DraftKings & FanDuel NFL DFS Week 9 Cash Strategy & Picks

Nov 06, 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 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 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

Let us talk about chalk. A lot of conversations about “chalky” options tend to be misguided, especially when it comes to cash games. One of the most popular things in DFS to do is “fade the chalk” and usually there is essentially no merit to this strategy, based on evidence from advanced simulations. There are certainly over-owned players in tournaments, but typically simulations show the best projected value options are under-owned relative to their optimal rates.

Beyond the simulated outcomes and what they indicate for tournaments, the logic of fading the chalk as a general strategy is even worse in cash games where the optimal approach is to maximize median at all costs. Ownership should be only scarcely considered, and simply playing the best plays is the priority.

This week, this lesson couldn’t be more crucial. Changes in depth charts and lagging pricing dynamics are going to mean the player pool of reasonable cash game options is very small, and ownership is going to pile into a few options at each position. If you are playing cash games, the important and simple takeaway is this: play those players.