to file some of these away in the back of your mind to utilize more heavily at the end of draft season.

Thinking Like a DFS Player

Correlation and Leverage

If you joined Thinking About Thinking primarily for the dynasty content and are new to tournament best ball, I suggest starting with a two-part series I wrote two years ago applying DFS principles to Best Ball Tournaments. Most of the general principles I outlined in those articles still hold up.

• Lessons to Learn From DFS

• Lessons to (Un)Learn From DFS

The primary reason why DFS and Best Ball tournaments are linked is because the final weeks of best ball tournaments are effectively DFS tournaments.

In Best Ball Mania IV, your first fourteen weeks more closely resemble a typical seasonal fantasy league, albeit in best ball form. The top-two scoring teams advance to the playoff rounds in which only one team advances out of a 16 person group in each of Week 15 and Week 16: this is effectively a (very) small field DFS tournament.

The final week is a 441 person show down with the prize structure heavily weighted to the top.

Therefore, as the tournament progresses from the regular season to the ‘playoffs’ to the finals, you are pushed towards maximizing for increasingly higher percentile outcomes, over decreasingly large sample sizes. As that occurs, you become less able to gain an edge through superior median projections, and more reliant on ceiling outcomes; especially correlated ceiling outcomes.

I explain correlation and leverage in much greater detail in both the linked articles above as well as this piece from my best ball guide last year.

The ‘TLDR’ version is that correlation = a reduction in the number of correct assumptions we have to make in order to reach a ceiling outcome in our lineup. Leverage means positioning our lineup to directly benefit from a potential failure in our opponents’ lineup.

These two concepts often work together, and against one another.

As best ball tournaments become increasingly popular, more players are focusing on correlation: both by stacking teammates together, and by stacking opposing players with one another in the same Week 17 games. While in a vacuum this is sharp play, it also creates opportunities for us to exploit the predictability of our opponents.

Leverage in DFS

In DFS, we can often predict our opponents’ lineups based on the salary of each player. At a basic level, we can view projections and presume that the best projected players per dollar will be highest owned that week. Beyond that, we can intuit how teams will have to construct their lineups based on the alignment of those best projected players with popular stacks.

For example, if Najee Harris were to suffer an injury, Jaylen Warren would likely be a highly-owned player the following week. This would be doubly true among teams executing a high-priced game stack who need to save salary at the running back position. For instance, teams stacking Patrick Mahomes with Travis Kelce will be especially interested in playing Jaylen Warren.

Therefore, I could generate *leverage* by playing a lineup stacking Patrick Mahomes with say, Kadarius Toney, and playing Pat Friermuth at Tight End. In this lineup, if Friermuth scores two touchdowns, not only does that increase the odds he winds up a superior play to Travis Kelce, but he is taking two scores directly away from the Jaylen Warren teams.

Kapeesh? Kapeesh.