A wise man once said, the final price in terms of odds on a sporting event is a sum of all the collective market intelligence. We’re here to show you how you can leverage this collective market intelligence and betting odds to create winning DFS line-ups.
That is, both from the bettors and the guys facilitating the bets, the bookies. Odds fluctuate as money comes into the system and bettors and bookmakers opinions alike are factored into one big ‘consensus’ price.
Many DFS players are also sharp sports betting players and many have already observed a way in which you can gain an edge playing fantasy contests.
By using the odds on that specific event in your favour.
TIP: The later you check the odds and use them to set your lineup the better. Remember, the more money that goes into a betting market theoretically the more efficient the odds will become.
Let’s take a look at a few examples whereby we can gain an edge or draw a positive conclusion based off what the online bookmakers odds are on a specific event relating to a daily fantasy sports contest.
A) EPL Week 1
When it comes to the EPL and Soccer Fantasy in general the obvious one we are looking for when picking strikers and even attacking midfielders in our DFS lineups is finding those high scoring games each week. Games that will have lots of assists and lots of goals.
What’s the most effective way to predict how many goals will be scored in a game? Looking at the goals total betting market!
The odds below represent Pinnacle Sports’ prices and lines on the goals totals for Week 1 EPL matches.
From observing the above we can conclude that the games that is predicted to be the highest scoring is Manchester City v Sunderland, with the Over 3 goals being slightly favored compared to the under.
So, we’d immediately be looking at both Sunderland and Manchester City strikers to see if there was any value for us. But before we do, it’s important to also check the Head-to-head odds for the game in question. If the odds are pretty much even than we can reasonably assume that the goals scored will be evenly distributed between the two teams.
However, in this case Manchester City are very warm favourites at $1.27 implying a win probability of 78.74%. From that we can draw the conclusion that if goals are to be scored in this game, more than likely they’ll be scored by Manchester City players.
We’d then be looking at the projected starting lineup for City and ensuring all of the potential value options we find are set to play.
B) PGA Golf Tournament – The John Deere Classic
This week the PGA Tour heads to Illinois for the John Deere Classic. With PGA DFS contests going on at FanDuel, DraftKings and FanSports we can use the odds on this tournament to make more effective DFS Golf lineups.
The easiest way to do this is to compare the odds on the players to the player prices on your DFS website. Some sites have caught on to this little trick and now base their prices almost directly off the odds but some haven’t yet caught up.
For example, looking at the large odds grid below we can see that Jon Rahm is the consensus third pick in betting to win the tournament. His chances of winning range from 12-1 out to as much as 16-1 at some bookmakers.
Funnily enough however, he is priced at just $7,600 in FanSports PGA contests this weekend, almost half the price of Zach Johnson ($15,000) and Kevin Na ($14,600). The odds grid below shows us that Kevin Na is considered roughly a 20-1 chance of winning the tournament whereas Steve Stricker is considered a 12-1 chance. So naturally, you’d expect Stricker to cost more to put into your fantasy lineup? Not this time! Stricker is $12,700 with FanSports. $1,900 cheaper than Na despite his odds being considerably shorter to win the event.
Needless to say at just $7,600 Jon Rahm is a MUST PLAY if you are putting together a FanSports lineup this weekend.
TIP: It’s always a good idea to compare the prices at multiple online bookmakers to increase the accuracy of your conclusions. There are many online odds comparisons sites that will be helpful for this. In the example for the PGA tournament above, we are using oddschecker.com
There are many ways in which a DFS player can find an edge and this is one of the more popular methods out there so be conscious of overplaying information you uncover by looking at the odds.
With that being said, a closing price on a liquid sporting event like an NBA, NFL, EPL or AFL match is a efficient number that will represent something very close to the best outcome predictor over the journey so you need to respect this information.
Related: Find value by comparing the prices of players across multiple DFS websites
