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.
I won’t be able to record videos this weekend with the short turnaround time between games. We should all know how to do this by now, but if you don’t, you can always refer to the video above.
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 (Mayfield, Roethlisberger CAPT, Roethlisberger)
- At most 1 K (Parkey, Boswell)
- At most 1 DST (Browns, Steelers)
- 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.
Browns: Donovan Peoples-Jones (WR) (UPDATE: KhaDarel Hodge is on the COVID list, which makes Peoples-Jones a rotational player instead of a punt play. Keep him in the regular pool, but remove him from the punt pool.
Steelers: Anthony McFarland (RB), Benny Snell (RB), Ray-Ray McCloud (WR), Vance McDonald (TE) (UPDATE: McFarland is inactive)
CAPT Pool
With so many options available to throw the ball too – and he utilizes them all – Ben Roethlisberger is worthy of the 20% ownership match it’ll take to maintain positive leverage on the field at CAPT.
Despite play Lamar Jackson twice, Baker Mayfield twice, Daniel Jones, Josh Allen, and Joe Burrow (all decent running quarterbacks); the Steelers still allowed the second-fewest number of fantasy points to opposing quarterbacks in 2020. So, even though he has some dual threat capability, Mayfield won’t make it into my CAPT pool tonight.
James Conner, Nick Chubb, and Kareem Hunt will all get a look from me at CAPT. Conner and Chubb for obvious reasons, and Hunt on DK in the event that Cleveland needs to play catch up in the second half.
Our CAPT pool is going to be rather large tonight, as Diontae Johnson, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Chase Claypool have all shown the upside to make them CAPT viable. For the Browns, it’s just Jarvis Landry and Rashard Higgins that interest me…and the interest is slight at best.
Here’s a look at my approximate exposures at CAPT:
- Ben Roethlisberger 20%
- Diontae Johnson 15%
- JuJu Smith-Schuster 15%
- Nick Chubb 12%
- Jarvis Landry 10%
- James Conner 10%
- Chase Claypool 8%
- Kareem Hunt 5%
- Rashard Higgins 5%
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 (9): Chubb, Hunt, Landry, Higgins, Roethlisberger, Conner, Johnson, Smith-Schuster, Claypool
QB (2): Mayfield, Roethlisberger
RB (5): Chubb, Hunt, Conner, McFarland, Snell
WR (9): Landry, Higgins, Hodge, Peoples-Jones, Johnson, Smith-Schuster, Claypool, Washington, McCloud
TE (5): Hooper, Bryant, Njoku, Ebron, McDonald
K (2): Parkey, Boswell
DST (2): Browns, Steelers
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
Ben Roethlisberger – Diontae Johnson 0.38
Baker Mayfield – Jarvis Landry 0.36
Ben Roethlisberger – JuJu Smith-Schuster 0.36
Baker Mayfield – Rashard Higgins 0.34
Ben Roethlisberger – Chase Claypool 0.34
Baker Mayfield – Austin Hooper 0.30
Baker Mayfield – Donovan Peoples-Jones 0.30
Ben Roethlisberger – Eric Ebron 0.30
Ben Roethlisberger – James Washington 0.26
Baker Mayfield – Harrison Bryant 0.24
Baker Mayfield – David Njoku 0.19
Nick Chubb – Cody Parkey 0.18
Notable Negative Correlations
Baker Mayfield – Steelers DST -0.41
Nick Chubb – Steelers DST -0.33
Cody Parkey – Steelers DST -0.22
Nick Chubb – James Conner -0.16
Kareem Hunt – Steelers DST -0.12
Nick Chubb – Chris Boswell -0.11
Kareem Hunt – Donovan Peoples-Jones -0.11
Cody Parkey – Chris Boswell -0.11
Kareem Hunt – Austin Hooper -0.10
Cody Parkey – James Conner -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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