In this daily fantasy sports strategy article, we shall discuss how to use the late swap function strategically on DraftKings and other sites that allow late swap.

Every Monday morning I go through my head-to-head match-ups in NFL and consider how I might increase my chances to win and in some cases create a chance to win out of nothing. Consider this example, a very simple one, from Week 5:

I’m losing by eight points. Let the record show that the guy rostered Latavius Murray in cash instead of Devonta Freeman. Pretty poor play, but I’m getting beat regardless and just like in poker I can’t do anything about the results after decisions are made. I can do something now, though, to increase my chances of winning.

I have Philip Rivers left and this is good. The problem is he has a QB left to go also and I don’t know who that QB is. It has to be either Philip Rivers (6.2k) or Mike Vick (5.1k), as they are the only two QBs playing on Monday night. One can assume that he has Rivers since Rivers was a viable cash game play, but he also rostered Latavius Murray, which was more of a flier GPP play this week as underdogs at home against the best defense in the NFL.

Fortunately, we can do math and deduce who our opponent is playing at QB by adding up the salaries of players we know of on his roster.

It turns out villain has spent 43,600 of the 50,000 allotted, meaning he has 6,400 remaining. This means that unless he left 1,300 on the table when making his lineup, he has Philip Rivers as his quarterback. This means that I am drawing dead if I leave Philip Rivers in as my quarterback. If I change my quarterback to Michael Vick, then I increase my chances of winning from 0% to something greater than 0%. All I need to happen now is for Vick to outscore Rivers by more than eight points.

I can think of another extreme example that happened to me last year. In the middle of baseball season, I had a contrarian pitcher throwing early, a chalk pitcher throwing late, and a stack from Coors Field. The contrarian pitcher got shelled quickly and before the second hour of games came around, I knew there was no way to win a GPP with a popular stack and a bad score from my lowly owned pitcher.

Therefore, I pivoted my second pitcher to somebody contrarian and then came off my Coors stack and on to the White Sox. It turns out the chalk pitcher got shelled, they only scored three runs in Colorado, and I won GPPs with a lineup vastly different than the one I had at 7:05 DFS time.

I have a love-hate with late swap. I like that it increases my edge, I like that I can sub out guys who are late scratches, and I hate that it takes time out of my life. Time is money. It is what it is, though, and if you play on a site with late swap, you should use it because most DFS players don’t.

If you don’t want to deal with late swap, then simply play on a site without late swap like FanDuelor Draftpot and don’t complain when the guy you rostered doesn’t end up playing that day.