Leveraging Default Ranking Bias On Underdog Fantasy

Hayden Winks
Underdog Sports
3 min readDec 3, 2021

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How to be a long-term winner at Battle Royale.

Daily fantasy sports (DFS), particularly tournaments, is all about finding low-rostered plays that still project well. In salary structured games, the player rostered rates are typically between 5% to 40% depending on the position and week. There’s only so much leverage you can do in those formats because the game is constrained by the salary structure.

That’s not the case in Underdog Fantasy’s Battle Royale. Instead of selecting players based on prices, it’s a snake draft with positions ranked by default projected points (which we get from a third-party provider). Most people, as you’ll see below, are anchored to the default projected points. That means the top-projected players are rostered in the 90% to 100% range, not the 5% to 40% range of salary DFS games.

Let’s start with the QB and TE spots, where all six teams are required to have one of each in their lineup:

In this Week 7 Battle Royale example (you can download the pick-by-pick csv here), 95% of the drafted quarterbacks were ranked QB1 to QB7 by our default projections. That number was the exact same (95%) for the top-seven tight ends, too.

In other words, nobody is scrolling down to quarterbacks and tight ends just outside of the top-seven. What an advantage for the contrarian DFS player. What are QB7 Aaron Rodgers’ odds to be the highest-scoring quarterback of the week compared to QB8 Ryan Tannehill’s? There’s simply no way that difference is enough to justify Rodgers’ 56% ownership versus Tannehill’s 10%. Remember, it is not how often you’re correct in DFS. It’s what are the payouts when you are correct.

Now let’s pivot to RBs and WRs, which is a little more complicated because there’s a floating flex spot. In this Week 7 example, 63% of the flex spots were filled by runnings backs, 36% were filled by wide receivers, and 1% were filled by tight ends. So a safe assumption to make is that there will be about 10 RBs and 14 WRs drafted each time.

The same discussion we had with QBs and TEs apply to RBs and WRs. There’s a massive drop-off in rostered rate from the RB11 in default projected points (78%) to the RB12 in default projected points (19%). For WRs, that’s 65% to 27% from the WR14 to the WR15.

To summarize, it’s beyond +EV to take at least one or two chances each draft on players ranked outside the top-7 QBs, top-7 TEs, top-10 RBs, or top-14 WRs. The payoff on a low-rostered hit is massive in Battle Royale, and everyone is anchored to the default rankings. Take advantage while you can. Here’s a deposit-match bonus if you want to try Battle Royale out:

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Published in Underdog Sports

Underdog Sports is a fantasy sports app offering daily sports, best ball, pick’em and rivals contests on iOS, Android and Web.

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