One of my favorite pieces of content to make is my weekly review of the winning Millionaire Maker — or occasionally other large prize pool — lineup. While we (rightfully) spend most of our time looking forward to the next slate, reverse-engineering what works in GPPs is a valuable exercise to make us better DFS players.
After Week 1 gave us some differently structured contests, Week 2 returned to the standard $20 millionaire maker contest with just over 200,000 entries total.
We had another multi-entry player take down last week’s tournament, with kjk003 entering a full 150-lineup portfolio. Three of their lineups finished in the top 1,000, which doesn’t seem especially impressive at first but works out to the top 0.5% of entrants. We’ll look both at the winning lineup and at their overall player exposures.
The Lineup
The high-scoring nature of Week 2 meant you needed a ton of points to take down tournaments, and kjk003 delivered with a massive 260-point team. That was nearly 20 points higher than anyone else, a huge margin of victory in a contest of this size.
The Stack
I was on the Cowboys-Giants game stack this week, as it seemed like one of the best overall offensive environments. The reason that I’m not a millionaire is because, unlike kjk003, I approached it from the other side, stacking Dak Prescott and his pass catchers with a Giants run back.
The correct answer was to stack Russell Wilson and his two top pass catchers, since the Cowboys did more of their scoring on the ground. Wilson double-stacked with Malik Nabers and Wandale Robinson was also much cheaper than stacking Prescott with CeeDee Lamb, leaving the salary on the table to get expensive plays at other positions.
The Giants offense is also extremely condensed, with Nabers and Robinson accounting for over 50% of Wilson’s targets on the season. That means if Wilson has a big game, we can be fairly confident who else will come along.
With all that said, kjk003 was almost exactly even with the field in terms of exposure to Wilson. It seems like they weren’t taking a stand on any individual stacks but instead found an edge by mixing and matching stacks in a sharp way. That’s a solid approach if you have the time and bankroll to max enter larger contests.
Other Correlations
All but one of the nine spots in this lineup featured some type of correlation, an impressive display of roster building.
The other offensive correlation spot was in the Bears-Lions game, where he paired Lions #1 WR Amon-Ra St. Brown with the Bears’ emerging top option, Rome Odunze. Odunze was priced as WR2 behind DJ Moore but has out-targeted the veteran 20-12 on the season. Given the Lions’ penchant to run up the score on occasion (especially following an embarrassing Week 1 loss), rostering St. Brown also made a ton of sense in hindsight.
They were well above the field on St. Brown but roughly in line on Odunze, which suggests that St. Brown was a priority, and they paired him with various bring-backs from the Chicago side.
The other correlated spot was Christian McCaffrey with the 49ers defense. McCaffrey was obviously the best play on the slate, as evidenced by his 40% ownership. Not many people extended that logic to the 49ers defense despite a juicy matchup with the Saints, though. Ironically, these were the two lowest-performing pieces of this lineup relative to their price tags, but it clearly didn’t matter.
The Chalk
The only piece of this lineup to even see double-digit ownership was McCaffrey, and his effective ownership was lowered by pairing him with his less-popular defense. We probably don’t need to get that off the board every week, but early in the season when the field is perhaps overconfident in what they know, it makes a lot of sense.
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The Sleepers
It made sense that nobody wanted to play Jonathan Taylor in Week 2. He was taking on the Broncos, one of the league’s best defenses on paper, as a slight underdog. Taylor isn’t typically especially involved in the passing game, so in theory he’s a better play as a favorite.
On the other hand, he’s still one of the most talented backs in the game, with a near every-down role. That combination can pay off regardless of matchup, and the Colts kept it close enough that he wasn’t schemed out of the game. Sometimes we get so in the weeds that we forget to roster players who are simply good at football.
That wasn’t a mistake kjk003 made, with nearly three times the fields’ exposure to Taylor, as well as heavy bets on McCaffrey and De’Von Achane. Only one of those really worked out — but that’s all it takes.
Pictured: Russell Wilson
Photo Credit: Imagn
