2018 NASCAR DFS Payline Analysis: AAA 400

Dover is in the books. It was a great race with multiple grooves working and allowing for a lot of passing and battling for positions. Overall for DFS purposes it was another high scoring week with three drivers producing weeks of 70+ points with Kevin Harvick leading the way with 153 points on DK . Let’s breakdown some contests from this week.

DraftKings

$15K Hot Rod (3 entry max)

Entry fee - $3

Total prizes - $15,000  First place - $1,000

Total entries – 5,945  Places paid – 1,552

Top score – 411.75 

Money line – 305.75 

Fantasy Alarm Lineups – GPP1: 324.25 ; GPP2: 275.25; Cash: 248.00 

All 38 of the drivers were rostered in this contest and none were over the 50% mark. Kevin Harvick led the way in ownership with 43.1% and his 153.75 points pretty much assured you of a cashing lineups, as his score alone made up more than half of the money line total. Jimmie Johnson was on 40% of lineups, which isn’t a shock considering his illustrious history at the track and the speed he showed at practice. The third-most rostered driver was David Ragan (my personal favorite cheap play for the week) at 34.28% simply due to his practice speeds and qualifying spot much further back and his 24.5 points found there way on to eight of the top-10 points lineups. Clint Bowyer, Chase Elliott, and Kyle Busch finished up the drivers owned on better than 30 percent of lineups and the best play of the group was Bowyer and his 75 points. Elliott gave you 28 and Busch cost you 11 when his drive shaft broke. Four drivers owned at between 24% and 15% posted 40+-point days in Martin Truex Jr., Daniel Suarez, Ryan Blaney, and Kurt Busch and three of those were mid-tier salary guys. The best value play of the race for sure was Brad Keselowski. By value I mean the driver with the highest points and lowest ownership, not salary. Keselowski produced 81 points and was on just 9.39% of rosters in this GPP contest. The best play based on salary was Michael McDowell’s 29 points and a sub-$6K salary.

$5 Double-Up

Entry fee - $5

Total prizes - $100  1^st-10^th - $10

Total entries – 23  Places paid – 10

Top score – 368.5 

Money line – 326.75 

Fantasy Alarm Lineup – 248.00

It was a small-field double up, but generally those contests are single-entry and allow for higher cashing odds than the big-field multi-entry double ups do. The downside is the lack of roster differentiation that there is. As an example of this, 87% of the 23 rosters had either Kevin Harvick or David Ragan on them and only one of the 23 lineups had neither. Jimmie Johnson and Clint Bowyer were the next highest-owned drivers and both cracked the 65% mark in this contest. Kyle Busch was still highly-owned in this one as well at 43.48% which is a bit higher than the GPP mentioned above. Surprisingly though, the second highest scoring drivers of the week, Brad Keselowski wasn’t owned on a single lineup in this contest, which could explain the relatively low high score. Despite their respective great histories here, Martin Truex Jr. and Chase Elliott were both rostered on 17.39% of lineups and out of that percentage, only two of them had one or both without Kevin Harvick. The driver who scored the most for less than $6K, Michael McDowell, was on just over a quarter of the lineup (6-of-23) but only once was he on a roster that cashed.

FanDuel

Once again this week I did not provide example lineups for FanDuel, however I did build a cash and GPP lineup to test on the site before providing for you. The GPP hit for a 2.5x return and produced a 386.2-point day. The lineup consisted of Kevin Harvick, Kyle Larson, Clint Bowyer, Aric Almirola, and David Ragan. The scoring for FanDuel adjusts some driver’s points downward as compared to DraftKings but it also pushes some driver’s point upward. For example, Harvick had a 153.75-point day on DK but 103.6 on FD (given the much smaller dominator point boosts) but Ragan went from 24.5 on DK to 56 on FD simply from the laps completed tally. The cash lineup did hit in a few contests for double-up cashes. I will have full lineups for FanDuel starting next week at Kansas.

Optimal Lineup

This is the optimal lineup for DraftKings that would have produced the highest score possible:

As has been typical in the past several weeks, around a $1,000 has been left on the table when producing the highest scoring lineup. Clearly the lineup starts with Kevin Harvick as getting 153.75 points on the roster is a big boost. Brad Keselowski is the other top-tier salary driver on the lineup with his 81 points getting us up to more than 230 points in just two drivers. Clint Bowyer and Daniel Suarez are the two mid-tier salaries that make the roster with 75 points and 46.5 points respectively adding FPPK to the lineup. Kasey Kahne and Michael McDowell finish off the six-man roster with two low-tier salary drivers that still combined for 64 points. Overall the FPPK of the lineup was 8.57 combined and five of the six drivers were written about in the playbook.