UFC 292 did not let me down in the least. That card was so much fun to watch from top to bottom, with the exception of a couple fights. We saw one champion solidify themselves as the Queen of their division, and then we saw a new king emerge in the main event when Sean O’Malley dropped Aljamain Sterling on his way in just as Jacob said he would in his lock of the week video. From a DraftKings perspective it was the second week in a row where extremely heavy chalk would have won you a ton of money. Let’s explore.
Below you will find the most owned lineup you could possibly afford on the UFC 292 DraftKings slate. I calculate the total projected ownership, total salary, and the total score of the chalkiest lineup possible, and then move on to discuss where changes could have been made. Hindsight is always 20/20, but when you are simply using ownership numbers and the concept of a “safe floor” for your cash contest selections you should win more than you lose when it comes to cash.
The purpose of the DraftKings Rewind article will be to take a look back on cash lineups and single-entry tournament lineups, specifically small-field contests because they play nearly identically to cash games. By doing this I believe that it will be easier to demonstrate how experienced DraftKings players use ownership to make decisions that open the door to long-term profitability.
THE CASH LINE
Before we can jump into retrospective lineup construction for cash games, we need to know what the cash line is. For those that don’t know what I am talking about when I say “cash line,” this means the lowest score possible in your cash contests where you could have won money. In double-ups, this is the top 45% of the field, and in 50/50 it is the top 50%. You do not get a bonus for finishing near the top in these contests so the cash line is all that matters. You can look at each one of your specific contests to see what your cash line score needed to have been.
For the purposes of staying consistent, we will be using the chalkiest lineup possible as our cash line. The actual cash line will vary from contest to contest in a given week but is usually within a few points of each other in one direction or the other.
UFC 292 Chalk Lineup
As you can see, if you used the six chalkiest fighters you could possibly cram into a lineup for this weekend, you would have scored 557.28 points. Normally this lineup would have you hovering around the cash line most weeks, but once again this week had very few underdogs that won, so you probably were well above the cash line with this lineup that contains the two chalkiest underdogs. You really didn’t need to touch anything as the cash line in most contests was closer to the 450-475 neighborhood from what I saw, but that would make for a pretty dull article. Let’s carve some shit up.
As I stated last week, when the goal is long-term success, your process is everything. So let’s see where we can make changes to this lineup and if you would still be above your cash line in your contest.
A good way to build a cash lineup is to start with the most chalk-heavy lineup you can and then make educated changes based on ownership and your own intuition. From the lineup above, the most reasonable fighter to have an issue with was Andre Petroski in my opinion because while he had the high ceiling of a first round knockout or submission, he also had a pretty abysmal floor of gassing out in the second round as he has done before and being outboxed by Gm3 as he began to get tired – which is kind of what happened despite Petroski managing to get the decision.
Let’s take a look at the potential pivots that could have been made from Andre Petroski. I have eliminated the opponents of other fighters in the lineup from consideration, as well as the fighters that the WeWantPicks premium DraftKings plays advised you to stay away from, and finally anyone under 20% projected ownership. Here were the available options;
UFC 292 Petroski Pivots
Based on those options, you would have had around a 60% chance of increasing your score and a 40% chance of decreasing it. I would argue that even if you decreased it though, you would have cashed in most cash contests regardless.
SMALL-FIELD SINGLE-ENTRY
When it comes to small-field single-entry contests we would need to make two small changes to the lineup. First and foremost you would have needed to break up the main-event stack. There is only one rational way to do that, and that was to play Sean O’Malley and replace Aljamain Sterling. Now I get that in hindsight it’s easy to say that, but here is why that was the correct play. If Aljamain Sterling won that fight it would have been five rounds of backpack control time that would have exploded your cash lineups to cover your tournament entries and then some – assuming of course you practice appropriate bankroll management. So by playing Sean in your tournament lineup (hint, for these contests you don’t want a bunch of different lineups, one cash lineup, one small-field tournament lineup) you were going to receive a boost to your tournament lineups if Aljamain let down your cash entries. This style of playing on DraftKings is all about insurance. Let’s take a look at what your lineup would have looked like if you made the sharpest moves from the starting point.
UFC 292 SE Sharpest Pivots
As you can see, that lineup would have scored 669.33. Now, of course, making these great decisions from our starting point would be a rarity. So let’s take a look at what the lineup would look like if we made the worst rational decisions which would have been keeping Petroski and moving down from Sterling to Hubbard who was the loser against Holobaugh.
UFC 292 Not Great Choices SE Lineup
Would this have hit minimum cash in your small-field single-entry tournament? I think it would have been close, but most likely have missed by a bit. That is why your cash games are so very important to keep you going.
FINAL THOUGHT
Once again, three back-to-back weeks now, you should be able to see how this process can help guide your cash game and small-field single-entry lineups. There will of course be times where you make the wrong decisions, and then there will even be times when the slate just goes crazy and removes all rational players from contention. Over time you will win more than you lose starting from the chalkiest point possible and using your own knowledge of the sport or the WWP premium plays section to make subtle changes to your lineup for the contest you are entering in the cash and small-field single-entry world.
If you have any questions or are actually committed to learning to play DraftKings please feel free to message me on Twitter (X) @WebGuyWWP. I am not by any means the oracle for DraftKings advice, but I do understand these ownership numbers and how to use them well enough to help you make informed decisions rather than just throwing darts in these types of contests.
Just because this was the premise that started this series I will be repeating this at the end of each one of these articles. Ownership matters everywhere in DraftKings!
AFTER THOUGHT
Sorry, this article was done, but then I remembered another conversation from this week in the DraftKings channel of the WeWantPicks Discord server that I couldn’t help but relay to you. A member of ours suggested stacking a three-round fight. When you say that to anyone that actually understands DraftKings, you should get laughed at in all honesty. I didn’t laugh but just rather said that I would never, and then I was told, “Well, do you know (insert some random MMA DFS YouTuber)? He is stacking Natalia Silva and Andrea Lee this week for his cash games.”
That YouTuber ate paint chips as a kid, wears a helmet, and licks windows. The combined ownership for that fight was projected at 34% – Silva at 20% and Andrea Lee at 14%. If you stacked that fight, or really any three round fight you deserve to lose your money every single week until you come to grips with the fact that you don’t understand DraftKings cash games at all. Even in the rare event that a stacked three round fight scores well (see Katona and Gibson this week) it doesn’t happen often enough to ever even consider making that your play on DraftKings. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk!
