
Your weekly guide to Saturday night’s Showdown slate on DraftKings. Ryan Clifford breaks down the top options at CAPT & FLEX, optimal stacking rules, and all of the slate-specific strategy you’ll need to get yourself atop the leaderboards!
I finally got around to recording my entire process for building MME Showdown lineups with the Elite Fantasy optimizer, which is now posted on the website under the main optimizer tutorials section. Here it is: Optimizer Tutorial for DK Showdown.
Setting Up the Optimizer
You’ll want to jump into our optimizer, which has been preloaded with our projections for the entire week, and then you can set up your initial groups:
- At least 1 QB (Jackson CAPT, Jackson, Allen CAPT, Allen)
- At most 1 K (Tucker, Bass)
- At most 1 DST (Ravens, Bills)
- In the position stacks tab, stack CAPT with at least 1 QB/RB/WR/TE/K/DST from the same team
Building the Punt Pool
Next up, we need to put our “punts” into the player pool, as we’ll be building a group with them.
You must pay attention to the inactive list that is announced 60-90 minutes before kickoff. Make sure none of these guys are on that list. Some of them will probably be, and you’ll need to adjust your pool at that point.
Here are the punts you should add to your player pool at this point.
Ravens: Justice Hill (RB), Patrick Ricard (RB), Dez Bryant (WR), Eric Tomlinson (TE)
Bills: T.J. Yeldon (RB), Antonio Williams (RB), Isaiah McKenzie (WR), Lee Smith (TE), Reggie Gilliam (TE)
CAPT Pool
Most of my CAPT exposure in this game will lie with the quarterbacks. With Tre White likely on Marquise Brown, I’m not seeing much of a passing attack for the Ravens tonight. Instead, I think it will be Lamar Jackson and the running backs that run, run, and run some more. Of course we have a split backfield with J.K. Dobbins and Gus Edwards, so I won’t be using either of them in my CAPT spots.
For the Bills, we’ll also see multiple running backs on the field, so Josh Allen is the only rusher I feel that I need exposure to.
Stefon Diggs and Cole Beasley are going to need to be in there, even in what is a tough matchup against a good Ravens secondary.
For the Ravens, it’s Marquise Brown and Mark Andrews in the passing game, but I won’t do any more than match the field with those two at CAPT.
Here’s a look at my approximate exposures at CAPT:
- Lamar Jackson 30%
- Josh Allen 20%
- Stefon Diggs 20%
- Marquise Brown 10%
- Mark Andrews 10%
- Cole Beasley 10%
CAPT Groups
Lamar Jackson
Set Jackson CAPT as key player. Use between 1-2 Baltimore WR/TE when key player is used.
Josh Allen
Set Allen CAPT as key player. Use between 1-3 Buffalo WR/TE when key player is used.
Marquise Brown/Mark Andrews
Set Brown CAPT and Andrews CAPT as key players. Use Lamar Jackson (QB) when at least one of the key players is used.
Stefon Diggs/Cole Beasley
Set Diggs CAPT and Beasley CAPT as key players. Use Josh Allen (QB) when at least one of the key players is used.
Filling the FLEX Pool
The last step is to fill in the FLEX pool with all of the remaining players that will appear. Again, you may need to adjust when inactives are released, but for now, you should have 32 total players in your pool. (UPDATE: Hodge is on the COVID list, McFarland is inactive…neither will play)
CAPT (6): Jackson, Brown, Andrews, Allen, Diggs, Beasley
QB (2): Jackson, Allen
RB (7): Dobbins, Edwards, Hill, Ricard, Singletary, Yeldon, Williams
WR (9): M. Brown, Snead, Boykin, Bryant, Diggs, Beasley, J. Brown, Davis, McKenzie
TE (5): Andrews, Tomlinson, Knox, Smith, Gilliam
K (2): Tucker, Bass
DST (2): Ravens, Bills
Optimizer Settings
We’re ready to build! Head back into “Advanced Options” and use the following settings:
- 1-2 unique players
- $48,900 maximum salary
- max 3 offensive players vs. defense
- 15% randomness – MAKE SURE TO TURN ON & CLICK ON “CHANGE ALL PLAYERS” (see image below)
- 0.1 minimum projection included in calculation

Correlations
Notable Positive Correlations
Lamar Jackson – Mark Andrews 0.32
Josh Allen – Stefon Diggs 0.29
Lamar Jackson – Marquise Brown 0.27
Josh Allen – John Brown 0.25
Josh Allen – Gabriel Davis 0.23
Josh Allen – Cole Beasley 0.22
Lamar Jackson – Willie Snead 0.20
Lamar Jackson – Dez Bryant 0.18
Josh Allen – Dawson Knox 0.15
Tyler Bass – Bills DST 0.15
Notable Negative Correlations
Lamar Jackson – Bills DST -0.49
Justin Tucker – Bills DST -0.25
Gus Edwards – Bills DST -0.23
J.K. Dobbins – Bills DST -0.20
Ravens DST – Josh Allen -0.18
Mark Andrews – Bills DST -0.12
Justin Tucker – Devin Singletary -0.12
Justin Tucker – Josh Allen -0.12
Justin Tucker – Tyler Bass -0.11
Ravens DST – Devin Singletary -0.10
Build!
We’re ready to go. Click on “Calculate 50 Lineups” (or less depending on how many you are building) and your first 50 lineups will be built. If you’re like me, and you’re building more than that, click that same button again and spit out 50 more. With the randomness set to 15% and 3 unique players, you shouldn’t get too many duplicate lineups.
When you have your second set of 50 lineups, click on “select lineups” and “move 50 selected” from the drop down menu, and it will move all of the non-duplicated lineups over to your first batch. Keep repeating the process until you have your desired number of lineups.
Click on “export lineups”, make sure to select to proper slate, and your lineups are ready to upload into DK!
Conclusion
Remember to keep an eye on inactives, I’ll be in chat once they’re out.
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