DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 5 Cash Strategy & Picks

Oct 03, 2025

Kim Klement Neitzel-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

Welcome to the week of value running backs. We’ve already had min-priced Marcus Mariota and Mac Jones slates and enjoyed a generous helping of quarterback value. This week, the slate pushes our attention to the running back position. Multiple starters are expected to sit in Week 5, pushing their backups into significant projection value as volume expectations rise.

There is inherent uncertainty and fragility when projecting backfield shares without the workhorse starter. So while mean projections may flash value, they can be driven by fragile inputs and are highly susceptible to variance. When building cash-game lineups this week, it’s crucial to identify where those fragile inputs might bite and avoid traps in favor of true, bankable value.