Best Ball Strategy
Best ball is a format that has grown exponentially over the last couple of years since Underdog launched their BBM (Best Ball Millionaire) contest in 2020. It’s a format where you draft your team and that’s it. There are no weekly waivers, no trades, no setting your lineup. The site will automatically set your best possible lineup each week based on how your players perform. Strategy and optimal roster construction is critical in order to give your team the best chance of advancing to the best ball playoffs. Below we will discuss site-specific strategies for Underdog and DraftKings, two of the biggest sites for best ball tournaments that we have rankings for.
Underdog Best Ball (Half-PPR):
The format for Underdog is an 18-round draft with you and 11 other teams, ½ PPR scoring with no bonuses. You will draft your roster and compete against the other 11 teams for the first 14 weeks of the season. Depending on the contest, there will also be a regular season prize pool (BBM4 has this). After that, the top two teams in each group will advance to a playoff group where you have to finish at the top to advance to the next week. The championship round is in week 17 and that’s where all of the biggest prizes are. The starting lineup on Underdog is 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, and 1 Flex each week.
DraftKings Best Ball (Full-PPR):
The format for DraftKings is a 20-round draft with you and 11 other teams. DraftKings uses standard DK PPR scoring rules that you normally see when playing DFS. This includes 100-yard rushing and receiving bonuses and 300-yard passing bonuses for QBs. Having 20 rounds will allow you to feel more comfortable when looking at your positional allocation, but the last few rounds the talent is scarce at certain positions. There’s an edge we will discuss below about which positions to target in these late rounds on DraftKings.
General Strategy:
How many of each position should you draft largely depends on what kind of draft capital you spend at that position and how it correlates with the rest of your team. Below is a rough guideline for what we would recommend, whether you’re on Underdog or DraftKings:
QB: 2-3 (if drafting a stud QB, you really only want 2)
RB: 4-7
WR: 7-9
TE: 2-4 (4 late TEs has had a solid advance rate in the past, but 3 is typically optimal)
Making sure your team is structured correctly right off the bat usually gives you an edge over 3-4 of the teams in your 12 person group. For example, there’s often people who don’t know what they are doing and will draft way too many of one position. For example, if a team ends up with 9 RBs and only 4 WRs, it’s basically dead before the season starts. You need to fill 3 WR positions each week so you have to account for some volatility when drafting. The difference between Underdog and DK is that we’ve noticed Underdog drafters are very wide receiver hungry, pushing all WRs up the board in ADP. The DraftKings users are more casual, leaving a lot more WR value later in drafts. With DraftKings being full PPR and having a 100-yard bonus, you could crush the rest of your draft room by taking early WRs. The 300-yard passing bonus also adds a little value to the traditional pocket passing QBs.
Another common mistake we see people make is planning for downside. If you draft Jalen Hurts in the 2nd or 3rd round, it doesn’t make sense for you to invest another high pick in a QB since you can only ever use one in your starting lineup. You could argue that you’d get a top QB score each week if you take two studs, but your team will likely be getting crushed at other positions. We want to draft as if we are right, so once we invest in a top QB we want to continue drafting as if that pick is the correct one and his score will be usable almost every week. After all, we are playing to win 1st place in these contests and not just cash for a small prize.
Stacking is another important aspect of best ball that should be considered. Correlating a quarterback with 2-3 of his pass catchers is helpful because it lessens the amount of things you need to get right in order to have the best possible outcome for your team. If you just have a random assortment of players, you will need to hit a series of individual player bets in order for your team to advance. However, if you draft Justin Herbert and Justin Herbert has a huge year, it’s likely that multiple Chargers will also out-perform their ADP.
One question people often ask is how many players should you take from a stack? Our stance would be that it varies on the price of the stack. Last season, a stack of Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, Devonta Smith, and Goedert wasn’t too expensive – Brown was a late 2nd rounder, Hurts went around the 7th, and Smith/Goedert were just after that. This year, in order to get all of them you would have to use your first 3 picks on Brown, Hurts, and Devonta Smith. You’d then have to take Goedert at the 6/7 turn. While this offense is projected to be one of the best and could very well smash, you are paying top dollar for that stack. Finding cheaper/undervalued stacks like last year’s Eagles will be the key to crushing 2023 best ball leagues.
Week 17 correlation was another aspect that entered the best ball world last year. The championship round for best ball leagues on Underdog and DraftKings is Week 17. If you’re in the finals, most teams likely have a lot of similar players on them. One way to try to stand out even more is to create mini-correlations with your stacks. For example, if you have Justin Herbert, Austin Ekeler, and Keenan Allen, you can consider drafting Jerry Jeudy and Greg Dulcich. If that game between the Broncos and Chargers shoots out in Week 17, this stack could go off. The only downside to doing this is that the most common players to be paired with a Chargers stack will probably be Broncos players, because quite a few people are trying to correlate their Week 17 stacks these days. Last season, the BBM3 winning team had Tom Brady, Chris Godwin, and D.J. Moore, who all had big performances in the Week 17 game between the Panthers and Buccaneers. This happened to be a low owned mini-stack that helped separate the winning team in the finals. This strategy is more viable in large field contests like millionaire makers where the championship week has a lot of people. For smaller contests, like the $100k Hot Route on DraftKings, the final week only has 10 seats. In a contest like that, there is no need to worry about correlating Week 17.
When using our rankings to draft, it’s important to factor in everything mentioned above. There might be a draft where multiple running backs fell way past ADP and you have 4 great RBs in your top 100 picks. On a team like that, at some point in the draft you might need to take a WR ranked lower in our rankings than a higher ranked RB. If you are trying to stack, you might need to take someone slightly ahead of where we have them ranked to make sure you secure your stack. For example, if you have a Chargers stack with Justin Herbert in Underdog’s Best Ball Mania contest, it might make sense to take Greg Dulcich ahead of Cole Kmet for Week 17 correlation even if the rankings have Kmet slightly ahead. This is just a minor example, but the key point is to use our rankings as a guideline while focusing on the context of the specific team you’re drafting.
Something to keep in mind if you are drafting best ball teams in July is that while you may end up with some great closing line value (meaning the ADP of your players rises throughout the summer), you have a higher chance of dead roster spots due to injuries or players not making rosters. One way to try to avoid that is how you structure your rosters. As of the time of this post, there are several starting tight ends and quarterbacks with ADPs in the last two rounds. Some of these tight ends are: Tyler Conklin, Hayden Hurst, Hunter Henry (likely will play more snaps at traditional TE than Mike Gesicki but both are viable picks), Jake Ferguson, Luke Musgrave, Noah Fant, Jelani Woods, Trey McBride, Cade Otton. A few of the quarterbacks that go very late in drafts are: Mac Jones, Sam Howell, Desmond Ridder, Jimmy Garoppolo. We aren’t arguing that any of these guys are league winners. However, when drafting early on in the summer these players have a much higher chance of being on the field come September than RB or WR dart throws that aren’t guaranteed to make the 53 man roster. Sure, you could hit a homerun on someone like Malik Davis as the RB2 in Dallas if nobody else signs there, but you could also end up taking a 0 every week with him. As of now, there are still a lot of veteran free agent running backs (Fournette, Elliott, Hunt, D Cook, Henderson) who could easily supplant players who are the current “RB2” on a roster like Malik Davis is in Dallas. If you structure your teams to need some late TEs or a late QB, you’ll have a better chance at more live roster spots (barring injuries) when the season starts.