The General Rules / Basics 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 sports like baseball and basketball while NFL football plays two or three days to get the Monday night games in. You pick a team full of players based on salary cap and those players earn points by doing well on the field.
Daily Fantasy Sports For Dummies & You!
A Quick “How It Works” – Things All Players Should Know
- You risk and win real money. Legally.
- Instead of an entire season it takes just 1 day from start to completion. *Football and golf last the weekend.
- The draft is done via a salary cap. **most of the time
- Your draft is independent of everyone else.
- You could draft the exact same team as someone else.
- No season long waits to get paid. Get paid that night.
- The main difference between season long fantasy is the 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 – Basics of Each Fantasy Sport
Let’s take a look at the actual playing of a daily fantasy sports contest based on which sport you playing.
- Football 101 – check out my Fanduel Football 101 Guide
- Basketball 101
- Baseball
- Golf 101
- Hockey
- NASCAR
- Soccer
- MMA
*Each site has individual rules and scoring models. In general your players do well, you score points like traditional fantasy leagues.
**Some sites have rotisserie style tourneys and ‘pick-em’ style contests (DraftDay)
3 Steps For New Players – Follow Exactly To Join & Play Today
- Join a daily fantasy sport league website – The hosting site that creates the contests and makes payouts. Create your account and make a deposit. I recommend FanDuel and DraftKings (reviews). They are the clear market leaders.
- Choose a fantasy contest – There are dozens if not hundreds of contests listed in the lobby. Start with a small buy-in or 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 (near real time). 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 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.
- You are in the game.
Your team is 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 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.
It’s legal and if you are playing at our recommended sites you can rest assured it is legit. When you win, you will get paid!
Fantasy Sports Basics
If you are not sure how fantasy sports in general work then I recommend studying up a little on that first. Go through the sport by sport guides (football, baseball, basketball, golf) and get the basics.
Start out in the free-rolls or $1 big field tournaments. These are great for getting a feel for how it works before risking much money.
Scoring points is also site dependent. Read each sites scoring rules 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 fantasy sports work is that players score points in fantasy by doing well in their respective sport in the games. Football players score touch downs, make positive yardage and baseball players get rbi’s, and baskeball players score points etc. That is the basics of how you play fantasy, of course each sport has it’s 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. They include:
- Large Tournaments
- Double Up Games
- Triple / Quadruple / Quintuple Up’s
- Sit-N-Go’s
- Head 2 Head’s
- Beginners Only
New 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 / 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 accepting / requesting 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 by playing.
Finally you can read our tips and strategy articles. Free advice pieces to help you get an edge on the opponents.
Enjoy the site and good luck in your games!
Where Next?
There are a ton of things you can do. I recommend:
- Check out todays 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
- Enjoy, and good luck. I’m Spry13 on DraftKings – I hope to see you on the leaderboards!