DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 2 Cash Strategy & Picks

Sep 12, 2025

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Whether you are interested in turning $1 into $1.80 or $50 into $90, deploying a sound cash game strategy when you are building your lineup for Sunday main slates is crucial. Cash game fantasy grinders can run into pitfalls when they fail to recognize that the main goal of cash games is to maximize median and beat, often, a small group of opponents (or maybe just one) in the quest to do so.

Ceiling outcomes should be narrowly considered relative to maximizing your lineup’s projectable floor. You can save those high-upside strategies for the $1 million dollar to first place contests on DraftKings or FanDuel, where you should focus on trading median for things like leverage, correlation, and low duplication. In cash games, there’s no reason to shy away from the player with 10x point-per-dollar value just because “everyone else is playing” him. If everyone else is playing him, it is probably a good indication that the market is aware of significant value.

4for4 has all the tools available to help you build your cash game lineups. This article is merely one of them. In the quest to grind out a solid edge (58%-62% win rates is very favorable), the most important tools at your disposal are mean projections, median projections, projection variance, point-per-dollar value, and a way to piece it all together (an advanced calculator is one option).

My goal for this weekly article is to consolidate all the crucial insights from our tools that can be used to gain an edge over your cash game opponents and help you put it all together to build lineups that have positive expected value.

Slate Context

The Week 1 hype is behind us, and Week 2 is notorious for overreactions to small sample sizes. I have a sneaking suspicion that Juwan Johnson will not finish as a top-three tight end this season, nor do I believe Dak Prescott will average fewer than 10 fantasy points per week for the year. Still, many fantasy players will lean too heavily on week-one results to make lineup decisions, which carries considerable risk without proper context.

That context is best established through projections built on sound foundations and detailed analysis, like the ones I referenced above. When the goal is to optimize median outcomes, robust projections are critical—especially early in the season, when uncertainty is high and decisions must be made with limited data.

In addition, Week 1 gave us more clarity about player roles, roster certainty, and injuries. Monitoring the final injury reports could reveal value options that become the difference between a winning and losing cash lineup.