Best Ball Draft Strategy: How to Win NFL Tournaments

If you are firing entries into the giant NFL best ball tournaments on Underdog and DraftKings 🎁, you already know the math is brutal. These contests draw six figures' worth of entrants, and the largest ones structure the path to the top prize like a parlay: you have to survive multiple advance rounds before you ever reach the final week, then beat the last 150 to 250 lineups standing. Hit all of it and you can win a life-changing payout. Miss one leg and you are done.

Related reading: NFL DFS Showdown Strategy: Captain Picks That Win GPPs and Underdog Battle Royale Strategy: How to Win Drafts.

I have been drafting best ball teams since the format took off, and I built my whole approach around one idea: best ball is a different game from redraft, and the people who treat it that way have a real edge. This is my best ball draft strategy, the same framework I use across hundreds of drafts every offseason heading into a new season. I started Awesemo.com (now Stokastic.com) precisely because hobbyists deserved the same simulation-driven tools the top pros use, and best ball is where that edge shows up most.

In Summary (TL;DR)

• Best ball is not redraft. Only your best performers at each position count each week, so depth and ceiling matter more than perfect weekly accuracy.
• Consider a third quarterback. The field underdrafts QB. When late QB value falls far enough relative to your RB and WR depth, a third QB beats another bench receiver or back. Take whichever has the bigger ADP-vs-value gap at that pick.
• Leverage the playoff weeks. In tournaments with advance rounds, the championship weeks carry disproportionate weight, more than in season-long formats, because a point in the final week is worth far more than a point in Week 3 and almost nobody adjusts for late-season schedules.
• Build balanced early, get cute late. Take value across positions early so you can pounce when a position runs at the wrong time.
• Let the sims do the heavy lifting. I rank and stress-test every roster build with Stokastic's NFL Sim Tools instead of eyeballing it.

Why best ball roster construction is different from redraft

Best ball is mathematically fascinating because only your top performers at each position count toward your weekly score. You set no lineup. There is no agonizing over who to start. The format does it for you and keeps the best results.

That single rule changes everything. The difference between season-long redraft, where you choose starters every week, and best ball cannot be overstated. If you take a standard set of redraft rankings and apply them straight to best ball, it is not a disaster, but you are leaving the format's real edge on the table.

To rank players specifically for best ball, I do not just sort by raw projection. I run simulations of how every individual player shifts your overall season outcome on an average roster. Your roster is a fixed size, so every slot is a tradeoff: an Underdog best ball roster is 18 players and DraftKings is 20. A defensible Underdog build lands around three quarterbacks, eight wide receivers, five running backs, and two tight ends to fill all 18 slots (run two quarterbacks and you carry one extra receiver or back instead). Once you assume those building blocks, you can simulate how each individual player contributes to the team's best ball score across a full season. Those simulations are the basis of how I rank players for the format. That is the core of the approach: projections tailored to best ball, not generic redraft numbers.

This is exactly what Stokastic's NFL Sim Tools and DataHub projections are built to do. Rather than ranking players in a vacuum, the sims evaluate each player inside the context of a realistic roster, the same way they simulate DFS contests tens of thousands of times to find the lineups with the best win equity. The tool surfaces the builds and leverage spots that win most often across all those simulated runs, not the one that simply projects highest on paper.

Playoff-week leverage: the biggest edge in best ball draft strategy

Here is the part most of the field ignores. In the big multi-round tournaments, not every week carries the same weight.

In a flat best ball league where each week counts equally, redraft rankings line up fine. But the marquee tournaments are not flat. You could have a rough early week and still advance, but a rough final week is game over. Because the stakes balloon as you move through the advance rounds, an extra point late is not worth the same as an extra point early. Once you factor in that you have multiple must-win weeks, the importance shifts dramatically away from regular-season scoring toward those playoff weeks.

I found this very hard to quantify by intuition. My first instinct was that the regular-season weeks were nearly worthless next to the final weeks, but that is wrong. The margin of victory in a long regular-season round is not enormous, so those regular-season points still carry real value even though there are more of them to go around. The only way I got a clean answer was by simulation.

Using sims, I solved for the value of an extra projected point in each round, then multiplied by the share of entrants still alive at that point. In DFS we live by points-per-dollar to find value. For this I flipped it into a dollar-per-point metric: the expected dollars added to your entry for each marginal projected point in a given week.

The result is consistent across both major sites: the final week is worth far more per point than any regular-season week, because if you get there you are racing a few hundred lineups for the top prize instead of beating 11 others to advance. The championship weeks carry disproportionate weight, more than they would in a flat season-long format where every week counts equally. That is the opportunity. Almost nobody studies who their roster's teams will actually play in the championship weeks.

Because Stokastic's rankings are powered by weekly projections, you can account for the likelihood of success in any individual week, not just the season total. And strength of schedule is more than the defensive matchup. Venue matters enormously late in the year. The disadvantage of throwing in cold, windy conditions can wipe out the edge of facing a weak secondary. Those factors live on the back end of the projections so you do not have to model them by hand.

Stop eyeballing your rankings. I run every best ball build through Stokastic's NFL Sim Tools and DataHub projections so playoff-week leverage and matchup weighting are already baked in. New users get 10% off your first payment with code STOK10.

Start with Stokastic Sims

NFL best ball draft tips: my biggest takeaways

Once your rankings are tailored to the format, draft strategy is the rest of the game. These are the takeaways I keep coming back to across hundreds of drafts.

The field undervalues quarterback (consider a third)

A third quarterback is worth rostering when late QB value has fallen far enough relative to your RB and WR depth. The decision is not a blanket rule, it is a comparison: at the pick in question, take whichever position has the bigger gap between a player's ranking and his draft cost. Often that is the QB the field has skipped, because most drafters stop at two. My points-added math assumes a full roster, and on Underdog's 18 spots that tends to land near two or three quarterbacks, five running backs, eight wide receivers, and two tight ends. Deviate if you are unusually strong or weak somewhere, and note this competes directly with leaning on wide receiver depth, so the third QB only wins when its value gap is the larger one.

People avoid a third QB because in redraft you start one, and they fear that two big QB weeks "waste" points. The value of a second or third QB does not come from two booms in the same week, because you only ever start one quarterback, so a second monster QB the same week is wasted that week. The real edge is across the season: extra quarterbacks raise your weekly QB floor, covering byes, injuries, and dud weeks, and the value comes from those being different weeks. Best ball auto-starts whichever scores best and discards the rest. Because most of the field stops at two quarterbacks, good QB value falls into your lap in the later rounds.

There is a tournament-structure bonus too. As the playoff rounds advance, surviving lineups get more similar because they all rode the same boom players forward. If you carry a third quarterback, you are far likelier to hold at least one QB who is not over-represented in the final field, which is exactly where you want differentiation.

Don't be afraid to let players drop

This works best from the middle draft slots, where you wait a moderate number of picks between selections. If a player is the best pick available now but there is a good chance you can still get him a round later, letting him fall can be a worthwhile gamble. The gap between a player's ranking and his actual draft cost is a clean proxy for the value you are capturing on that pick.

Wait on WR and QB, be careful waiting on RB and TE

You can push wide receiver and quarterback toward the back of the draft. Wide receiver has a deep pool of viable players who go undrafted every time simply because there are so many of them. Since you only need a few of your roughly eight receivers to hit each week, you can substitute quantity for quality to a point. Quarterback, as covered above, is chronically neglected, so I am happy to let those fall and scoop the ones nobody else wants. Running back and tight end are thinner, so waiting too long there is riskier.

Know your scoring settings

Scoring shifts your board, and the two big sites differ. Underdog best ball is half-PPR. DraftKings best ball is full-PPR with yardage bonuses. Full-PPR pushes reception-heavy players up your board, so it balances running back and receiver value nicely. Half-PPR dings reception-heavy types, slot receivers, pass-catching backs, and tight ends, while rushing-first running backs gain relative value. If you are drafting off rankings that already bake in the specific site's scoring, these differences are handled for you, but always confirm the format before you draft.

Draft balanced early

If you grab the highest-ranked name on the board every single time, you will run out of roster room at one or two positions and lose the ability to pounce when other players at those positions drop later. Spreading your early picks keeps your options open.

Stack with the right quarterbacks

Stacking matters more for some QBs than others. A quarterback who adds heavy rushing production can deliver a league-winning week on his own, so I worry less about pairing him with his receivers. A pure pocket passer is very unlikely to post a ceiling week without at least one of his pass-catchers also crushing, so those QB2 and QB3 picks should be paired with receivers from their team. My default is to wait on QB, but the one time I will reach is here: roughly a round ahead of ADP for a pocket-passing QB who stacks a pass-catcher I already own, to lock in that correlation rather than let an opponent break it up.

Know the draft room you are in

Different sites default to different sort orders, some by site rankings and some by ADP. That alone changes which players pop on each platform. My preference is to load my own rankings, then sort by ADP so I can quickly see who will not survive to my next pick and prioritize accordingly. Learn the logistics of your specific draft room before you are on the clock.

How to use Stokastic tools to dominate best ball drafts

Here is where the proprietary edge comes in. I do not draft on gut. I draft on simulation output.

• NFL Sim Tools and DataHub projections. These produce the best-ball-tailored rankings described above, weighting playoff weeks and matchups so your board already reflects format leverage rather than generic redraft value.
• the Sims. After a draft, I stress-test roster construction and exposure across many simulated builds the same way the Generator builds and balances DFS lineups, so I can see whether my position allocation actually holds up over a full season of outcomes.
• Boom/Bust and Ownership-style range thinking. Best ball lives and dies on ceiling. I evaluate late-round dart throws by their upside range, not their median, the same boom/bust lens we use to find tournament-winning DFS plays.

The same philosophy that powers Stokastic's DFS Contest Sims, simulate the outcome thousands of times and play for win probability rather than a single projected score, is exactly what wins best ball. You are not trying to be right on average. You are trying to maximize the chance one of your lineups reaches the final week and pops.

A worked example: the third-QB edge in action

Let me make the third-quarterback point concrete with how the math actually plays out in a draft.

Say you are picking from the middle of the order. Through the early rounds you have built balanced: a couple of running backs, a few receivers, one quarterback you like. By the middle rounds, the QB run the field expects has not happened, because most drafters are content with one or two. That leaves a starter-quality passer sitting there several rounds below where his weekly projection says he should go.

In best ball, taking that QB as your third does two things. First, it raises your weekly QB floor across the season, because the format auto-starts whichever of your quarterbacks scores best that week, so the extra arm covers byes, injuries, and dud weeks. Second, it hedges the playoff weeks, where surviving lineups cluster around the same one or two quarterbacks. If you can also pair that passer with a wide receiver already on your roster, you have built a cheap correlated stack that can spike in exactly the weeks that decide the tournament. That is the points-added logic, a marginal projected point late is worth more in dollar-per-point terms than a marginal point early, turned into an actual pick.

I generally wait on QB, but when that third passer also stacks a receiver I already own, I will reach about a round ahead of his ADP to lock in the correlation, because in a tournament structured like a parlay, the lineups that win are the ones built to spike late, not the ones that look prettiest on draft night.

More on this: NFL DFS Hub: Every Live Stokastic NFL Page · NHL Best Ball Draft Strategy: How To Win On Underdog · NFL Playoff Best Ball Strategy: Underdog, Drafters & DK · Underdog NBA Daily Draft Strategy: Win Fantasy Hoops · NHL Best Ball Strategy: Draft A Winning Fantasy Hockey Team

Draft smarter with Stokastic Sims

Apply this best ball draft strategy with rankings built for the format and you will be competitive with every lineup you draft. The pros are not winning these tournaments on vibes. They are winning by simulating outcomes and drafting for win probability, and that is exactly what Stokastic's NFL Sim Tools, DataHub projections are built to give you.

Get the full toolkit with Stokastic Sims and take 10% off your first payment with code STOK10.

Upgrade to Stokastic Sims Play responsibly, and good luck in your drafts this season.

Alex "Awesemo" Baker is the founder of Awesemo.com (now Stokastic.com). A former professional poker player, he reached the No. 1 overall DFS ranking on RotoGrinders and built his projections and simulation tools to give everyday players the same edge as the top pros.

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