A lot of the fun in daily fantasy sports is competing for the millions of dollars in prizes available in the large guaranteed prize pool (GPP) tournaments such as the $7 million guaranteed Millionaire Maker on DraftKing which pays $1.2 million to the winner, and the $5 million Sunday Million on FanDuel which guarantees $1 million to its winner. These contests cost $20 and $25 to enter respectively.
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Players can also win their share of million dollar prize pools in contests that cost as little as $3 to enter, and there are even some that cost as little as $0.25 and pay out tens of thousands of dollars.
The biggest GPPs draw hundreds of thousands of entries making the popularity of players one of the factors to consider when building a lineup. The more entries that contain the same players that you have in your lineups, the more difficult it is to ascend to the top finishing spots in these DFS contests and win the biggest cash prizes.
For example, let’s say you have Tom Brady as your quarterback, every time he scores, you and everyone else that has him in their lineup move up the rankings. So, if a small percentage of lineups contain Brady, when he scores you are gaining ground on a large percentage of the other entries that didn’t use him, but if he is widely owned, his scoring becomes less relevant as it does not separate you from the crowd.
That is not to say that you shouldn’t roster highly owned players at all, but the ownership percentage of a player should be one of the data points considered when building GPP lineups.
So how do you know which players will be widely owned? You don’t, that information isn’t revealed until after the games start. So why did I bother telling you all of this? Well, as you might have guessed, there is a DFS tool that helps you estimate the ownership of players in the big money GPPs.
Our featured DFS tool this week is a weekly posting over at DFSReport.com called the FanDuel Thursday Ownership Percentages report where the team there aggregates ownership percentages gleaned from the contests over at FanDuel—where they release the ownership percentages of the players in your lineup as soon as the first game starts—that include the players from the Thursday night game.
These percentages help gauge the interest in certain players for the big Sunday/Monday contests and are broken down by position with handy sortable charts. The team even provides insight into interpreting the information presented.
If you aren’t aware of the FanDuel Thursday ownership percentages, then this DFS tool is for you.
