Every Sunday in the weekly fantasy chats, I get asked about my favorite plays of the week or who is my player pool that weekend for DFS.
This article series covers exactly that.
I will go through the games that I am targeting for stacking purposes as well as the players I am targeting as core plays for all formats and players for tournaments.
The idea is that this will paint a clearer picture of framing lineups.
Week 1 DFS Content:
For those new here, one of my favorite ways to play DFS from a tournament stance is small-field, single-to-five-max entry games with 5K or smaller fields.
Both sites even offer these types of games with fewer than 100 entries (albeit at a higher cost of entry) if you want to go after a really small field.
In these contests, my approach is to go with full-game stacks.
You are going to lose a lot of weeks, but if you get the game right, you gain a big advantage. Just cashing in one of these over an 18-week season can make your entire year.
When doing these, I want to aggressively build around games that have a wider range of outcomes, but with the reduced number of entries, you can also eat some chalky game stacks because we are going further in the overall game stack than what our opponents likely will.
These are the games I am circling for those tournaments in Week 1, but you can also tie these games into your stacks for larger field tournaments.
You can dig deeper into why I believe these games present some downside in the Worksheet, but we are solely playing for the upside outcome here in these games.
I will have some analysis on the player selections and game writeups, but check out the Week 1 Worksheet for a fully detailed breakdown of the players and games.
Bengals at Browns
The bull case for the Cleveland side of things is that Deshaun Watson returns to a proxy of the player he was to open his career while Kevin Stefanski adjusts his offense around what Watson does well.
In that event, we are looking at some like a Watson-Amari Cooper–David Njoku Cleveland stack, bringing it back with Joe Mixon and Ja’Marr Chase or Tee Higgins.
For the Bengals side, they present natural upside any given week, but added upside if Jim Schwartz runs his defense as aggressively as he did in the past, blitzing Joe Burrow and playing man coverage at a high rate.
From the Cincinnati angle, stacking Burrow with Chase and Higgins, bringing it back with Nick Chubb and David Njoku.
This one is pricey, and you will have to punt defense at minimum, but it can be done with cheaper plays in Week 1 on the board and discounted core plays we already covered.
You can also add someone like Elijah Moore in here as a salary saver on both sites.
