---
title: 'How to Profit on DraftKings and FanDuel DFS in NFL 2024'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=n1piTU7wDAc'
video_id: 'n1piTU7wDAc'
date: 2026-08-10
duration_sec: 1819
channel: 'DFS Army - Daily Fantasy Sports '
---

# How to Profit on DraftKings and FanDuel DFS in NFL 2024

> Source: [How to Profit on DraftKings and FanDuel DFS in NFL 2024](https://youtube.com/watch?v=n1piTU7wDAc)

## Summary

Kevin Allen from DFS Army explains how to become a profitable NFL DFS player on DraftKings and FanDuel in 2024. He emphasizes bankroll management, contest selection, and lineup construction strategies, showing why massive tournaments are rarely profitable and how to use smaller contests for consistent returns.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to DFS Profitability** [00:02] — Kevin Allen introduces the video's focus on DraftKings salaries, bankroll management, and techniques to go from casual player to profitable player.
- **Bankroll Allocation** [01:40] — Determine your total DFS budget for the season, then allocate 10% per week for main slate contests. For showdowns, limit to 5% of bankroll.
- **Weekly Bankroll Distribution** [03:27] — Example with $100 weekly bankroll: $25 in head-to-heads, $25 in double-ups/triple-ups, $30 in small tournaments, $20 in massive GPPs.
- **Why Massive Tournaments Are Hard to Profit** [04:29] — In a 200,000-entry tournament, even with 20% of lineups in the money, you lose over half your entry fees unless you hit the top 0.1%.
- **Focus on Cash Games** [10:50] — Allocate at least 50% of weekly budget to head-to-heads and double-ups/triple-ups for consistent profits.
- **Head-to-Head Setup** [12:15] — Start with lowest dollar amount, limit each opponent to one play, and avoid sharks by playing $2-$3 contests.
- **Double-Ups Explained** [13:09] — Double-ups pay double if you finish above the median score. A slightly above-average score can return most of your bankroll.
- **Small Tournaments (Hundos)** [14:53] — In a 100-person contest, a top 1% lineup pays 14x your entry, compared to 3-5x in massive GPPs.
- **Lineup Construction for Cash Games** [20:44] — Use players with high points-per-dollar and high ownership projections to reduce variance.
- **Small Tournament Strategy** [23:13] — Stack QB with pass catchers, fade bad chalk, and differentiate from the field to gain an edge.

### Conclusion

To be profitable in DFS, focus on cash games and small tournaments, manage your bankroll wisely, and avoid the allure of massive GPPs unless you're chasing a lottery ticket.

## Transcript

NFL DFS player on FanDuel and DraftKings in 2024 what's up guys my name is Kevin Allen AK the geek from DFS Army and today we're going to take a look at DraftKings salaries bankroll management and just techniques that you can use to
and just techniques that you can use to go from being a player to being a profitable player on fan DraftKings now I'm going to preface this by saying some a profitable player now you might be
what are you even talking about but not everybody wants to play profitably you might be playing um DraftKings FanDuel daily fantasy sports in general daily fantasy football in general just have fun and that's cool that's totally fine
it could be an entertainment for you it it could be a lottery ticket for you all to take your game to the next level or if you'd like to become profitable I'm going to talk about why the approaches that you might have been using up till
now are generally not going to be profitable and basically some bankroll techniques that can help you turn your game from losing money all the time to hopefully losing less money maybe losing no money and maybe even making some
money my big Theory with tournaments and those lotto ticket tournaments is you lineup after lineup in those to finally hit that top 01 percenter that gets you the 10K that gets you the 50k and you guys know if you're following the FSR we
have members take down these tournaments all the time we have millions ion doll winners we have 100K winners over 50 of them uh 50k and so on and so forth 10 everything but in order to get that win you've got to be in the game so let's
talk a little bit about bankroll allocation and contest selection so I'm going to start with contest selection when it comes to your bank uh well we'll bank roll how much bank roll should you use in a given week so to keep it very
simple what I want you to do is think about how much money you have have effectively for the 2024 NFL DFS season right you might be like hey you know I'm in five leagues I put 100 bucks in each league all good to
me sometimes I win sometimes I lose no big whoop but I'm going in expecting I'll put $500 in my fantasy leagues and lose 500 fine so what is your DFS budget let's start there so the way I want you to figure this out is
just think about an amount of money you're comfortable spending SL losing cause you to not have money for your rent or any sort of issues like that um worry about it to my if I lose it it's cool is that number ,000 5,000 10,000
whatever it is come up with it now I want you to take 10% of that number and want you to take 10% of that number and we're going to call that your weekly DFS aggressive I guess you could go up to 20% but because I'm focusing on just
main slate bankroll I would say you're also going to run showdowns and and all stick to a rule of thumb of if you're going to like a showdown contest i' I'd avoid I I would not go more than 5% of my bankroll and something like that and
my bankroll and something like that and on a main slate type Sunday all the on a main slate type Sunday all the games contests approach I would be uh limited to 10% of my total bankroll so once you figured out your your weekly
bank roll now we're going to get into how to spread that out each week so in this example here on screen your weekly bank roll would be $1,000 now I'm just going to punch in some different numbers so that everybody watching this has some
level of connection to it so if if it was $100 we'd be looking at something was $100 we'd be looking at something like this $25 in head to heads $25 in double up triple UPS $30 in what I call small
tournaments my bread and butter style of contest and then 20% or $20 in massive gpps the type of contest where you're virtually locked into losing half your money almost every time you enter them right so that's going to be how we set
bit about each one of these contest types and how to attack them but first I want to show you why it's so important to mix in head-to-heads double up triple ups and small tournaments right so let's look at a typical massive tournament on
DraftKings I'm going to pull one up from NFL week one here let's go to pretty much everybody's favorite tournament the play action okay and this one's really really easy to understand so I'm going to put this up on screen and we're GNA
take a look at the contest details and the payout structure so this is this is where it gets really really important take a look at the payout structure here right there are 200,000 entries in this tournament first place gets you $50,000
so to max out this tournament I've got to spend $60 or 20 entries at $3 a pop 60 bucks it's going to cost me to Max this thing out put in my 20 lineups now I've done other videos where I talk about how to attack a 20 Max contest I'm
not even going to get into that right now I really want to just help you guys this contest week after week and you always lose money and you kind of start to think man I suck at DF you don't you
in this contest I'm going to show you why so let's say you put 20 lineups into this contest and we get 20% of our lineups in the money right that's the
average so if you take a natural bell curve of distributions 20% of your lineup should wind up in the top 20% simply by the Bell Curve now that might not happen every single week but that's how it would go unless you place one not
in the top 1% but in the top 0.01% like the top five you're going to lose money the top five you're going to lose money so out of your $60 uh only four four or 20% of the lineups are in the money and let's say from that 20% or from those
four lineups one of them is in the top 5% and the rest of them are outside of the top 5% right so the one of them in the top 5% let's take a look at the payout structure here and understand what the top 5% is first of all top 1%
would be first through 2000th so even a top 1% lineup is maxing out at a somewhere between or it's it's bottoming out somewhere between 10 to 15
and those are in the top 1% so on a $3 entry you make a top 1% lineup and you might only get paid 10 bucks so three times three so it's a 3X maybe between 3 times three so it's a 3X maybe between 3 to 5x your entry fees seems good but
losing a lot of money the rest of my lineups all fall in the top 15% which barely does not even pay triple your money it only pays double or even less than double at times so let's jump back over to the example to see what I mean
so we put 20% of our lineups in the money one of them is in the top group money one of them is in the top group and let's say that makes us 10 bucks the other three are in the lower group and we're going to make let's say five and
$6 dollar because they're anywhere from Top 15% top 18% top 5% so the in the Top 15% top 18% top 5% so the in the money lineups end up returning 15 20 $26 but we put in 60 bucks we only got back 26 so we lost over half our entry fees
average return had one really good lineup top 5% the rest of them all in the top 20% other four of them we still lost $34 out of our 60 so greater than
50% of our money but check this out this example is really going to drive the nail home to understand why it's so hard to make money in the super giant lottery ticket contest and why focusing other contests is really really important if
you want to be a profitable player you might not that's fine but but if you do might not that's fine but but if you do check this out let's say you put 50% of check this out let's say you put 50% of your lineups in the money so you
destroyed the odds you had a great run on the domination station Optimizer and half of your lineups are in the top 20% they're in the money line well you've already absolutely destroyed competition so to speak because you've beaten the
odds right this means you're an elite player everybody else would normally only get 20% in there you got 50 % so you're in the top 1% of players in the week well let's take a look at what happens so let's say you put two lineups
in the top 5 per in this example you're amazing out of your out of the 10 lineups that are in the money two in the top five% the rest the other eight are in the top 15% somewhere scattered around what's the net result the two
lineups in the top 5% return you somewhere around 16 bucks $8 on three maybe it could be a little more if you're in the top 1% but in the top 5% you're only making eight bucks if you're lucky on a $3 entry so double maybe two
lucky on a $3 entry so double maybe two two to 2.2x your entry fee so those two return $16 the rest of your eight lineups in the money they give you five bucks a piece so you get 40 bucks so even in this example where you
absolutely beat the odds and it is impossible to repeat this type of not how distributions work that's not how odds work you still lost four against the $60 you put in this tournament so my point is when you enter
this contest unless you finish in the top effectively 0.1% which would mean top effectively 0.1% which would mean the top 200 lineups that's 0.1 and even then so if you finish if you place a lineup in the top 0.1% you will get your
money back 0.1 percent you got to be in the top 200 out of 200,000 just to make your money back now of course why am I entering this contest because I'm trying to hit the actual top lineup which will return 50 Grand and
there's virtually no other thing out there uh you know no other thing out gets where you could place a $3 entry and have the potential to win $50,000 now DFS Army subscribers we win these tournaments all the time like it most
weeks you'll see subscribers winning a contest or the Minx or something where wherever we are wherever they are we're winning these so can absolutely happen but in order for you to hit those odds you've got to survive and thrive week
and week and week in and week out to keep plowing lineups into these tournaments which is where the rest of our bankroll allocation strategy comes from I want you guys to allocate at least 50% of your weekly budget to two
contest types first head-to heads and second double ups and triple UPS now explain what these contests are head-to-heads are contest where you go up against um just random players in the ecosystem and I'm going to show you
exactly how to create those so on the draftking screen you're going to go to create a contest find your sport NFL find the mode select the time and you know select select the time and heads right and then we're going to choose our
dollar amount dollar amount how many how many lineups we want or how many create so in this case I'm setting up the $2 contest it's really really important when you playing head to heads that you start with the lowest dollar
that you start with the lowest dollar amount contest available to you now the head-to-heads we want as large of a voluminous distribution of scores as score you're going to go up against
score some of them but a lot more will put up a worse score so you're not going to double your money but you'll get some of the money back you'll have some wins some losses and if you're better than average at crafting these cash lineups
second then you should be profitable doing these so in this case the big adjustment that I always make is you want to limit the number of times one person can play against you to just once that's a very very important part of
setting up head-to heads you you want a wide distribution of scores so playing the same person over and over again effectively ruins that the other reason we want to max out the one the two the three before you get to the five and
especially the most volume heavy players on DraftKings are disallowed from playing any contests or head-to-heads especially or cash games that have that are fewer lower than $5 entry points so you can avoid a lot of the sharks there
boom when you're ready to go create the contest and right here you'd make your lineup and be good to go right so that's your head-to-heads is even if you put a lineup in so I'm going to explain the
double UPS in double UPS everybody who's at least one tenth of a point above the at least one tenth of a point above the median score the median not the median score as long as you're 0. one point above that you will double your money in
that contest now most of the double ups that you enter will have the same median score so a lot of times if you hit a certain number you will cash every single one of your double UPS so um in this example let's say given week the
this example let's say given week the median score for cash games was 150 you put up you put up heads and your double UPS you put up here in your double UPS you're going to double your money straight up $25 on your $100 budget
turns into 50 right on your head to heads that will cash a lot you'll make a little bit of profit but because you didn't absolutely crush the median score some people will actually beat you so let's say $25 will get you back $35
notice what's going on here all we did was put up a slightly above average score on our main lineup and we've already gotten back $85 of the $100 we've allocated for this week's bank roll so you're starting to see oh this
roll so you're starting to see oh this is how you play DFS and actually profit on a week-over-week basis so now we already said I'm not going to count in any tournament wins but we've already said that your lotto ticket massive gpps
no matter pretty much what you do outside of these occasion more often going to lose half your money in these so in this case we only get back $10 of so in this case we only get back $10 of the 20 that sets us up at 5085 95 back
and the rest of our profit will be determined by these small contest so what are these contest types that you could choose there's the 5x the 10x tournaments I'm going to show you my favorite small tournament on DraftKings
available in a lot of different price points and this is basically a contest where you're up against a 100 other people whatever the dollar amount is doesn't matter um what's cool about this contest you put in a top 1% lineup
contest you put in a top 1% lineup effectively you win this tournament and you'll get on your $10 entry $140 back or 14x your money now let's jump back over to our monster contest example
because I want to show you the difference so in the hundo when we get a action because I already talked about that one in the hundo when you get a top that one in the hundo when you get a top 1% score you get 14x money well what do
we get hey it's harder to hit a a one top one against 198,000 people but what top one against 198,000 people but what do we get if we hit a top 1% score in the play action well there are 200,000 entries so 1% would be anywhere within
entries so 1% would be anywhere within the top 2,000 finishers so let's look again at the payout structure and see what we're likely to get so top 1% it's what we're likely to get so top 1% it's anything from 1 1st through 2000 and and
let's just call it 1500 all right let's be more conservative, 1500 so it's this be more conservative, 1500 so it's this is even greater you need top 7% lineup and you might only get 15 bucks on your $3 so that's 5x so that's just a 5x and
you had to hit the top Point 7% against a lot more people and you could get even less than this 5x uh your your entry fee a 3X potentially if your lower end of the top 1% % of entries so again the hyundo top 1% you're talking about 14
hyundo top 1% you're talking about 14 extra money and in the play action top 1% you're looking at somewhere between three to five extra money I hope this is three to five extra money I hope this is starting to hit home why attacking those
monster tournaments is no way to turn a profit on a week-over-week basis you will almost always lose money until you win one dialing it back to the to the win one dialing it back to the to the hundo note that a top 2% actively second
place still pays 10x and then a top three four 5% lineup a top 5% lineup which in the play action isn't even doubling your money or just barely 2x in your money here is giving you anywhere from 6 to 8X your original investment so
these smaller high and and higher dollar tournaments going to be more profitable over time even though they don't have that sexy five and six figure first
place prize they're sucking you in so the reward isn't as great but because you're giving up some of that monster reward the the risk level is lower and reward the the risk level is lower and your returns your Roi is greater uh a
example of this a stock Mark example that you no one's goingon to understand right now but I don't care I'm referencing it in the stock market selling covered calls or or buying calls buying effectively I don't know if you
guys know what what that means I'm not going to explain it but buying calls supposedly ly is a activity that loses money 99% of the time so like the statistic goes that 99% of the people who buy calls on in the stock market
tend to let them expire worthless and lose all their money right well when you're in the market you can buy and sell a coal so you know when I heard that stat that 99% of that are purchased expire worthless I said well shouldn't
something where 99% of the time you'll make money and the answer is yes that is what you should be doing for the most part except the problem is that one time that 1% of the time that had a call sold against it you lost a ton of money
similarly in DFS if you only played in these hundos then you might miss out on that one time when you could have bet three bucks and won $20,000 which is why we spread out our action across all the different contest types now let's talk a
different contest types now let's talk a little bit about lineup construction for to be entering um actually before I do that I want to mention that of course football is back and DFS Army is going all in in the preseason with our biggest
discount ever our NFL discount uh for a full season 12 months of NFL access projections player projections cheat sheets the Discord with our community
everything you need to dominate at NFL DFS ownerships everything you need we've got it currently going at a big discount I guess $75 off the 12- month subscription all access for 224 using promo code NFL 2024
that link is in the description and if you want full access at DFS Army viip which is what I recommend covers all sports covers our pick them games every sports covers our pick them games every everything we do promo code VIP 2024
knocks the price down from $89.99 a month to $69.99 a month so make sure to go to DFS army.com do it right now get signed up lock in the discount you will signed up lock in the discount you will not see this again all season long this
is our preseason special it won't happen again and you lock in this price for as long as you're subscribe take a look at the other sites that don't win as much as us that don't deliver as much don't have a research station don't have real
tools don't have anything they're charging more than we are DFS Army turning Average Joe's into DFS pros make sure to use promo code VIP 2024 you get full VIP access to everything we do for $69.99 so make sure you check that out
now back to the video how do we build lineups for these various contest types double UPS then we've got our small tournaments and then of course lotto ticket tournaments so a lot of this ownership projections is really King for
our cheat sheets where we kind of focus you in on players for different contest cash play this is a tournament play that kind of a thing in cash games we want to reduce variance as much as possible in two ways number one is take the players
with the best points per dollar values versus their implied um implied salary on DraftKings or fandel so a who has a high projection is somebody we want to
use in our cash game a high points projection we also want to focus on our cash games in players with high ownership projections ownership High ownership is our friend in tournaments doesn't hurt us it helps us why does it
doesn't hurt us it helps us why does it help us because a in in cash games let's say there's a player um we just back test uh from the 2023 season with uh a lot of subscribers and it's an awesome teaching tool that we do at DFS Army in
the preseason where we rerun the optimizer you know for the previous year slates and heal for what worked and what didn't and there was this one week where Taylor gets hurt Zach Moss being the starter for the Colts and he was 4600
super cheap on DraftKings for a starting running back and his ship projection that week was something like 55 60% because it was too good of a price for a have a hard time kind of not making
play now he actually failed that week only put up a seven right if you played your opponent also played him so that was just a wash but in tournaments when
60 70% of the field played moss and he got a seven well if you didn't play him and you played someone else in that spot who didn't fail I mean you just leap frogged 70 80% of that tournament a some of these tournaments we're looking at
you're talking about leap frogging 150,000 people and now competing in a 150,000 people and now competing in a tournament with only the rest so in our head-to-heads we want to actually look for the highest projected ownership
players and those are the ones that you want to build your lineups around now another way to build for head-to-heads is simply and and double UPS is simply to run the domination station Optimizer and maybe make 10 or 15 lineups I like
to sort by highest projected ownership so that it will just find the lineup it made with the highest projected ownership and potentially just use that one or use some version of that lineup as your cash head-to-head double up
triple up approach from there as we move on to small tournaments how do we attack small tournaments well the smaller the tournament the chalkier you can be but so in a small tournament the first thing I'm doing is stacking my quarterback
with at least one of his pass catchers I might do that in head-to-heads and doing that in any sort of Tournament entry that I'm doing I'm also potentially fading what I consider to be sketchy or bad chalk and that stuff
comes up every week we talk about it on all the shows we do here at DFS Army but it usually involves a player who's a little underpriced but not underpriced enough and Just overhyped For No Good Reason like he had a big week last week
but other than that he hasn't been doing that much or something along those lines recognize but if they looking to fade some bad chalk or just take some shots on areas that people aren't taking like in a small gpp I might find let's say
let's actually load up week one I'm G to show you the perfect I'll show it to you show you the perfect I'll show it to you on screen so in week one here we've got a group of wide receivers in CD lamb Tyreek Hill Justin Jefferson Jamar Chase
Devonte Adams in that group and even Mike Evans right we've got this group of wide receivers that are all really good they're all great they're all studs every single one of these guys can put up a 40 so what I would do is let's say
in week one for whatever reason Tyreek Hill actually I kind of see it as possible that Tyreek Hill will be the the nuts why well it's Jacksonville and maybe there's some stat about Miami's defensive backs can't stop Hill
doesn't matter maybe he's going to be the chalk right so I might say you know Hill if I'm going to go into this contest and play Tyreek Hill you know everybody else he 35% ownership and let's say Jamar Chase um in this lower
let's say Jamar Chase um in this lower total game here at Cincinnati is home is only projecting at 5% ownership well I might look at a contest like this and say you know what let everybody play Hill I I know he's awesome I know he's a
great play but I'm not doing that I'm just gonna play one of these other guys like Chase and then if Chase pops or Hill fails and Hill is massively own that tournament that is enough to actually thrust you into first place in
a lot of these smaller contests I'll give a personal example years ago I was in the Draft Kings King of the beach tournament and this was a few years back and I just remember it because it was a very specific situation where the this
was when Julio Jones was still on the Falcons yes he was still on the Falcons right and maybe it was Julio Jones and Calvin Ridley I can't remember the two I think it was Julio Jones and maybe Calvin Ridley were the two wide
wrong I could be misremembering but I know Julio was the main guy and I do think it was Calvin Ridley and this was a week where the Falcons offense was the team that could not stop the pass all season long so it was a 100 person
contest and it was very obvious that Matt what the heck was his name I don't know the Falcons quarterback Matt can't remember but anyway was the Falcons quarterback to Julio Stacks were going to be the chalk it was that Falcons
quarterback was a highest own guy highstone QB Julio Jones was projecting like a 35 40% Buck couldn't stop anything so I looked at that game and I said all right if everybody's gonna play um this QB da stack it doesn't make
and do the same thing so I said you know what who's the wr2 for that team C said all right I do want a piece of that game but let's find a piece of that game with someone different so everybody's playing Julio I'm going to play the wr2
um everybody's playing the quarterback from the Falcons yeah it was that Ryan so everybody playing Matt Ryan jio Stacks so I said let me do something different quarterback I think it was Fitzpatrick at that time now the reason
I tell the story is because I didn't want to get too crazy and go too far off Chalk in a 100 person contest not like I was going to ignore this game that had like a 55o total and it was this Tampa couldn't stop the pass but I found a way
to attack that game that was different than what the field was doing and that was enough for a 10th Place finish in that tournament which was great and got lots of money Julio Jones wound W wound up getting hurt but he was on his a big
game he winds up getting hurt and then of course Ridley goes crazy um now you that was gonna get hurt and you're right I of course I didn't know that but what I did know was that this player is going to be 60% owned and it makes no sense I
will get Gain No advantage in this contest from playing such a chalky player especially at the wide receiver position where wide receivers are much more volatile for example compared to running backs or quarterbacks so with
that being said for attacking your 5x 10x small gpps hundos you want to play play lineups that are correlated QB correlated with one or two pass catchers maybe back so bring one back from the
necessary but pay attention to the chalk it's okay to play some chalk especially little different somewhere try to understand what your opponents are going to do and you know while they're playing
you're going to play you love this game let's say another game in week one has a massive total and everybody's playing the WR QB combo maybe grab the running going to do the scoring it's a high total game everybody's playing uh let's
say let's say again let's jump back to the example and let's look at these games will be Jacksonville Miami everybody's playing Tyreek Hill maybe we'll play Devon aan instead maybe he'll go off in that game so do something a
little bit different having ownership projections is a really important key to this and of course that's something we have over at DFS Army alongside player everything you need here's the chalkboard uh so we have our chalkboard
this helps you pick your um of course it's not live yet it's just preseason games but when this is live it shows every position group our projected ownership for each player or projection for each player and the chalkboard is
what I go to I go right to the chalkboard try to create my cash lineups and any kind of chalky lineups that I want to create I just pull the top players for most of these most of these groups and it's as simple as that um you
can absolutely Crush cash games and you can a profitable player on DraftKings in 2024 and again now if you if you like the idea of signing up at but you don't like the idea of even using one of these promo codes which I think you should um
especially the VIP 2024 another way to get signed up FS Army is by using our free month class and simply click go to the top of the website here click on free month and you can get a free month of DFS Army by signing up for one of our
partner side so you can do that as well and it is all described right here prize code DFS Army you let us know and we will send you a code for a free month of DFS Army good luck this season everybody I'll see you next time