If you are the guy that makes poor lineup decisions for the contest types you are playing, or even worse, the guy that consistently does that and then finds other reasons/people to blame for your consistent losses, this article is for you. You will probably be too stubborn to read it or believe it, but it was born from the Discord tears of your fallen lineups. DraftKings is not betting. It doesn't matter who you think wins a fight, at least not at first. DraftKings has been optimized by the people that have been perfecting strategies for over ten years to be played a particular way based on the contests you are playing. If you are not playing that way, you are donating your money more often than not.

Below you will find the most owned lineup you could possibly afford on the UFC Singapore 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. This week there may have been a few different combinations to get to the same rough area within a few ownership points of each other, so if the chalkiest lineup posted below is off by an ownership point or two – don’t be that guy. Also there may be a heavier chalk lineup with a more expensive dog than Chan Sung Jung, but I couldn’t not stack that main event, despite Chan’s poor ownership projection. 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 Singapore 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 351.73 points. This number sounds incredibly low because it is. This week saw numerous finishes, and very few of them came from popular fighters. Most of the chalk underperformed this week, but we don’t care about that because everyone in cash ate those poor performances with you as long as you moved off the fighters with low floors. Let’s take a look at where that could have been.

I am going to share some DM’s from one of the members that reads this article, and add a few references from my DraftKings Chalkboard article that comes out every wednesday. The purpose for sharing these things is just to demonstrate that I am not just cherry picking outcomes here, and that the changes I will be making to that lineup are well within the scope of my pre-fight analysis.

So as you can see in that DM, I was in favor of stacking that main event despite it not hitting my typical 20% ownership baseline for fighter consideration. The first reason for that is because I love to have insurance, and we almost needed it as Max was wobbling a few times in the first round. The second reason is due to the extremely low salary point for Chan Sung Jung at only $6500, so it was needed to open things up in my opinion. Next we need to identify the fighters that didn’t have a safe floor. You can see in this message that I agreed with the member that Spann and Njokuani needed to be replaced.

After you remove the fighters with very concerning floors, competing fighters to those already in our lineup, and anyone under that 20% ownership threshold that I generally like to stay above, you are left with this list.

As much as I would love to say that I would have had the balls to roster JJ Aldrich in cash at $9400 in cash once her ownership came in projected over 20% (evidenced by my DraftKings Chalkboard article) it would be an outright lie. When it comes to fighters priced over $9000 I usually like to be closer to, or over, 30% projected ownership. It was my opinion after looking at the ownership and considering the floor of each available fighter that Erin Blanchfield and Talia Santos was going to be an important fight for lineup construction in these contests. In hindsight there were better fights but this was the one I was leaning towards. Here you can see that in the message.

So with that in mind. Let’s take a look at where a reasonable cash lineup could have gone using Erin Blanchfied and sticking to our key indicators for the remaining roster spot. I believe this would have been a pretty reasonable place to end up based on the information above.

UIFC Singapore Reasonable Cash Lineup

I am fairly confident based on what I have seen so far today that this score of 420.55 would have brought back cash in virtually every single-entry cash contest on the planet. I would encourage you to check yours and see. At this point we should be due for a loss, as this system isn’t perfect by any means, but assuming that number would have cashed for you we have had four weeks in a row now using this system where you would have had to make some pretty poor decisions not to cash just using ownership and avoiding fighters that could potentially get smoked.

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. For me this was removing Max Holloway and leaving Chan Sung Jung. I wrote in the Chalk Board article that I thought Max would get a finish around round 3 or 4, and that it would limit his scoring because he couldn’t hit his normal volume. In hindsight he was still a better play than Rinya Nakamura, but I said what I said. Second, as I stated above and in the DM, I was under the impression that the Erin and Talia fight would be the swing fight, so I will be swinging to Talia here to open up my tournament lineup at the top of the 8k range. Let’s take a look at what that would potentially look like;

UFC Singapore SE Lineup

As you can see, I left one spot blank. For me, I would have used Ryan Spann and I would have blown my tournament hopes and dreams with that selection. Below I have included a list of available fighters for that last spot. You would have had about a 60% chance of picking a fighter there that would have brought back some money in most small-field single-entry contests. So let’s take a look at what the lineup possibilities would have looked like.

UFC Singapore SE Pivots

Assuming you picked one of the three winners from that list, would this have hit at least minimum cash in your small-field single-entry tournament? I think yes, but then you could have also picked Spann like me and lost for sure. That is why your cash games are so very important, to keep you going in between tournament come ups. I feel like a broken record in this article repeating that so often, but cash NEEDS to be a part of your process for DraftKings if you are not a weekly mass multiple-entry player.

FINAL THOUGHT

For my final thought this week I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to shout out a user in the We Want Picks Discord by the name of Brain K. Brian went light this week because of the unsure feeling that most had regarding this slate, but still managed to bring back a beautiful return on his investment by playing small-field tournaments and cash games. Your entries should look similar to this each week if you are playing this style. Bravo to Brian for what I would consider to be near perfect contest selection, and for having great lineups that did exactly what he needed them to do. My only gripe here is that there should be more cash entries than single entry tournament plays for proper bankroll management. I think this slate may have scared him away from that though, as many people didn't love the layout of the slate.

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.

Remember – ownership matters everywhere in DraftKings in one way or another.