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Do you love drafting fantasy football teams but can’t commit to more waivers, lineup-setting and in-season management than you’ve already signed up for? Then perhaps adding some Best Ball teams to your fantasy football experience is for you.
Best Ball is a version of fantasy football in which all you need to do is draft a team and then watch the season play out. Your top-scoring lineup will be selected automatically each week. Can’t decide whom to start between Brock Purdy or Trevor Lawrence every week? No problem. Whoever scores more will be your starting quarterback that week.
Best Ball is one of the fastest-growing forms of fantasy football, with its own strategy and nuances. It’s important to approach a best ball draft with a focus on a strategy that embraces risk and reward in the larger contests that offer the biggest prizes, which is where you really need to set your team apart from the crowd. Not only do you need to win “your” league versus your fellow drafters during the regular season, but the playoffs pit you against an increasingly elite pool of other league winners, some of whom may have a lot of the same players you do.
Last season, I finished second among more than 940,000 entries in the DraftKings Millionaire contest by using the strategies explained below.
For more, see the 15 players to draft in Best Ball leagues.
The Basics: How to play DraftKings Best Ball
Your League, Your Rules
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DraftKings Best Ball drafts are typically 12 teams with full PPR scoring and yardage bonuses. You draft 20 players, and each week, your team will earn the points earned by your top quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, a tight end and one flex position, which is another running back, wide receiver or tight end. No kickers or defenses are included.
With no in-season management, a roster will need to withstand bye weeks and injuries, so building depth is as important as nailing your early picks and finding breakouts in the mid- and late rounds.
Most big contests offer a 14-week regular season followed by the playoffs, just like in season-long fantasy football. The regular season is based on cumulative points, rather than head-to-head. If you advance from the regular season, you will be placed in a new one-week league for Week 15 with the goal of advancing to Week 16 and then to reach the finals in Week 17, where every remaining team will compete for the top prizes.
Each contest has different advancement and payout structures. The DraftKings $20M Millionaire contest advances the top two scorers among the 12 teams against whom you drafted, and then the top scorer from the 12-team mini-leagues in both Week 15 and Week 16. If you survive each round (1 in 864 odds!), you advance to a 1,089-person final with the top three finishers each earning at least $1 million. DraftKings offers plenty of contests at all price points, with the prize pools scaled down accordingly. Play responsibly and stay within your means. Remember that 10 out of every 12 teams won’t even make it to playoffs.
Roster construction
In 20-round drafts, your typical team should have 2-3 quarterbacks, 4-7 running backs, 6-10 wide receivers, and 2-4 tight ends.
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The most common DraftKings build is 3 QBs, 6 RBs, 8 WRs and 3 TEs, however the number of players at each position should vary based largely on the strength of your players at each position. If you take a running back in each of the first four rounds, consider stopping there. You’re counting on three of them to be in your lineup pretty much every week. Too many more and you risk wasting points on your bench at the expense of potentially similar production at a different position.
On the other hand, if you don’t take a running back until round 8, you should probably take six, seven or maybe even eight, to increase the chances that two will contribute meaningfully to your lineup in any given week.
Bye weeks also matter more without waivers. Make sure you can fill out a complete roster each week. If both of your quarterbacks have Week 7 byes, or four of your five running backs have Week 11 byes, you are guaranteeing yourself a zero in your lineup that week.
Last season, my second-place build was a 3-5-10-2 with an elite running back in Bijan Robinson, whom I took first overall and an elite TE in Trey McBride, whom I took him at the 2/3 turn. I didn’t take my first wide receiver until the 4/5 turn, which is why I prioritized depth at the position.
Looking back, I likely should have added a third tight end instead of the 10th WR or third QB, simply because the tight ends in the final rounds often outscore the running backs and wide receivers, and having the extra TE would have insulated me if McBride or my second tight end Hunter Henry missed time.
So far this preseason, I’ve found myself taking running backs earlier than in previous seasons, leading to most of my roster builds being either 3-5-9-3 or 3-5-8-4. Each draft is different and you should adapt accordingly.
Balancing floor and ceiling
Ultimately, your goal is to build a roster that has enough of a floor to survive the 14-week regular-season gauntlet while maintaining enough ceiling to put up massive scores in the playoff weeks.
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Historically, rookie wide receivers have been some of the best bets for that back-weighted production. Last season, Chicago Bears rookie Luther Burden III scored 30.8 fantasy points in Week 17, despite having just one 15-point game all season to that point. Two years ago, San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall had a similar arc.
At the same time, you need enough early-season production to actually reach the best ball playoffs. Veteran players with apparent high-floor/low-ceiling roles are typically bad picks in season-long fantasy, but avoiding zeroes is more valuable in a format that does not allow for in-season waivers.
Last season, Wan’Dale Robinson, Keenan Allen and Michael Wilson were examples of players who had locked-in roles but seemingly lacked upside. All three helped advance a lot of teams, and Robinson and Wilson showed more ceiling than expected.
Roster correlation and stacking
Drafting multiple players on the same team can be an edge in best ball, particularly when paired with your quarterback. If a wide receiver or tight end scores a ton of points in Week 17, chances are the quarterback also had a very good game. This is known as stacking, which can lead to results such as Burden being the top scoring fantasy receiver in Week 17, while his quarterback Caleb Williams finished as the QB4, throwing for 330 yards and two touchdowns.
While the quarterback/pass-catcher stack is the most obvious and common example, they don’t need to be fully correlated to work. Last season, Daniel Jones and Jonathan Taylor were both great for most of the season, and while Taylor wasn’t a key part of the passing game (he averaged fewer than three catches per game), each player’s success raised the ceiling of the entire offense until Jones got hurt.
You can also team-stack without the quarterback. Trey McBride and Michael Wilson finished as the TE1 and WR10 despite QB Kyler Murray losing his job midseason.
One other important concept is game-stacking. Last season, the Chicago Bears-San Francisco 49ers game in Week 17 scored 80 total points. That game featured that week’s fantasy QB1 (Purdy), QB4 (Williams), RB4 (Christian McCaffrey), TE2 (Colston Loveland) and TE3 (Jake Tonges).
While we don’t know which games will be high-scoring in Week 17, we do know the specific matchups. If you pick multiple players from the same Week 17 matchup, and that game is fantasy-friendly, you could be well on your way to a difference-making result. Stacking for Week 15 and Week 16 also can help you advance.
Just make sure not to overdo it by reaching multiple rounds to draft players to fit a certain build. While stacking certainly helps, drafting the best players and getting value from every pick should take precedence. Try to stay relatively close to the site’s average draft position (ADP) when building your stacks.
Making your picks
While on the clock, think about these four things.
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Roster construction: Is this pick within the right positional limits? Try not to allocate too much or too little capital to a certain position. And make sure you can fill out a full roster each week. ADP value: Are there any great values left on the board? Try not to reach more than a round on ADP unless there is a good reason. “Trying to be unique” typically isn’t a good enough reason, unless you have a strong player take. Player takes: Who are the best players on the board based on rankings, projections or my own takes? The wisdom of the market (ADP) is one guide, but you should ultimately pick the players you like most. Correlation: Does this pick fill out a team stack or a Week 17 stack? Use that to break ties.
The biggest thing is to remember to have fun, whether you are drafting one team or 1,000 teams. The fewer teams you draft, the more you should be willing to go get your guys, while a volume drafter should build more of a portfolio. This is what best ball players refer to as “exposure” to a player, which is the percentage of teams on which a player appears. Too much exposure and your risk profile goes up accordingly. Nobody is immune to injuries or bad games. Too little and you reduce your chances to have those league-winning breakout players or one-week wonders propel your teams forward.
Remember, nobody knows which players will be this year’s difference-makers yet. So all you can do is maximize your chances to have as many of those players concentrated on your roster as possible, then sit back and enjoy the ride.
My 2025 DraftKings 2nd Place Best Ball team
Players in bold contributed to the Week 17 lineup. Six players wound up not contributing a single point in Week 17 — attrition is real in Best Ball — but I was lucky to get the right players to perform well when it mattered most.
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QB: Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Anthony Richardson Sr.
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RB: Bijan Robinson, Zach Charbonnet, RJ Harvey, Jaylen Warren, Jaydon Blue
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WR: Luther Burden III, Chris Olave, Wan’Dale Robinson, Ladd McConkey, Rome Odunze, DeMario Douglas, Tory Horton, Isaac TeSlaa, Troy Franklin, Jaylin Lane
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TE: Trey McBride, Hunter Henry
