Draftkings Welcome MMA

Playing fantasy sports at DraftKings is fun, but a lot of people have been disappointed that they didn’t have an MMA component to their lineup of daily fantasy sports. They added this very recently, though, and if you are a fan of this sport, there are a lot of new opportunities to make money in their cash games.

Most contests will work in a similar manner. You are given a salary cap of $50,000 and can select five fighters to compete for you. Like other daily fantasy leagues, they score points for certain performance measures. The scoring is pretty simple at first glance. We’ve put together a quick chart for easy reference.

As you can see, there are some moves that are more highly valued than others. A quick fighter, someone able to hit fast and get out of the way, will likely be scoring a lot of points because a significant strikes happen far more often than a knockdown would. The downside, of course, is that 6 SS are equal to one knockdown. This gives an obvious emphasis on the stronger, more physical and offensively aggressive fighters. Just 2 knockdowns in a fight would take a fast fighter several rounds to accomplish. Both have advantages, but depending upon how you are approaching the budget, both have a definite place in your lineup.

But here’s the catch. Yes, the little things are important for increasing your score, but there are also bonuses awarded to fighters depending upon how quickly they win a match. A second chart will give you an idea of how important wins are.

As you get deeper into a fight, the win counts for less, but there is still a premium on fighters able to score a victory in the first 5 rounds. Even a 5th round win is worth more than 10 knockdowns, so your approach to drafting a lineup should focus primarily on picking winners, and only secondarily on maximizing points within those supposed winners.

Your methods will vary depending upon how is fighting on a particular night, but the general strategy should remain the same. Go through a lineup and find the matches that have the surest winner. It doesn’t matter what the handicap is far a particular fight since a win counts as a win regardless of at the advantage is. Find the top seven or eight fights that you are most sure of what the outcome will be, and then look for ways of maximizing the point value of the ones that you are unsure of. So, if there are two matches that you seem to have the same confidence level in regards to the outcome of, look at the individual stats of the fighters within. If one fighter has a high number of significant strikes, and the other has an average of 2 knockdowns per fight, and this seems to be an average fight for them, a focus on significant strikes would be smart if the knockdown specialist doesn’t max out his SS number.

Getting an extra few points out of a fighter is the surest way to separate yourself from the others in the competition. Picking winners is not tough, picking the winners that will win earliest and with the most amount of points is your goal. You should not be settling for just the +25 bonus ever. If that’s how it works out, that’s fine, but your goal should be to pick as many winners in the first 3 rounds as you can.