How To Shrink The Field And Win Big MLB DFS Tournaments

Morgan, who plays on DraftKings as CW279, took down the DraftKings Ultimate Main Event for more than $830,000. He actually shared first place, an identical score with another player who had also maxed out his entries and built eight completely different hitters around the same two low-owned pitchers. The part worth your time is not that he got lucky on one MLB slate. It is that he learned how to shrink the field: he set himself up so that if things broke right, he was competing against roughly 26 people for the top prize instead of 1,300. That is the whole game, and it is a skill you can borrow.

He laid out the thinking on a Stokastic interview, and very little of it was about which players he "liked." It was about leverage, projected ownership, and the discipline to be comfortable losing. If you already know what a stack and an ownership projection are, this is the next layer.

Watch: How $19 Seats Turned Into An $830K DFS Win

The full conversation walks through the strategic thinking behind the win and the bankroll mindset that makes it repeatable. Watch on YouTube.

A Worked Example: The Math That Turned 1,300 Into 26

Start with the math, because it reframes everything. A 1,300-player tournament sounds like a lottery. So the goal is not to beat 1,300 people. The goal is to quietly eliminate most of them before the games even start, then have a real shot against whoever is left.

Here is how that played out on the winning slate:

Decision	Field effect
Took 0% Hunter Brown (46.4% Projected Ownership)	If Brown underperformed, the ~46% of the field on him lost their leverage, cutting the effective field from ~1,300 to ~650
Played Zero Rockies Stacks (The Popular Pivot Off Brown)	Sidesteps the next-most-obvious build the field piled into
Played Patrick Corbin At ~6% Ownership	Corbin hit, but most of the field that played him also had Brown; fading Brown left ~98% of the field gone
Played Tanner Gordon At 0.15% Ownership	Morgan was the only player in the field on Gordon, and his three lineups were that entire 0.15%

Stack those choices and the effective field collapses. "Instead of 1,300 people, I was competing with like 26," is how he put it. Twenty-six people for a million-dollar prize is a bet you take all day. Thirteen hundred is a dart throw.

The point of leverage is not to be different for its own sake. It is to make a 1,300-player ocean feel like the lap pool at your local YMCA, so that when your build hits, the money is concentrated on you.

He did this with 12 entries when the contest allowed 40, and the results clustered at the top: a chopped first place, plus 5th, 10th, and 11th. Concentrated, similar lineups built around the same low-owned spots are what produce that kind of cluster.

Why Shrinking The Field Beats Picking The "Best" Lineup

The mental model that makes the rest click: DFS is not a sportsbook, it is closer to a poker tournament. The house takes its rake, and then you play against the field for whatever is left. So the most important question on any slate is not "who is good tonight," it is "what is everybody else doing, and how do I avoid being in a pool with all of them."

This is why simply being right about baseball is not enough anymore. Fire the highest-projected lineup and you are sharing it with a huge chunk of a smart field, where splitting the top prize with the rest of that group is the good outcome. That edge is how you make sure that when you win, you win big instead of carving it up many ways.

If "ownership" and "leverage" are new words, our how to win DFS tournaments guide and the DFS dictionary cover the fundamentals. From here, assume them.

Projected Ownership Is The First Number You Look At

"The first thing I look at every day is what's the projected ownership, and then I make decisions based off that." That single sentence is the entire workflow, and it matters even more in football than baseball because football is the ultimate ownership sport.

The reason you cannot skip this: your opponents are looking at the same tools you are. The field gets smarter every year, and as he put it, people can now sit down 25 minutes before lock and build a good lineup with the tools. So you are not hunting for the best player. You are hunting for the spot where the field is concentrated wrong, and the only way to see that is to have the ownership read in front of you. When you cannot see where the chalk is, you cannot leverage away from it.

The Stokastic MLB Sim Tools are built for exactly this. The projected ownership shows you where the field is piling in, the number he said he checks first every single day, and the Contest Sims run the slate across thousands of simulated outcomes to see which low-owned builds tend to win a tournament rather than just post the highest median score. That is the difference between fading chalk on a hunch and fading it because the simulations say a contrarian build has more equity.

Want the same starting point he used? Projected ownership is the number he says he checks first every day; the Stokastic+ MLB Sim Tools give you that same ownership read, plus Contest Sims to pressure-test tournament builds before lock. Take 30% off any monthly subscription with code Morgan at checkout: Start with the Sims.

Go Narrow, Not Wide, When The Spot Is Clear

Most players spread out. They run many different pitchers and many different builds to "get some money back." He started the day planning to do exactly that, then looked at the tools and went the other way: super narrow, a handful of similar lineups built around the spots he was confident the field had wrong.

Going narrow is uncomfortable, and that is the point. If Hunter Brown had thrown a gem, those 12 lineups were dead together and he made nothing. You have to be at peace with zero. But narrow is also what produces a 1st-5th-10th-11th finish, because when the contrarian read hits, all of your bullets are pointed at the same target instead of scattered.

This is the opposite of cash-game thinking. In cash you want safe and similar to the field; in a large-field GPP you want to be concentrated where the field is light. The two builds pull in opposite directions:

	Cash games	Large-field GPP
Goal	Beat ~50% of the field	Finish near the very top
Ownership	High-owned is fine	Hunt low-owned leverage
Entries	Few, safe, similar to field	Concentrated on your contrarian read
Mindset	Consistency	Comfortable losing for the rare big hit

For the baseball-specific version of the contrarian build, see the MLB DFS contrarian strategy breakdown.

Satellites Are The Cheap Way In

Here is the detail most people miss: he did not buy directly into the Ultimate Main Event. None of the seats were direct buy-ins. They were satellite seats, a lot of them won for as little as $19.

He treats it like a parlay. A week before the main event he entered around 20 satellites in one night and won the four seats he was chasing. In poker terms, those seats were "Sklansky bucks," theoretical dollars that are worth nothing until you turn them into real ones. The math is friendly: a small satellite buy-in gives you a real shot at a seat worth far more, for far less than a direct buy-in.

The practical takeaway:

• You do not need to direct-buy your way into the big contests. Win your seat cheap through satellites.
• Treat satellite nights as their own mini-tournaments. Enter several; you only need to convert a few.
• Getting the seat and cashing the main event are two separate parlays. Clear the first one cheaply, then swing for the second.

Bankroll And Emotional Control Are The Real Edge

Everyone talks about bankroll management; almost no one lives it. The number that matters: the best poker tournament players in the world cash 11 to 13.5% of the time, and DFS is similar. So nine out of ten slates, you make nothing. You have to walk into every slate assuming you lose everything you put in play, which means only ever risking a small slice of your roll.

The proof is in what happened after the win. In the three slates following the $830K score, he changed nothing about his process and got zero dollars back all three times. No tilt, no chasing, no bumping up stakes to recapture the high. That discipline is what keeps you solvent long enough for the rare big hit to land.

He compares it to a casino roulette board. People stare at the run of past results and read it however their bias wants — "it's been black seven times, it has to be red," or "it has to be black again." The run of past results means nothing for the next spin; the board is there because it feeds your bias and makes the house money. DFS punishes the same wishful thinking. If you cannot sit calmly through five or six losing days, you will eventually go all-in on black, it will come up red, and you will wonder what happened.

If you are not comfortable being uncomfortable, a more conservative path may suit you better. There is no shame in steady, low-variance investing. Large-field DFS asks you to accept frequent losses on purpose, and that is not for everyone.

Why The Old Leverage Plays Stopped Working

Leverage is not a fixed recipe, and this is where staying flexible matters. Years ago you could stack five hitters against the best pitcher on the slate, all under 1% owned, and win $100,000 because almost no one else dared. Think of the old days stacking five Marlins against an ace like the Phillies' Roy Halladay. That worked because the field was thin and information was king.

It barely works now, for one reason: the tools got good and too many people run the same contrarian plays.

The old leverage plays became the new chalk. Once a contrarian move is widely known, you are back in a crowded pool. The edge is always in the spot the field has not caught up to yet.

On the winning slate he did not fire Rockies stacks as the pivot off Hunter Brown, precisely because that was the known, popular move and he did not want to be in that pool either. His baseball read backed the leverage play: he did not think the Rockies would be very good, and they won 6-1 without going off.

His own cautionary tale is college football. He used to dominate it back when there were no tools and people were "shooting arrows in the dark." He recently fired a big number into an opening-slate college football tournament, got zero back, looked at the top lineups, and was stunned by how good they were. The information edge he once had is gone. The lesson is not "quit," it is "respect your opponents and keep moving" — whatever edge worked three years ago has probably been arbitraged away, so your read on what the field is doing has to be current.

The Bottom Line

The eye-catching number is an $830K win, but the transferable skill is field-shrinking. Look at projected ownership first, build to make the field smaller, concentrate your entries on the spots you are confident are mispriced, get in cheap through satellites, and stay disciplined enough to lose nine times for the one time it pays. None of that requires being the smartest baseball mind in the room. It requires the tools your opponents already have, plus the patience most of them lack.

When you are ready to find the field's blind spots yourself, the Stokastic+ Sim Tools give you the projected ownership read at the center of this approach, plus Contest Sims to pressure-test your builds. Code Morgan takes 30% off any monthly subscription at checkout: start with the Sims.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "shrinking the field" mean in DFS? It means making roster decisions, mostly low-owned plays and deliberate fades of the highest-owned chalk, that put you in a pool with far fewer opponents. If most of the field is on a player you fade, you are effectively only competing with the smaller group that built differently, which is where a top finish actually becomes reachable.

Is fading high-owned players always the right move? No. Fading a 46% chalk only pays if that player underperforms; if he goes off, you are dead. Leverage is a calculated trade of equity, not a guarantee. You fade where the projected ownership is high relative to the player's real edge, and you have to be comfortable with the slates it costs you.

Do I need to buy directly into the big tournaments? Not necessarily. Many large-field winners get their seats through satellites for a fraction of the direct buy-in. It lets you take real shots at the big prize pools without risking a large chunk of your bankroll on a single entry.

How many lineups should I enter? There is no fixed number, but concentration beats spreading thin when you have a clear read. On the winning slate he used 12 entries out of a possible 40, built narrowly around the same low-owned spots, and finished 1st, 5th, 10th, and 11th. Going wide dilutes the leverage that wins tournaments.

What tool helps most with this strategy? Projected ownership is the first thing to check each day, and the Contest Sims help identify which low-owned builds actually win rather than just post a high median score. The Stokastic+ MLB Sim Tools provide both.