The General Rules – The Basic Things To Know
Daily style fantasy sports are similar to regular fantasy sports with the main exception that the entire contest starts and ends in a much shorter time frame. Contests last a single day for some sports like baseball and basketball while NFL football DFS players will get two or three days to get the Monday night games in.
You’ll pick a team full of players based on salary cap or via a snake draft and those players earn points by doing well on the field.
Don’t think you can find this one at the stores, but we got you!
A Quick “How It Works” – Or, “The Things All Players Should Know”
- You legally risk and win real money
- Instead of an entire season it takes just 1 day from start to completion. *Football and golf last a weekend.
- The draft is done via a salary cap. Most of the time
- Your draft has nothing to do with anyone else.
- By that same token. you could potentially draft the exact same team as someone else.
- No season long waits to get paid. You’ll get paid that night.
- Again, the main difference between season long fantasy is the obviously shortened time of the contest.
The sport you are playing will determine exactly how you build your team and how they score points. The general rule of thumb is that the better your players do on the field, the more points your team scores on the leaderboards.
Sport by Sport How To Play Guides – The Basics of Each DFS
Let’s take a look at the actual playing of a DFS contest based on which sport you are playing.
- Football 101 – check out my Fanduel Football 101 Guide
- Basketball 101
- Baseball
- Golf 101
- Hockey
- NASCAR
- Soccer
- MMA
Make sure you check out any fine print on any site as they will all have their individual rules and scoring models. But basically, if your players do well, you’ll score points like traditional fantasy leagues.
**Some sites will have rotisserie style tourneys and ‘pick-em’ style contests, such as (DraftDay)
4 Steps For New Players – Follow Exactly To Join & Play Today!
- Join a Daily Fantasy Sports league website.
This is the hosting site that creates the contests and makes payouts. Create your account and make a deposit.
I recommend FanDuel and DraftKings.
The 2 of them have been the clear market leaders for quite a bit now and continue to march that way. Click on those names to read our full reviews. - Choose a fantasy contest
There will be dozens if not hundreds of contests listed in the lobby. You can start with a small buy-in or even a free one. - Draft your team
Put together a line-up of the best possible players you can get while staying under your salary cap. - Compete!
This part is hands free as the hosting site keeps track of the leaderboards and updates everything in real time or at least pretty damn close. Watch your team rise and fall on the leaderboards as the games progress!
It is fast, furious fun. I love it. Especially when you have a good “sweat” going where if a player does well you could hit a monster sized score.
Creating A Team – How To Pick Your Players
The building of a team is literally click of the button easy. Once you join a contest, you are prompted to draft your team.
- See a list of players and their price tags.
- Click on their names to see more or click on the ‘add/draft’ button to add them to your line up.
- Fill up your team completely, staying under the salary cap.
- Easily change, add, remove players until you are satisfied with your team.
- Save and submit your line-up.
- And that’s it! You are in the game.
Your team is all set, but you can still make changes up until the fantasy tournament locks. Depending on which site and which games you are in will determine when that is.
For example on DraftKings you can make late changes up until the point where your players game starts, where as on FanDuel the line-up’s lock at the point of the first days games begin. Even though your pitcher plays the late game on the west coast, line-ups are locked as soon as the 1st game of the day begins on the east coast.
You are now in and now playing daily fantasy sports!
The current landing page at FanDuels. Hey! A free $20!
Fantasy Sports Basics
If you are not sure how fantasy sports in general work then you should probably go ahead and study up a little on that first. You can go through these sport-by-sport guides (football, baseball, basketball, golf) and get a better idea.
After that, you may want to start out in the free-rolls or $1 big field tournaments. These are great for getting a feel for how it works before you go and risk a good amount of your real money.
Scoring points is also site dependent. Readthe scoring rules of each site or one of our comparison guides, like this fantasy baseball scoring chart I put together for the big 3 sites for MLB.
The short answer on how DFS work is that players score points in fantasy by doing well in their respective sport in the games. Football players score touchdowns, make positive yardage and baseball players get rbi’s, basketball players score points etc.
That is the basics of how you play fantasy, of course each sport has its unique ways to play fantasy style. We are creating new player guides for each sport, linked below.
The Different Types of Fantasy Leagues To Play
In addition to different sports, there are a variety of contests you can enter just about at any time. They include:
- Large Tournaments
- Double Up Games
- Triple / Quadruple / Quintuple Up’s
- Sit-N-Go’s
- Head 2 Head’s
- Beginners Only
Newer players are strongly encouraged to start small and play in the larger field tournaments at first. If you start out thinking head 2 head matches will be easier to win you are likely to be wrong.
Sharp and strong players play in the head 2 head matches by entering the same line-up in multiple contests. They do the research, build a few line-ups and then enter those line-ups against as much varied competition as they can. One way they do this is by requesting and accepting head 2 head matches. My tip – start out with the single entry, low buy-in games to start out!
How New Players Get Started Playing Daily Fantasy Sports
The first section you should read through is our top 10 daily fantasy sports websites list which links to reviews of the leading places to play. From there you can read through our constantly updated promos and news articles that will let you know the latest and greatest bonuses and freebies you can take advantage of.
Finally you can also read our tips and strategy articles. Free advice pieces to help you get an edge on your opponents.
Enjoy the site and good luck in your games! I’m Spry13 on DraftKings -and I hope to see you on the leaderboards!
So what now?
- Check out today’s games on DraftKings.com – get signed up and play in a freeroll tonight.
- Sign up for my email newsletter. It’s over there on the right hand side of the page.
- Read through a list of daily fantasy sports tips aimed at beginner and intermediate players
- Go all in and read the more in-depth dfs strategy articles
- Read reviews of FanDuel, DraftKings and Victiv