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With the exciting announcement of the introduction of Captain Contests to Draftstars for the upcoming EPL and NFL seasons, we thought we’d take a look at some of the considerations and strategies that you can apply for selecting your captain in these contests.

In Captain Contests on a single-game slate, you generally have to pick one captain and five other players. Your captain scores 1.5x the usual number of Draftstars points, but they also cost 1.5x their usual salary.

So how can you take advantage of this feature and find an edge versus the field? Let’s take a closer look.

Look for High Ceilings

In order to maximise the returns of the 1.5x score, you want players who can land big as your captain, so always lean towards players who have high ceilings. In the NFL this will probably be a quarterback, while in the EPL you might consider an attacking midfielder who can score goals. You’ll probably also want to consider which team is the favourite which will also lead to higher scoring.

In general, the highest ceilings are going to come from your premium players with the highest salaries. Yes, it’s expensive at 1.5x salary as a captain, but if they go big, you’ll want to have them on your side.

Value Hunting

You can look to pay down for your captain as the best choice isn’t always the one who is most expensive. If a player is a good value pick in the contest, then they could also be a good option for captaincy. Not only do you get 1.5x score for a captain, but you have to fork out 1.5x salary, so sometimes finding the best value pick (that is, the best return of points compared to their salary) is a solid captain pick as you’ll not only get a good score, but you’ll save some salary that you might be able to put towards a premium pick in your other selections.

Don’t Pay Down Too Low

Be careful of paying down too low for your captain. Generally, using a minimum salary player as your captain isn’t the best approach to win the contest. Sure, you’ll save some salary which will allow you to fill out a stronger team, but you’re missing out on potential upside from the 1.5x scoring of the captain.

Hitting the Optimal Lineup

In these single-game contests where you are only picking six Flex players, your goal is to get as close to the optimal lineup as possible. That’s near impossible in a larger GPP contest across multiple games and numerous positions as there are way too many variables and combinations of players to get that close.

In single-game contests, there’s often a core group of premium players who are always going to be among the best scorers in the match. This means if you’re playing multiple lineups, you might lean towards playing more of your premium players more heavily in your lineup builds, and then diversify across your cheaper players in order to hit the optimal scoring combination.

Correlate your Selections

Correlation is an important factor in daily fantasy sports so it’s certainly important in Captain Contests. You want your selections to work well together to maximise your score. For example, picking the quarterbacks of both teams might not be an effective strategy, but pairing a quarterback with a wide receiver from the same team would work well. Think of the game script, tell the story with your selections, and then hope it goes to plan!

Leave Money on the Table

It’s not a rule that you have to use every last dollar of your salary, but most new DFS players will try hard to spend up as much as they can to avoid “wasting” their budget. In larger GPP contests with thousands of players and millions of combinations of selections, it’s less likely you’ll have a duplicate lineup as someone else. However in single-game contests under the Flex format of selecting six players, it’s quite easy for many players to have identical lineups. The option of the captain does make it less likely there will be duplicates as it adds more possible combinations, but it’s still possible.

One way DFS professionals avoid this is by leaving a chunk of their salary on the table unused. There’s no right or wrong amount to spend, but by spending less, it increases your chances of being unique which is always a good thing in DFS!

All Aboard, Captain!

The best thing about Captain Contests for island games is that they are fast and snappy to enter. You can create a lineup very quickly and easily and mix it with the best DFS players in the region. Apply the steps above and you’ll give yourself a great chance of success at Draftstars!

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