## Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy: Stacking

As I mentioned in the previous post, stacking is possibly the most common strategy used in MLB DFS Tournament contests. Perhaps a more accurate statement is that it is very common in winning Tournament lineups. If you want to win a large Tournament, your best bet is to employ this strategy.

It works.

At this point, you’re probably asking the first question most of us asked in our lives: why? Good question, let’s talk about it. There are several reasons why stacking can give you an advantage, but two main reasons carry more weight than the others.

One thing stacking allows you to do is select multiple batters that are going to be facing off against a bad pitcher. Bad pitchers give up more hits and runs, which results in more fantasy points. It should be obvious why this is a good reason to consider stacking. But it goes even further than that.

If you consider yourself a baseball fan and watch games often, think about what happens when a pitcher performs poorly. If a pitcher starts the game by giving up a lot of hits and runs in the first few innings, his pitch count gets too high early in the game. This usually leads to that team going to the bullpen to use relief pitchers a couple innings before they intended. On top of that, if they are already down by several runs, they probably won’t be using their best relievers.

## Why is this important?

If you stacked 4 players in your lineup going against the starting pitcher that performed poorly, gave up a lot of runs, and got replaced early, your lineup is likely to see two main benefits.

1. The players in your lineup were likely a part of the fun against that starting pitcher. This means that they likely racked up a few hits, RBI, runs, or stolen bases just in their first 2 – 3 plate appearances. So, you already have a good chunk of fantasy points with a lot of game left to be played.
2. When a team is down by several runs early and has to replace their starter in the 3rd or 4th inning, they usually don’t put in their best bullpen pitchers. If this is the case, your players that you stacked go from seeing a bad starting pitcher to bad relieving pitchers. Bad relievers are typically even worse than bad starters. So, you get even more opportunity for high fantasy scores in the late innings. It really snowballs in your favor.

## What’s Next?

In the next post, we’ll talk about the other big reason why stacking is a good strategy. Then we’ll touch on some of the other reasons as well.

If you want to play along and enter some FanDuel lineups of your own, you can use my FanDuel referral link here to get a deposit bonus. You should just need to deposit at least $15 within 30 days of signing up, and you’ll get a$15 bonus added to your account if you use that link.

## Common Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy

Now that we have discussed the basics about how FanDuel, DraftKings, and daily fantasy baseball works, we can start talking about the strategies we will want to use to build lineups. A quick Google search for “MLB DFS Strategy” yields tons of common strategies used by players across the inter-webs. These strategies can range from beginner to advanced. Let’s start with a general overview of some of the most common strategies in this article. I’ll come back and link to more detailed breakdowns as we deep dive into some of these in future posts.

## Stacking

This is possibly the most common DSF strategy in baseball contests. Stacking just means that you select multiple players from the same team, usually 3 or 4. There are a few reasons why this strategy makes sense. I found many articles that prove these ideas mathematically. If you want to read more about that, you can check out some of them here and here. I’ll summarize the main takeaways, but since others have already done the math to prove it, I won’t bother with that here. I just want to talk about general strategy for now.

• If you choose several players from the same team, it allows you to have several players going against a specific bad pitcher. Bad pitchers give up more fantasy points to batters, so we can capitalize on this more by picking 4 players against that bad pitcher instead of just 1.
• There is a correlation between fantasy performances of players on the same team. Usually players on the same team will do better than average together or worse than average together. This goes back to the “boom or bust” strategy we talked about earlier.
• Stacking allows you to choose multiple players in other advantageous positions. This can allow you to capitalize more on things like hitter’s parks, or good weather.

## Batting Order

A good general rule of thumb: pick players closer to the top of the batting order. You can read more about the math behind this here, but the logic is simple. Players batting at the top of the order get more at bats. Extra at bats equals extra opportunities to score fantasy points, which may lead to actually scoring more fantasy points.

## Weather

Most importantly, it’s probably a good idea to avoid players in games with a chance of rain. If you have a player in a game that gets postponed due to rain, that player gets 0 points. It’s nearly impossible to win a large tournament with any zeros in your lineup.

On top of that, players playing in warm or hot games are more likely to score more points than players in cold games. The ball flies a little bit farther in higher temperatures, meaning home runs and extra base hits are going to be a little bit more likely. This translates to more runs scored in MLB games, and more fantasy points for players in that game.

## What’s Next?

In the next several posts, we’ll start talking about these strategies in a bit more detail. More importantly, we’ll start talking about how we can set up experiments to test which variations of these strategies produce better results and win more DFS contests.

If you want to play along and enter some FanDuel lineups of your own as we conduct this investigation, you can use my FanDuel referral link here to get a deposit bonus. You should just need to deposit at least $15 within 30 days of signing up, and you’ll get a$15 bonus added to your account if you use that link.

## High Variance or Low Variance in Tournaments vs 50/50s

We now know how to calculate variance of fantasy performances of a given player, but now you’re probably thinking: why is this important?  You are asking the right questions.  It is a good one.  It all goes back to the differences between the payout structure and the number of lineups entered in the two types of contests.

Payout structure differences have a more significant impact, so let us start with that.

## Impact of Payout Structure on Desired Variance

#### Percentage of lineups entered that win

• In a paid 50/50 contest, half of all entries win money giving an entry a 50% chance to win.
• On the other hand, roughly 25% of all lineups entered in a Tournament end up winning.