DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 3 Cash Strategy & Picks

Sep 19, 2025

Amber Searls-Imagn Images

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 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

We’re on to Week 3. From here on, expect controlled chaos every Sunday that will shape who you target in cash games. As the weekend approaches, injuries and usage shifts will open a wide range of high point-per-dollar options, each with varying levels of median and ceiling outcomes. For instance, before Jayden Daniels was ruled out Friday, I had a joke lined up about not having access to 20+ point quarterbacks at bare-minimum salary—scratch that (keep reading for more on this).

A quick reminder: projections remain the best way to synthesize all the variables that drive player performance. Almost every factor you might consider—usage, matchup, efficiency—is embedded in the median and mean projections, which reflect a wide distribution of outcomes. Early in the season, fantasy players tend to overreact to tiny samples, but the small-sample problem lingers far longer than most realize. Two weeks of data is still essentially noise. That’s why calibrated, back-tested projections provide far better context than gut-level modeling. Long story short: lean on projections to cut through uncertainty.