DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 1 Cash Strategy & Picks

Sep 11, 2026

IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

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 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 are 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

There are so many variables that make a good cash game option, and many of them are captured well in our mean projections. But a lot of times they can be spotted even without that context if you understand the game and what makes projections spike, especially relative to pricing. The week one slate reminds me a lot of an important aspect of cash-game value that is similar to something professional sports bettors seek out when looking at a bet: closing-line value.

Uniquely, the pricing for this slate was posted weeks ago, when rosters and roles weren’t finalized and before injuries were announced. This means that the prices posted on players were based on a given set of assumptions at the time that very well may have changed. In essence, if pricing was efficient (or trended toward efficiency) at post, they certainly have drifted far from that now as things have changed. This is something you’ll see a lot in the cash game values we identify week-to-week, but it is especially prevalent in week one when so much time has lapsed between contests being posted and the games actually being played. Not only that, but there also tends to be the most significant shifts over the period in question – with so much uncertainty around rosters and depth chart being ironed out over this time.

You’ll see this theme woven throughout the accompanying narrative for some of the players listed, but I think it's important to note because it is conceptually important every week moving forward.