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The physical act of posting your FanDuel lineup on a blog is counter intuitive when you think about it. The whole strategy of winning a large GPP tourney in DFS is to pick a UNIQUE lineup that hits it out of the park.
If you're new to DFS, there's different strategies for cash games vs. tournaments. In cash games, the goal is to pick players that all have a high floor, and a level of consistency. Use your budget to craft a solid team from top to bottom, in hopes of minimizing risk. Large tournaments, or GPP's, the strategy is the opposite. You intentionally need to be a contrarian, and take risk/reward to a whole new level. Now with that being said, every winning lineup will have it's fair share of "chalk" players. Chalk is the much cooler way of saying "no brainer" picks, but this directly conflicts with being a contrarian. By definition, a chalk pick cannot also be contrarian. That is the true puzzle; combining chalk plays with a few contrarian plays that hit big AND have low ownership percentages. My lineup this week is a combination of chalk plays and contrarian plays. Enjoy, and hopefully we win together!
Matthew Stafford, QB, DET, $6900
HOLY CONTRARIAN. My guess is Stafford's ownership is under 2% on Sunday. He's done NOTHING to warrant a selection, other than his price dropping down to backup QB territory. But, he's at home against a bad Bears secondary, coming off of an embarrassing benching last week, and still has a lot of weapons at his disposal. This could easily flop, but I have a weird hunch he goes for 300+ yards and 2-3TD's.
Adrian Peterson, RB, MIN, $8900
CHALK
Le'Veon Bell, RB, PIT, $9000
CHALK
Mike Wallace, WR, MIN, $5400
Coming off their bye week, and against the lowly secondary of the Chiefs, Wallace has WR2 upside, yet is priced as a WR4. Value pick.
Allen Robinson, WR, JAX, $6700
Close to chalk. Not that he's an elite WR yet, or that you can fully trust his QB, but his price hasn't risen proportionately to his production. ARob will be highly owned, but his price still warrants a selection with his massive upside.
Calvin Johnson, WR, DET, $8200
If you go contrarian at QB, you must follow through with the stack! Megatron looks more human than Decepticon this year, and is still priced as a WR1. Too expensive and inconsistent "sometimes" means a great play in a GPP. Obviously I'm putting too much faith in the Lions offense, but if there were ever a week for them to go kaboom....
Greg Olsen, TE, CAR, $6300
This is a unique one; call it a chalky contrarian play. We all know Olsen is a weekly top 3 TE, but we also have been conditioned to believe that the Seahawk defense is impenetrable down the seams. Au contraire mon frere; Seattle has allowed 4 TDs to TEs in five games so far this season, including a massive game to Tyler Eiffert last week. I don't think he'll be heavily owned due to price and matchup, and he's still Cam's first/second/and third option in the passing game.
Robbie Gould, K, CHI, $4500
A minimum priced kicker averaging 9.6 points/game indoors against s a struggling defense? Yes please.
Tennessee Titans DST, $4100
I admittedly have no idea how Miami will come out of their bye week under Dan "Robocop" Campbell as their new head coach. But the Titans easily have top 12 upside at home verse the Dolphins, and are the second cheapest DST on FanDuel this week.