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What is PlayLine?
First, you might be wondering, “What exactly is PlayLine?” The short answer, a new Daily Fantasy Sports site. I’ll use PlayLine’s own words to give you the long answer…
“Co-Owned by UFC Middleweight Champion Michael “The Count” Bisping, PlayLine’s goal is to make fantasy sports for everyone – by simplifying the process, focusing on the super star players you know and love, and by offering the biggest cash prizes in all of daily fantasy sports.
Here at PlayLine, we recognize that daily fantasy sports has become overly complex and time consuming, while fostering an ecosystem built on unfair models of competition. That’s not right! PlayLine’s goal is to provide its users with a simplified fantasy experience that evens the playing field. Instead of drafting players or using a salary cap, PlayLine asks you to predict the stat line of our featured super star players. Tell us how you think these athletes will perform – the closer your PlayLine stat line is to the players actual performance, the more points you get! The higher your point total, the more likely you are to share in our industry leading real money prizing!”
In a nutshell, the contests have two-to-four players and you have to “guess” what their stat line will be. The closer you get, the more points you get.
Scoring Explained
The scoring is pretty simple once you understand it. First, we will tackle the QB scoring using the example below.
The far left column under the header is what I entered before the game, or what I thought Dak Prescott would do in the game, 215 passing yards and one TD.
Looking at the yardage row, my total score was 158.6 PLP (PlayLine Points). The 238 in the center column is how many yards Prescott actually threw for, so I was short by 23 yards. Passing yards are worth .04 points, but you do not receive the points for any yards that exceed your prediction. So I guessed 215 and he threw for 238, but I only accrue points up to 215.
215 yards x .04 = 8.6
Now we look at the bonus points. You receive bonus points if you are within 50 yards (over or under) of a player’s actual yardage. Every five yards closer, your bonus increases by 25 up to 300 points for a perfect score. Using the chart below, you can see that because I came within 23 yards of an exact total, my bonus was 150 points. 150 bonus points + 8.6 passing yards = 158.6
Touchdowns are worth 4 points for a QB, and an exact guess is worth 75 points. Coming within one TD (over or under) is worth 25 points. In the example above, I guessed one TD, Prescott threw two. I get the 4 points for the one TD I predicted and 25 bonus points for coming within one TD of his final total. 25 bonus points + 4 point TD = 29
158.6 + 29 + 187.6 (Final Score)
Wide receivers and running backs are scored very similarly with the major differences being their yards are worth .1 per yard, six points for TDs, and receivers have a third stat category, receptions. Looking at the example below, I will break down my score…
I guessed 125 yards, but Julio Jones only had 108 yards.
108 x .1 = 10.8.
My bonus for coming within 17 yards was 175.
175 + 10.8 = 185.8
Receptions are worth .5. I guessed 9, but he only had 5 receptions.
5 x .5 = 2.5
My bonus for receptions was 25.
2.5 + 25 = 27.5
I landed a perfect score for TDs to get 75 bonus points.
75 + 27.5 + 185.8 = 288.3 (Final Score)
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Basic Strategy
Okay, now that we’ve had our math lesson for the day, the real question is, “How do I use this to my advantage?” Honestly, when I first started playing PlayLine, I didn’t see any strategy that could be used, to me, it was strictly a guessing game. Sure, you could use historical stats and player averages to make an educated guess, but at the end of the day, it was still a guess. But, after talking to one of the founders of PlayLine, I now have a few basic strategies that may help you when picking your PlayLine.
Don’t Be Afraid to go Over
Have you ever watched the Price is Right, and one of the contestants bids $1 because they don’t want to go over? Well, in PlayLine you’re not penalized for going over, in fact, I encourage you to “round up” on your projections. Here’s why.
If you are picking yardage for Antonio Brown, let’s say you guess 100 yards to make the math simple. If we ignore the bonuses for this example, your highest possible score is 10 (100 yards x .1 = 10). Even if he has 200 yards, you only get credit for the 100 yards you guessed, nothing more. Obviously, if it’s less, you only get credit for what he actually did. So, if you guessed 50 yards you’d get 5 PLPs.
Now, before you go and say, “I’ll just predict a million yards and that way I’ll get the most points possible”, don’t forget about the bonuses. You have to be within 50 yards (over or under) of his actual total to receive the bonus points.
Leverage Your Predictions vs the Field
Okay, what does that mean exactly? To help you understand this, I’m going to use a DFS term we are all familiar with, ownership. In traditional daily fantasy, going contrarian and finding a lower owned player that can match or exceed a “chalk” players’ fantasy points is how we leverage our lineups to be different than the masses.
Well, you can do that in PlayLine too. Common wisdom tells us that the majority of the field is going to use averages or previous history to pick their PlayLines, right? If Antonio Brown averages 100 yards per game against the Cleveland Browns, everyone’s guess will be around 100 yards, give or take 10-to-20 yards.
But, what if you guess 30 yards? How many people do you think will be in that PlayLine bracket? Probably not many. Think back to Week 1, how many people had David Johnson and Le’Veon Bell as their top plays at running back? Pretty much everyone, but both of them were horrible.
If we equate that to PlayLine, how much of an advantage would you have had if you predicted David Johnson with 20 yards in Week 1?
Obviously, you have to pick your spots as to when you predict a player to have a bad game, but sometimes a little research can help. Point and case, I was telling everyone in Week 1 to avoid playing Drew Brees in contests, yet he was one of the higher owned QBs that day. Brees is not a good road QB, and going to the Vikings in Week 1 had me avoiding Brees at all costs. If we take this same logic and apply it to PlayLine, you might be able to accurately predict a players “bad” game.
Of course, it also works in the opposite direction by predicting a great game for a player that may have previously been struggling.
Don’t Overthink It
The biggest selling point for PlayLine is the “set it and forget it” mentality. It’s daily fantasy simplified. You don’t need to know who David Johnson’s backup is after he went down with an injury in Week 1, nor do you have to agonize over whether to start his backup Kerwynn Williams at $4,600 the following week. The average NFL fan had no idea who Kerwynn Williams was two weeks ago, and some of you are reading this now and thinking, “Who is Kerwynn Willaims”.
You don’t need to adjust your lineup 75 times before lock or read every player update to determine if they are going to be active or sit out with a nagging groin injury.
All you need to do is some minimal research, enter your PlayLine, win money. Done and done.
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