Your weekly guide to Sunday 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.
And here is tonight’s slate-specific optimizer setup (if the video won’t play, it’s likely still processing; give it a few minutes, refresh, and try again):
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 (Roethlisberger, Allen CAPT, Allen)
- At most 1 K (Boswell, Bass)
- At most 1 DST (Steelers, 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.
Steelers: Anthony McFarland (RB), Jaylen Samuels (RB), Ray-Ray McCloud (WR)
Bills: Isaiah McKenzie (WR), Tyler Kroft (TE), Lee Smith (TE)
CAPT Pool
We just saw these teams in the Showdown format on Monday night. Josh Allen remains a CAPT candidate for me despite only appearing there in the perfect lineup once since the start of 2019 (11 total appearances). Roethlisberger doesn’t have the same mobility anymore, so he is not a CAPT candidate for me tonight.
James Conner returns for the Steelers and he may be my favorite CAPT on the slate against an awful Buffalo run defense. I won’t worry about either of these Buffalo backs at CAPT. Not only do the Bills continue to operate a pass heavy playbook, but the matchup against the league’s No. 3 ranked run defense is not an appealing one for fantasy purposes.
Lots of receivers in play tonight. I still believe we want exposure to all three of the Steelers top wideouts: JuJu Smith-Schuster, Diontae Johnson, and Chase Claypool. For the Bills, it’s Stefon Diggs and Cole Beasley that interests me. Beasley was the optimal CAPT against San Francisco on Monday night…his third appearance as the perfect CAPT in six optimal lineup appearances.
I have some matchup-based interest in Eric Ebron. He isn’t one of my favorite CAPT’s, but it won’t take much to be over the field on him. The Bills are one of the league’s worst teams defending opposing tight ends.
Here’s a look at my approximate exposures at CAPT tonight:
- Josh Allen 25%
- James Conner 25%
- Stefon Diggs 12%
- Diontae Johnson 10%
- Cole Beasley 10%
- JuJu Smith Schuster 10%
- Chase Claypool 6%
- Eric Ebron 2%
CAPT Groups
Refer to the video above for detailed instructions on setting up tonight’s CAPT pools.
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 34 total players in your pool.
CAPT (8): Conner, Smith-Schuster, Johnson, Claypool, Ebron, Allen, Diggs, Beasley
QB (2): Roethlisberger, Allen
RB (6): Conner, Snell, McFarland, Samuels, Singletary, Moss
WR (9): Smith-Schuster, Johnson, Claypool, Washington, McCloud, Diggs, Beasley, Davis, McKenzie
TE (5): Ebron, McDonald, Knox, Kroft, Smith
K (2): Boswell, Bass
DST (2): Steelers, 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 Correlation
Ben Roethlisberger – JuJu Smith-Schuster 0.44
Ben Roethlisberger – Diontae Johnson 0.41
Ben Roethlisberger – Chase Claypool 0.38
Josh Allen – Stefon Diggs 0.37
Josh Allen – Gabriel Davis 0.35
Ben Roethlisberger – Eric Ebron 0.34
Josh Allen – Cole Beasley 0.34
Ben Roethlisberger – Josh Allen 0.28
Ben Roethlisberger – James Washington 0.23
Ben Roethlisberger – Vance McDonald 0.20
Ben Roethlisberger – Stefon Diggs 0.15
Josh Allen – Dawson Knox 0.15
Notable Negative Correlations
Ben Roethlisberger – Bills DST -0.36
James Conner – Bills DST -0.20
Chris Boswell – Bills DST -0.16
Josh Allen – Bills DST -0.14
JuJu Smith-Schuster – Bills DST -0.12
Stefon Diggs – Bills DST -0.11
Benny Snell – Bills DST -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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