Underdog Pick 'Em strategies and plays

Ben announced our partnership with Underdog about it both in our Discord and in his recent post with his Week 2 plays, but I wanted to give some thoughts from my perspective as well.

First off, it’s extremely exciting to be partnering with such and incredible company in Underdog. When Ben and I starting Stealing Lines last year, one thing that was very important to us if we were ever going to partner with a company was to make sure it was very natural to what it is we were already doing and have it be a value boost to our subscribers.

Underdog encompasses all of that as not only is it a rising juggernaut in the fantasy space, but it cares about the people using their app. That has been evident to both Ben and I for a while as we are in the space and we have seen how responsive they have been to feedback and acting on it.

But what they’re also doing for all of our Stealing Lines subscribers is they’re giving out $100 A WEEK in credit on their site to a random sub here for the rest of the season. In order to be eligible for that you must fill out this google form and simply fill out your Underdog username, your email attached to your Stealing Lines subscription, and your discord username.

And if you aren’t an Underdog user yet and want to tail us on these Pick Em’s this year you can use this link or the code “STEALINGLINES” for 100% deposit match up to $100 on your first deposit.

All-in-all it’s going to be exciting to bring another unique piece of content to you guys each week. And the cool thing about Underdog is the Pick ‘Em’s are available in 41 states across the US so this gives more people the ability to play alongside us at Stealing Lines.

Since our Pick Em's differ slightly from the rest of our content I want to run through some strategy and ways we are going to play them this year.

What is an Underdog Pick Em entry?

Each player will have multiple stat projections on Underdog that we would choose whether we think that player will go higher or lower that number.

We would then create an entry with multiple of our picks and get paid out accordingly if you get everyone right within that specific entry:

• two plays = 3x payout

• three plays = 6x payout

• four plays = 10x payout

• five plays = 20x payout

It’s important to note that the payout calculated includes your original stake so you can look at it almost as a 2x, 5x, 9x and 19x added on to your original play.

After we have selected which players we want to play and have added to our entry it would look something like this:

(you can tail this play right here if you would like)

We would then choose how much we want to play with and Wala! We have now placed an entry!

Underdog Pick ‘Em Strategy

Strategies we want to think about when doing Pick ‘ems.

It can be fun to have a plethora of options in which to choose from when creating selections, but there’s one main strategy that comes to mind when adding these to our entries.

Game stacks.

Creating a three or even five pick entry within one single game can be a fun way to play out certain scenarios we know to be at play.

For example I’ll use the Chiefs/Jaguars game with the entry above as a baseline.

If we think that the Jaguars keep this game close or even come away with an upset win over Kansas City, we have to ask ourselves: “How would this effect each individual player in that game?”

Well the game might be closer than intended because game script likely didn’t get out of hand for the Jaguars. So maybe adding something along the lines of Travis Etienne over rushing attempts with Trevor Lawrence under passing attempts for the Jaguars.

Then how would this effect the Chiefs in this scenario? Well, it makes it more likely game script is forcing Mahomes to throw the ball more and keep the Chiefs away from running the ball.

We now have a scenario where we’ve create a four play Pick ‘Em along with these. I’d encourage anyone playing these entries to shy away from doing four play entries as the payouts aren’t as great per play as the three or five pick entries.

Once I’ve created my base game script with a QB/RB for each team that correlates together, I’ll add a fifth player (usually WR) that also correlates to that game script.

Another one of my favorite ways to play these entries is to find games in which there is multiple running backs on the same team with rushing lines and going higher for one of their projected stats and lower for the other (see Bijan/Allgeier entry below). If rushing attempts are available for both players that’s my favorite way to play it, but it’s still good for rushing yards.

Every week we will be putting out our most confident plays for the games and how we think the game script could wind up going and how that impacts these players. But what I would encourage you to do is to have multiple entries for each game! I personally tested this out last year and would have upwards of 30+ game stack entries a week and had some success doing this. In a world where you only have to win 1 out of 19 entries to become profitable it’s simply a volume play.

And I would argue that creating a Pick Em is similar to how you would construct a best ball team if you’re familiar with it with the strategy around that. Yes, the correct player you draft early on does matter, but if you don’t properly construct your team with the proper amount of players allocated to each position the you aren’t maximizing your potential team.

So I’d view this in a same way. Identify your player takes within a specific matchup and build the rest of the entry around that! In the same vein of best ball where you can get players you aren’t as exposed to enough, you can create game scenarios that are correlated even if you aren’t confident in that being the outcome. The truth is we are going to be wrong about a lot of things and this allows us a fun and smart way to hedge our bets.

Underdog Play of the Week

Scenario: Titans try to slow down this game with Henry and are leading at some point. Chargers are throwing the ball a ton with the Titans being a big pass funnel defense and missing a couple starters in the secondary.

You can tail right here

Other Pick ‘Ems I like

Touched on the rushing attempts strategy above and this is one I like. I will be playing multiple variations of this one with Bijan under attempts with Allgeier over and vice versa. Personally I just think this is the most likely outcome.

And I added the Zach Wilson here because I really like going lower here and as I mentioned earlier I think it’s suboptimal to have four picks in an entry. The fifth play for these types of rushing attempts ones don’t have to correlate at all, you can just put in one of our Stealing Lines plays as the fifth option.

You can tail right here

Another one where I feel the Broncos will continue to run a bit. They ran the ball at one of the highest rates on first down last week. If Broncos can control this game this means Washington could be forced to pass more.

You can tail right here

Don’t love fading Garrett Wilson but I love fading Zach Wilson and this is a scenario where the Cowboys just do well against the Jets and Zach Wilson still is handing the ball off a ton as they would be hiding him.

You can tail this here

Bengals could take advantage of the missing pieces in the Baltimore secondary by throwing a ton, Ravens could try and grind this game out a little more than normal.

You can tail this play right here

Variations and why they matter

I mentioned earlier the idea of variations when using them as a strategy and a lot of it comes from embracing uncertainty. There’s so many times we think we know what is going to happen only for that not to be the case at all. Take Week 1 of our bets as an example.

By using variations in a sense we are hedging against what we think is going to happen, but in a very smart way! And honestly by using this strategy we can still fire off a few plays per game even without having a strong take. It’s all about proper structure.

I personally tried this strategy for a few weeks at the end of last year and noticed I was profitable across 299 Pick ‘Em entries. What is important is to be very careful with risk management as there tends to be some big swings week to week. I noticed there would be weeks where I would win like 1 out of every 30 and others where I would win like 3 out of every 30 entries. I wouldn’t bet more than .1 unit per entry.

I’m going to show you an example of variations to a game that I’ve personally played all angles of even if I don’t think they will happen! The thing is there’s going to be lots of times in which you miss on every single play in your entry because game script got completely out of whack. Why not take advantage of it?

Our original Bengals play was posted above, but here’s one variation to it. Literally the complete opposite.

You can play this here

Similar to our first one! where we are just changing out Higgins/Chase and now adding Lamar rushing attempts under to correlate with Edwards over. The cool thing about this is both this and the original entry can win!

You can play this here

This is one of those plays where you’re banking minimal points being scored and offenses to stifle and clock to be run out. This happens more often than we think even though it’s not fun and adding these to our plays are generally pretty sharp.

I’d recommend if you’re trying to correlate similar to this that you try to refrain from playing higher on a lot of players. I don’t like these plays as much, but if I do them having four lowers is a play I had success with last year.

You can tail this here

Final thoughts

I could literally sit here all day on the app and just crank out a ton of these types of variations on games, but unfortunately Substack is warning me that this email is getting too long.

The main thing I want to emphasize here is I am personally playing so many of these variations and want to hopefully give you guidance into the right way and how to do it.

I’d encourage you to try this out even it’s for very minimal amounts of money first just to prove that this does work!

I’ll be having plenty more strategic thoughts on even more ways to play these entries in future posts, but wanted to give some baseline thoughts out there!

Cheers everyone let’s have a good Week 2!