DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 5 Cash Strategy & Picks

Oct 09, 2026

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Whether you are interested in turning $1 into $1.80 or $50 into $90, deploying a sound cash-game strategy when building your lineup for Sunday’s main slate is crucial. Cash-game fantasy grinders can run into pitfalls when they fail to recognize that the main goal is to maximize median projection and beat what is often a small group of opponents—or perhaps just one.

Ceiling outcomes should receive limited consideration 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 projection for leverage, correlation, and low duplication. In cash games, there’s no reason to shy away from a player with 10x point-per-dollar value just because “everyone else is playing him.” If everyone else is playing him, that is probably a good indication that the market recognizes 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—win rates of 58%–62% 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 everything together to build positive-expected-value lineups.