DailyFaceoff Short Slate Strategy

Short slates are often the toughest to get a grip on especially when the chalk is so obvious, and tonight without going out on a large limb the Dallas Stars will be heavy chalk. How do you attack a three game slate like this knowing the Stars will be so heavily owned. I will break down a few options below on how I am going to handle this short slate.

Build a cash style lineup:

On a short slate like this there is a lot of top heavy talent (Stamkos, Kucherov, Seguin, Benn, etc) and some good values on defense(Sergachev, Colin Miller , etc) so it may be wise to not stack and use a cash game strategy in GPPs tonight. While correlated stacking generally has the highest upside nothing is off limits on a three game slate. If you can fit the high end talent with maybe even correlated value plays I think this could end up being a very viable strategy tonight, especially if you load up on non chalk plays which could leverage the field. I know I am kind of contradicting myself because cash game plays are generally chalky, I just mean the style of lineup not the actual players in the lineup.

Double stack(Josh Stack) a team

I am not that egotistical that I think I created double stacking a team and it got named Josh Stack, it just so happened that I six man stacked the Blackhawks on a large slate and I won a good chunk of change on it and someone called it a “Josh Stack” and the name just stuck. This is one of my favorite strategies to deploy on a short slate because say you want to use Dallas and you are afraid of ownership of the top line, if you use their whole top six, while the ownership percentages may be high, the amount of lineups that actually use all six skaters will be very low. There are a couple of ways to go about this, the easiest is obviously just using the top six skaters, the other would be use five of the top six skaters and plug in the power play QB which most certainly will correlate with the skaters you have. It is a great way to get a ton of exposure to the chalk without being overly chalky(if you want to go the Stars route).

Business as Usual

Sometimes the best thing to do is trust your process and research and build how you normally would on any size slate. It is important to not try to recreate the wheel just because there are three games opposed to eight. Whether that is a correlated 4-3-1 stack, a one line stack and fill in with value, or however you build, I don’t think there is a wrong answer on a short slate.

The best part about all of this is that you can use The DailyFaceof Lineup Optimizer to deploy any strategy. If you want to lock a player in you can do that, if you want to go all in on a certain line and build multiple lineups around it you can do that. The optimizer is an extremely valuable tool for cash and GPP. It is definitely worth the price and it will benefit you as a player with multiple strategies all season. It has projections loaded by Emmanuel Perry who is the man behind Corisca which is amazing, so you really need to check it out. At some point over the weekend I will be doing a video review of one of my lineups that I generated using the Optimizer and be sure to check that out if you are unsure about the product.

Good luck everyone and let’s win all the money.