Using late swap effectively

This is going to be a long blog, but I hope you find it valuable.

It's been a while since we had an overall strategy piece, so let's jump right into it. With FanDuel adding late swap this season, it can provide a tremendous advantage to you if you play your cards right. How much late swap can actually help you depends on the type of contest. If it is a head to head and you realize that your remaining players are the same as your opponent, then it can take you from a 0% chance to win to a 30-35% chance to win in that contest.

Let's start by understanding when to use late swap. Late swap is best used in a situation heading into the 4PM or Sunday Night games when you are looking to increase your odds of winning. This can either be from a position of strength, or from a position of weakness and needing to catch up. The reality is that most people do not late swap when they are building their lineups especially if they are currently winning, which I am here to say that is effectively a mistake.

If you're behind:

This is where late swap is the most beneficial. You're in a 50/50 or in a head to head cash game and you realize that you're behind. Maybe one of his players had a great day, maybe some of your players did not have a great day. What I do, is I try to reverse engineer my opponents lineup. I know who he has that has played already, so I add up all of the salaries of those players, and then I try to figure out who my opponent has the highest likelihood of having in his starting lineup remaining. In 50/50's it's a little bit more difficult, but just start scrolling through opposing teams and see how many people might have a high owned running back that you have on your team.

Now that I have my best what my opponent(s) lineups or ownership looks like. It's time to make a decision. In head-to-heads it is rather easy, if I am behind and I have the exact same remaining players as an opponent, I need to make a change. If I have the majority of my players as the same as my opponent, I likely also need a change. Where it gets a little bit more tricky is that if I have a small number of players that are the same, this is where you need to decide on that individual players involved.

Great, you've now identified that you need to make a late swap, now what? The answer is relatively simple, what I typically do is I take either my projections or the projections on footballguys.com and determine what is a swap combination that from a projection standpoint gets me within a few points of my original lineup using players that also have upside built in.

For example, in this scenario below let's say you come to the realization that you will likely have the same two players LeVeon Bell and Jamison Crowder. Instead of just riding with LeVeon Bell and Jamison Crowder, swapping out to Antonio Brown and Carlos Hyde would net you a projected 0.3 points less. However, what that 0.3 points is the most likely scenario, but you also have to consider Antonio Brown's upside, and Crowder's downside, so instead of being blocked swapping to those two players increases your chance of winning from 0% to some percentage that while it is still less than 50% getting a few wins per year out of late swap can pay dividends. The reason I bolded that part is that it is important to realize that late swapping will rarely if ever make you a favorite in a contest, it will just increase your theoretical chances of winning.

If you are winning/off to a great start:

First of all congratulations, you hit on all of your 1PM starters. Don't count your money just yet as while you're in a good spot, be honest with yourself in evaluating your lineup. For example, last week if Jamison Crowder was a 4PM start time and I was ahead, it would have been advantageous for me to make a change to that lineup as ultimately Crowder has shown a tendency this year that his floor is close to 0 which could kill your lineup. Instead sometimes make a late swap to a player with a higher floor can be a smart play so that you avoid that risk of one of your players killing your lineup.

Also, as a quick GPP note, if you're off to a great start, it is the exact opposite. Now is the time to make critical decisions on whether you want to go for a win, or go for a solid cash. For example, look at the other teams around you, while you're off to a great start, are there people who have less players played or players at a cheaper salary ahead of you? If there are then you need to decide whether you want to go with a higher upside lineup that is more risky to potentially surpass those people. One great option is to late swap to a stack of some variety.