No idea if anyone else plays best ball on Underdog, but would love to get a thread going if there are any other sickos out there drafting teams right now to talk builds, strategy, and whatnot.

They just opened up a really cool tournament called Weekly Winners where you can draft a season-long team, but winners are determined weekly, as the name implies, rather than at an end-of-season playoff/tournament style.

In, playing best ball for the first time this year after having some winnings left over from last football season on Underdog. (The gorilla marketing on The Fantasy Footballers definitely influenced as well.)

Currently in my 4th draft. So far I'm treating it like mock drafts and just kind of seeing what sticks. Going WR heavy early in this one with AJ Brown and CeeDee.

I've also tried to stackQB/WR or TE in every draft.

Yeah, stacks are critical to take advantage of spike weeks.

QBs also seem to be going earlier than ever on here which makes sense given how impactful stud QBs can be. I really like the value on Justin Fields right now...I think he will be in the same range as Allen, Burrow, Hurts, but his ADP is a few rounds after each of those guys.

Check out the Weekly Winners tournament, I think it is a really cool concept and gives you more opportunities at making money.

So this isn't Underdog, but rather DraftKings, as they have a promo that ends in a couple of days that your first entry in their $10 Best Ball Millionaire competition (I don't know the exact name), you get back 10 DK dollars, so I basically took a freeroll.

I ended up drafting 10th overall out of 12 and here is the team I ended up with (20 total roster slots, DraftKings full PPR scoring, start QB/RB/RB/WR/WR/WR/TE/Flex).

QB:
Tua Tagovailoa (7, 82)
Anthony Richardson (8, 87)
Sam Howell (14, 159)
Gardiner Minshew (20, 231)

RB:
Jahmyr Gibbs (4, 39)
Alexander Mattison (5, 58)
Cam Akers (6, 63)
Devon Achane (10, 111)
Elijah Mitchell (11, 130)
Cordarrelle Patterson (16, 183)

WR:
CeeDee Lamb (1, 10)
Garrett Wilson (2, 15)
Calvin Ridley (3, 34)
Odell Beckham Jr. (9, 106)
Marvin Mims Jr. (15, 178)
Rashid Shaheed (17, 202)
Josh Downs (19, 226)

TE:
Gerald Everett (12, 135)
Sam LaPorta (13, 154)
Jelani Woods (18, 207)

Basically, I drafted CeeDee and Wilson at the Round 1,2 turn with the plan to stack with Dak and Rodgers in the mid-rounds. Ended up getting sniped on both QBs. Dak was ADP 91, I targeted him at 82, and he went 78. And the team that took him had just taken Lawrence the round before!

At that point, I panicked. I figured 82 was way too early to get Rodgers, so I went with Tua, even though I wasn't able to get either Dolphins receiver earlier. At pick 87, I didn't see any players I liked at that slot, so I ended up reaching for Richardson, which I wasn't planning to do (At the end of the draft, I ended up creating a Colts "stack" by taking TE Jelani Woods and their 3rd round pick WR Josh Downs, who profiles as a slot receiver. I also took Minshew with my last pick in the event Tua gets hurt and Richardson gets benched.). I was planning on taking Rodgers, with an ADP of 111, at 106, which meant I would have gone QB in three straight rounds, but he ended up being picked at 100.

I like my RBs and WRs and figure either this team is going to be a unicorn and advance out of my 12 team group or is going to finish dead last. Either way, I don't think I'll be doing any more Best Ball drafts. I'll stick with regular DFS and my two season-long redraft leagues once the season starts.

I have had a bunch of teams on Underdog that have had that CD/GWill start. I think both guys have the overall WR1 within their range of outcomes and should be solid WR1s (barring injuries).

It is so frustrating when a stack you are targetting gets sniped...it always seems to be a guy that already has a QB and doesn't have any sort of correlation on their team too lol if AR15 hits, I think this team will be really good. I like the late-round pickup of Jelani Woods too. His potential is pretty intriguing to me, especially stacked with AR.

How does DFS work on DraftKings? Is it still all building a roster through an imaginary salary cap or do they have drafts now?

I believe DK does have snake draft DFS contests available, but I have never tried them. All the big tournaments (and most of the small ones, too) are for their salary cap contests.

One thing I learned from this draft, and has already been mentioned in the thread, is how early the QBs are being drafted. It will be interesting to see if this trend spills over from best ball into season long drafts this year. I know that best ball drafts are a little different, but if I drafted 10th in my PPR redraft league and got 3 WRs and 3 RBs in my first 6 picks and still got Tua as my QB1, I would be ecstatic!

Really looking forward to the upcoming NFL season. Last year was my first year playing DFS. I started with $1,000 on DK. After the last NFL and NBA seasons, I have about $620 left. So I'm not profitable yet in DFS, but I haven't had to rebuy either.

I've learned a lot about DFS strategy over the last year and hopefully this year I can get back over my initial buyin and perhaps start to play more than just small stakes contests. Just 3 weeks until the Hall of Fame game and 8 weeks until the Week 1 TNF kickoff!

You should check out DFS on Underdog. They have six-man drafts for daily/weekly DFS tournaments that range from $5-100 buy-ins that have pretty good returns.

It has been a long time since I played DK/FanDuel, but those DFS tournaments used to frustrate me so much because it seemed like teams that won often times had some random scrub in that caught a touchdown...it felt like there was a bit more guesswork and luck involved when it came to make the last selection with your salary cap money.

I much prefer the draft style tournaments, but obviously to each their own. UD is an awesome platform!

Starting around this time of year, I'll do a $3 12 man draft at lunch. Also there has been a big push on people drafting while doing some type of cardio activity which I think is pretty cool.

2022 results -- 28 total drafts, $84 total entries, $112 season winnings

Best ball is all about finishing first in your league. You get nothing for finishing 4th or 5th, and even finishing 3rd is a minimum outcome. You have to take some chances and hard stances to get optimal outcomes. For me last year, it was Jalen Hurts and Ken Walker, and and I got lucky on some round 13-18 round picks like a lot of Zay Jones.

Some names I like right now based on their current ADP -- I think Trevor Lawerence is incredible value. I love the potential of the Jags offense. AR is also a great option if he is going to start 17 games for Indy. Team may not be good, but he'll put up stats. At RB Miles Sanders and Dameon Pierce are great values for their draft position. I tend to draft a little more zero RB so I love to snag them later. WRs have been pushed up this year so you almost have to grab them early, but I like where Mike Evans is going and think George Pickens could make a big jump. If I'm not getting Kelce/Andrews early, I just grab three names in the later rounds.

I used to be a heavy DFS player as well. My best DFS story is over a summer I accumulated a lot of Milly Maker tickets from playing MLB DFS. Go into week 1 and have like 30ish teams. This was back when the Milly Maker was Sunday + MNF. One of my teams, a Chargers/Bengals stack, hits. My last player is Dez Bryant on SNF against the Giants. He does fine, but not a great Dez game. Even went out of the game injured a couple times. He scores like 14 points total or something. I wake up Monday morning and my team is in the Top 10. I'm winning, at the time, what I consider to be life changing money. Except -- there is still MNF to go and I have no PMR. That night is Eagles/Falcons. Julio explodes in that game -- scores something like 40-50 DK points. I go from Top 10 to somewhere in the 500s. I still come out with like $1000 or something, but nothing like the $50-100K I was winning at the start of Monday morning. It was torture watching that MNF game.

Aside from that the most success I've had in DFS was playing college football DFS. A few years back I finished 2nd in one of the major tournaments using a.....Longhorn/WVU stack. Now I'm in Ohio and can't even register for college football DFS (unless the rules have changed this year but don't think so, sadly).

My personnel take on NFL DFS is its become close to a solved game thanks to Establish the Run....obviously the variance will never mean its solved but so many more similar LUs now than 8-10 years ago when there was a true edge. I think think you could be profitable playing H2H or 50/50 anymore...you have to be close to a straight tournament player.

Yeah, I just play DFS tournaments for entertainment. I do watch some of the free ETR and Stokastic content on YouTube, but I don't pay for projection data like the pro players do.

I have a friend I used to work with who is big into DFS. He lives in a rural part of the country and does not have close access to a poker room so he plays DFS to get his gaming fix. A couple of years ago he entered a couple of lineups into the DK Milly Maker late in the season and solo shipped it. I think it was a week after Lamar Jackson got hurt and he stacked Tyler Huntley and Mark Andrews with a DeVante Adams bring back in a Ravens/Packers game that ended up being an overtime shootout.

Anyone play around with the new Eliminator format? Did one draft yesterday, think its really interesting. My take on it so far is you really want one of the top QBs (Mahomes, Hurts, Allen). Picks 1, 2, and 3 overall with the round 2-3 turn are pretty sweet. If not, then you should probably draft 3 QBs. Skinny stacks only (QB + 1 WR), and bye weeks become super important.

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So this isn't Underdog, but rather DraftKings, as they have a promo that ends in a couple of days that your first entry in their $10 Best Ball Millionaire competition (I don't know the exact name), you get back 10 DK dollars, so I basically took a freeroll.

I ended up drafting 10th overall out of 12 and here is the team I ended up with (20 total roster slots, DraftKings full PPR scoring, start QB/RB/RB/WR/WR/WR/TE/Flex).

QB:
Tua Tagovailoa (7, 82)
Anthony Richardson (8, 87)
Sam Howell (14, 159)
Gardiner Minshew (20, 231)

RB:
Jahmyr Gibbs (4, 39)
Alexander Mattison (5, 58)
Cam Akers (6, 63)
Devon Achane (10, 111)
Elijah Mitchell (11, 130)
Cordarrelle Patterson (16, 183)

WR:
CeeDee Lamb (1, 10)
Garrett Wilson (2, 15)
Calvin Ridley (3, 34)
Odell Beckham Jr. (9, 106)
Marvin Mims Jr. (15, 178)
Rashid Shaheed (17, 202)
Josh Downs (19, 226)

TE:
Gerald Everett (12, 135)
Sam LaPorta (13, 154)
Jelani Woods (18, 207)

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Well, somehow this team of misfit toys actually finished 2nd in my group and I advanced to Playoff Round 1. In this week's group of 12 teams, only 1 advances to next week, so I have very slim hopes of making it all the way to the final week that has a $1MM first place prize, but all teams that made it this far are guaranteed $15 so at least my 1 Best Ball team this year is profitable.

A couple of interesting notes from my season:

• I had only one weekly first place finish this year, but it was the highest scoring week in my group over the season and I only had a couple of weekly finishes below 7th place, so I had fairly consistent scoring.
• Drafting 4 QBs was probably not optimal, but it worked out with this team given the injury to Richardson (it helps that DK has 2 more roster spots than Underdog). Surprisingly, Sam Howell had the most weeks in my optimal lineup with 6, followed by Tua with 4, Minshew with 3, and Richardson with 1.
• I punted TE and was very fortunate to have drafted Sam LaPorta, who was my optimal TE in most weeks.
• Only 3 of my 20 draft picks never appeared in my weekly optimal lineup: Jelani Woods (who never got off IR), Eli Mitchell (CMC was healthy all year), and Cordarrelle Patterson (Bijan and Allgeier ran the ATL backfield).

I'd be a little more optimistic about this week, but my RB room is in shambles. Akers is out for the year and Mattison is out this week, leaving me with Gibbs, Achane (questionable), and the aforementioned Mitchell and Patterson. At least I can hold the millionaire dreams for a couple more days.

Good luck to all of your Best Ball teams in the playoffs!