NFL DFS Contest Selection Week 1: Cash Game Or Milly Maker?
By Jake Hari
August 22, 2026
Every September I watch the same thing happen: a player spends six days agonizing over his Week 1 lineup and about six seconds deciding where to enter it. Then the slate locks, and the contest he picked quietly matters more than any swap he made. Week 1 of the NFL season is one of the biggest deposit days on the DFS calendar and brings the softest set of fields you will see all year, which means the entry screen is where your real edge lives. My goal here is to make that screen simple: what cash games, single-entry tournaments and the Milly Maker actually pay, what each one honestly costs you in expected value, and a three-question test that turns your bankroll into a contest plan. By the end you will have a worked dollar split you can copy for opening Sunday, and a clear place for the Milly Maker inside it.
One note before we start: this guide is about choosing contests, not building rosters. The building side runs on NFL DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub, and the all-sports version of this decision lives in our DFS contest selection guide. Week 1 NFL is its own animal, and that is what we are solving today.
Cash, Single Entry Or The Milly Maker: What You Are Choosing Between
Daily fantasy contests sort into three doors, and the differences are structural, not cosmetic.
Cash games are the flat-payout formats: double-ups, 50/50s and head-to-heads. In a double-up specifically, roughly the top 45% of the field doubles its entry fee, and finishing first pays the same as sneaking into the last paid spot; 50/50s and head-to-heads pay out around the top half (payout splits vary a bit by contest, so glance at the payout table before entering). Your job is to beat about half the room with the steadiest lineup you can build.
Single-entry tournaments are GPPs (guaranteed prize pools, the top-heavy tournament format) where every player, from the newest depositor to the best pro in the world, gets exactly one lineup. That cap removes the volume advantage the sharpest players lean on, which makes single entry one of the most beatable tournament rooms in NFL DFS; the full case is in our single-entry GPP strategy guide.
Large-field GPPs are the lottery format, and the DraftKings Milly Maker is its Week 1 extreme. For last season's opener, DraftKings ran a special $5 edition of the Milly Maker, and it drew more than 832,000 entries, with one first-place lineup worth $1 million. Almost everyone who enters loses the $5, and the contest is designed that way.
| Cash games | Single-entry GPPs | Milly Maker (large-field) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payout Shape | Flat: ~45% of field doubles | Top-heavy, smaller field | Extremely top-heavy |
| Who You Have To Beat | About half the room | One lineup per player, capped | 800,000+ entries at once |
| Variance | Low | Medium | Very high |
| Lineup Goal | Highest floor | Score AND uniqueness | Ceiling and low duplication |
| Realistic Outcome | Small, steady wins and losses | Occasional real scores | Long droughts, rare jackpots |
The row worth sitting with is the last one. Nothing on that line says one format is smarter than another; it says they pay on completely different schedules. Cash pays like a wage, single entry pays like a bonus, and the Milly Maker pays like a lottery with skill mixed in. The mistake is not picking the lottery. The mistake is funding it like a wage.
What Each Format Honestly Pays
Here is the expected-value conversation most contest lobbies would rather skip.
In cash games, the site's cut is hiding in the gap between the share of the field that gets paid and the half you might expect. Only about 45% of a double-up field cashes, so you need to finish ahead of roughly 55% of the room just to get paid, and you need to cash about half the time before a double-up habit even breaks even. The good news is that cash edges are real and repeatable for a disciplined player with strong projections; the flip side is that they are thin, and they compound slowly. Cash is how a bankroll survives. It is rarely how one gets exciting.
Single entry sits in the middle and, for my money, offers the best ratio of edge to variance in NFL DFS. The pros cannot bury you with 150 lineups, more of the prize pool sits in casually built rosters, and one genuinely well-constructed lineup competes on even footing. You still need a top-heavy finish to get paid meaningfully, so you will cash less often than in double-ups, but the ceiling on a good Sunday is a different order of magnitude.
The Milly Maker sits at the far end: the worst cash rate of the three formats and the only one where $5 can become $1 million. In a field of 832,000-plus, even a great lineup usually loses, and a winning process looks like eating dead tickets for weeks. What last year's winner shows is that the jackpot is real and reachable, with a lineup built on reads the field ignored. What the rest of the field shows is the base rate. Both facts belong in your plan.
The thread connecting all three formats: every edge runs through better projections than the field, applied to the right payout shape. That data layer is the part you control before a single game kicks off, and it is also the part with a deadline attached this month.
Week 1 is exactly when a season-long data plan gets decided. Stokastic's NFL Core, Max and MVP annual tiers are on Early Bird pricing right now, and on September 1 NFL pricing goes up across the board; the full Early Bird breakdown has the tier-by-tier math. An annual plan bought this week keeps today's price through the playoffs.
Three Questions That Pick Your Week 1 Contests
Because the formats pay on different schedules, the right mix depends far more on your bankroll than on your skill. Ask yourself three things before you enter anything.
1. How big is this Sunday relative to your whole season? An NFL DFS season is roughly 18 weeks of main slates plus playoffs. If Week 1 takes 40% of your bankroll, one bad Sunday ends your season in September. A common discipline among long-term winners is keeping any single slate to a small slice of the roll, somewhere around a tenth of it, so that variance never gets a knockout punch. Week 1 makes restraint easier than it feels: the stale-pricing edge on the opening board does not expire at Sunday's lock, because DraftKings keeps repricing off thin data for the first few weeks. Our DFS bankroll guide walks the full framework.
2. Are you building a bankroll or buying entertainment? Both are legitimate. A builder weights cash and single entry, where edges are steadier, and treats the Milly Maker as a small fixed cost. An entertainment player can weight the Milly Maker more heavily, as long as the stake is money that was always going to be spent on the sweat.
3. How many lineups will you actually manage? Cash and single entry ask for one to a handful of carefully defended rosters. Mass-entering large-field GPPs asks for portfolio management across dozens of builds, late swap included. Be honest about the hours; an unmanaged 20-entry block is usually worse than three lineups you actually watched. If the honest answer is one lineup, single entry is the format built for you, and the Single Lineup Simulator covered below is the tool that pressure-tests that one roster before you commit it.
Translated into dollars, the answers become a split. Take a $300 bankroll as a purely illustrative example, with 10%, or $30, allocated to opening Sunday:
| Contest Type | Illustrative allocation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Double-Up / 50/50 | $20 | The steady core; a normal Sunday returns most of the stake |
| Single-Entry GPP | $5 | The best edge-per-dollar tournament room |
| Milly Maker | $5 | One ticket at the jackpot, priced as a fixed cost |
The number that matters most in that table is the one that is not there: the $270 still sitting in your account after lock. That cushion is the difference between a Week 1 result you absorb and one that ends your season. Notice also what the split implies about the Milly Maker: at these ratios it is one ticket. If that feels too small, the fix is growing the roll through the first two rows until the ratios buy a second ticket.
How The Contest Sims Judge Each Format
The reason I keep talking about formats as payout shapes is that our simulation tools literally treat them that way. The Stokastic pre-contest simulator takes the tournament lineups you built, plays them against a simulated version of the contest field tens of thousands of times, and hands back a simulated ROI, win rate and cash rate for every build; the NFL DFS contest simulator walkthrough tours it tab by tab. The setting that makes it a contest-selection tool is percent to first: match it to your contest's payout curve, and a top-heavy Milly Maker build gets judged on ceiling and duplication while a smaller single-entry field gets judged on the balance of score and uniqueness. The same lineup can grade out very differently across the two rooms, which is the whole argument of this article expressed as a number.
Cash games are the deliberate exception: the Contest Sims are a tournament tool, and we do not use the simulated-tournament pool to build double-up lineups. Cash is a floor exercise, built straight from projections, chasing the steadiest points on the slate rather than a simulated jackpot. Keeping those two workflows separate is one of the quietest edges in DFS, because most of the field runs one lineup through both doors.
Watch: One Lineup, Simulated Against The Field
For the one-lineup formats, the Single Lineup Simulator is the tool built for exactly the problem single entry creates, and as we broke down on our NFL Single Lineup Simulator walkthrough, it hides a trick most users never touch: a three-column CSV upload that swaps in your own projections and ownership for the entire field before you sim. Watch on YouTube.
Why Week 1 Fields Are The Softest Of The Season
Everything above applies to any NFL Sunday, and Week 1 turns the volume up on all of it.
DraftKings priced this year's opening board off last season and August guesses, and the shape is unusually kind: our DraftKings Week 1 pricing first look pulled the full 715-player board and found Jahmyr Gibbs ($8,000) as the most expensive player on the slate, ahead of Ja'Marr Chase ($7,800) and every quarterback, with Josh Allen ($7,000) topping a compressed QB tier and 547 of the 715 players priced at $4,000 or less. Soft, stale pricing means more viable rosters, which rewards players who pick their room carefully.
Ownership is even softer than pricing. In September, the field's ownership is built on August narratives, and the gap between narrative and reality is where tournaments are won. Remember that 832,000-entry field from earlier? It was won by a quarterback rostered on 1.8% of lineups, and our NFL Week 1 Milly Maker strategy breakdown shows the same contrarian shape winning two years running. Soft ownership is the strongest argument for buying your Milly ticket in Week 1 rather than Week 10: the one week the field is guessing is the one week your $5 buys the most leverage. It argues just as loudly for keeping the ticket small, because a soft field is still 832,000 deep.
Cash players get their own Week 1 gift, and it lives in that compressed quarterback tier. When the most expensive QB on the board costs $7,000, a floor-first cash build can pay for elite quarterback volume and still afford a bell-cow back, a combination mid-season pricing almost never allows once the board recalibrates. The same soft board that hands tournament players their leverage hands cash players a cheaper path to the slate's most predictable points.
FAQ
What is the DraftKings Milly Maker? The Milly Maker is DraftKings' flagship large-field NFL tournament, paying $1 million to first place. For Week 1 last season, DraftKings ran a special $5 entry edition, and it drew more than 832,000 entries.
What is the best NFL DFS contest type for beginners? Cash games, with double-ups first. The flat payout means a solid, high-floor lineup gets paid without needing a top-1% finish, so you learn pricing and roster construction while your bankroll survives the lessons. Head-to-heads against one opponent are the gentlest version of all. Add a single-entry tournament once your cash results are steady.
What share of a bankroll should go into Week 1 NFL DFS? There is no universal number, but a common guideline among disciplined players is keeping any single slate to around a tenth of the total roll, weighted toward cash and single entry with a small fixed amount on large-field tournaments. The season is 18+ weeks; Week 1 only needs to buy you Week 2.
When does Stokastic NFL pricing go up? September 1. NFL Core, Max and MVP annual subscriptions are on Early Bird pricing until then, running $100 to $200 below their September list prices depending on tier, and an annual plan started before the deadline keeps its price for the full season.
- NFL DFS Contest Simulator: Using The Stokastic Sims Tool
- DFS Contest Selection: Cash Vs. GPP, Field Size & Bankroll
- How To Use The Stokastic MLB DFS Contest Simulator
- NFL DFS Hub: Every Live Stokastic NFL Page
- NFL Week 1 DFS Picks 2026: DraftKings Stacks, Value Plays & Main Slate Strategy
The Week 1 Bottom Line
Zoom back out to that player from the opening, the one who spent six days on the lineup and six seconds on the entry screen. Flip the ratio. Decide your Sunday number first, split it across the three doors in a proportion your bankroll can repeat for eighteen weeks, and let the Milly Maker be the $5 sweat riding on top of the plan. The lineups will get better all season as the data sharpens; the contest discipline is the edge you can have on day one.
The other thing worth doing before September 1 is settling your data cost for the season. Our NFL projections, Sims and ownership tools are what every workflow in this article runs on, and the annual tiers are cheapest right now.