Gas-N-Go: Top NASCAR DFS Picks and Strategy for the GEICO 500 - Talladega, April 23
The NASCAR DFS Deep Dive; going through lineup construction, cash and tournament cores, top potential lap leaders, and pivots for Sunday's race at Talladega.
In today’s article, we’ll go through cash and tournament lineup construction, on both DraftKings and FanDuel, using the cores from the RaceSheets, as well as how to approach this slate from a game theory perspective finding pivots and differentiation in tournaments.
With that said - let’s dive in… 🥽
GEICO 500 Lineup Construction
At this point in the NASCAR calendar, we’re venturing into our third superspeedway NASCAR DFS slate of the year. Thus, it should be pretty apparent by now how you’re supposed to build for these types of events.
Talladega races can devolve into chaos, thanks in part to the draft, and a driver who was out in front all day can finish in dead last. Meanwhile a driver who rode around the back all day trying to avoid that chaos, can pick up a top 10 finish. The drivers that start up front are the ones most likely to lead, however, we’re not really concerned with dominators because there’s only 188 laps, fastest laps happen randomly throughout the field, and a driver that led a bulk of the race can easily get turned and have all of their laps led points negated by lost place differential.
Thus, there are no dominator groups for today unlike last week at Martinsville. We are simply building with two scoring metrics in mind; finishing position points and place differential. In cash, we should be playing it safe with drivers starting in the rear while in tournaments we’ll take shots on drivers that start near the front but have the potential to finish in the top five or top 10 - with hopefully some laps led points boosting their fantasy scores.
Finally, if my lineup construction leaves me with thousands of dollars left over in salary, so be it. Leftover salary is just a part of the game this weekend.