Welcome back to another edition of the CS:GO ARTicle. EU is off on Friday, so we have a 2 game slate of NA CS:GO.
Furia are very large (74% implied odds) favorites over Chaos, and Liquid are even bigger (90% implied odds) favorites over TeamOne. This should actually be a very interesting slate because pricing is very tight.
Pricing/Ownership
There are exactly 22 lineups that can be made using only player from Furia and Liquid. Every single one contains Vini. Every single one contains Stewie2k. Now, Stewie is definitely a better play than Vini historically, but given that he now has IGL responsibilities, fragging isn’t always his top priority. 3 of the lineups have Grim captain. Expect all of those to be owned upwards of 10 times in the big $10 GPP. There is 1 lineup with each Yuurih and Hen1 as captain. Again, expect a bunch of duplicates. Every single one of those 22 lineups will likely have at least a few duplicates in the field of 2,000+ entries. I really don’t see either of these underdogs taking the series, so I won’t have many 3/3’s with a favorite/underdog (or dog/dog) combination, and I don’t think the rest of the field will either. I expect 3/2/1 lineups to be much more popular than they traditionally have on 2 game slates because of this dearth of possible 3/3 lineups. One quick note one 3/2/1 lineups, I recommend always doing the 3 from one game and the 2/1 from the other, having 4 (or 5) players from the same game very rarely wins tournaments, even on 2 game slates.
The question on the slate becomes, which players on underdogs can outscore Vini and/or Stewie. The most popular choice for a 1 off underdog will likely be Xeppaa. Chaos are much smaller underdogs than T1, and if Thursday taught us anything it’s that Vegas > recent performance when it comes to DFS ownership. Forze had about triple the ownership of T1 Thursday, even though T1 had just beat Cloud9 a few days ago and were competitive against Furia. It also doesn’t hurt that Chaos is largely cheaper than T1 I do think that T1 have been playing well enough for the DFS community to start take notice, and I think that B4rtin in particular will have increased ownership Friday after he scored 100 on the dot Thursday, easily the top performer on the slate. I will certainly have shares of both, but I will also look to their teammates, particularly on T1. There is a pretty wide gap in FP/round over the last 3 months between Xeppa and his next closest teammates (Leaf), while the gap between B4rtin and prt is much smaller. prt has also quietly been playing well this tournament, and could easily outscore B4rtin on any given slate. He’s my favorite play from an underdog, and I expect to be well above the field on my prt exposure.
***Update after writing*** I just went to mess around with some builds before I hit publish to make sure none of my thoughts had changed, and it turns out that pricing is so tight that you can’t fit much prt with Furia captains (spoiler alert) as a 1 off (with Vini removed from the pool, sorry Vini). I guess I won’t be able to fit as much prt as I’d like.
Grim is still wildly mispriced relative to his teammates on this slate. He is at $8k while Naf is at $9.8k and Elige $9.2k. ?????????? I have no idea why Draftkings left his price so much lower than his teammates, and I fully expect him to be by far the most popular the most popular player and captain on the slate. While it’s hard to fade him on just a 2 game slate, I think the 2nd game where he and his teammates were much more grouped together in scoring, will be the norm, and his first game outburst the exception. It’s also worth noting that in every projection I have seen, including ours, Grim is head and shoulders above anybody else. I think he will eventually level out to much closer to the projections of Naf and Elige, but right now his projections still reflect his stats from Triumph and his first game explosion will buoy his Team Liquid stats for the foreseeable future.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention arT in this section. He went nuts for us the other day, top fragging for Furia and putting up their best fantasy score by a wide margin. Aside from his super aggressive play leading to a ton of 1st kills and overall working better against lesser competition, arT has also been Awp’ing quite a bit more than he used to. He was even the main Awper on T side of train against T1. Unfortunately, Draftkings lowered his price relative to his teammates, and pricing is super tight, so I do not expect him to be nearly as sneaky, in the flex spot at least.
Top Captains
As I mentioned, Grim will undoubtedly be the top captain on the slate. I would love to pivot to his teammates, there’s just one issue. If you remove Vini from the player pool (something I basically always recommend doing, again, sorry Vini) there are exactly 3 lineups with Naf captain and a 3/2/1 featuring favorites as the 3/2. For Elige, there are 22 possible lineups with the same conditions. Again, all of the lineups will likely be duplicated several times over.
I am much more likely to pivot to Furia captains instead of Elige/Naf captains. In fact, there is a good chance I only run Furia captains. You can make more diverse lineups, and since I prefer T1 to Chaos as my 1-off that fits (from a game theory perspective) better with Furia captains than Liquid.
Pivoting from Grim to arT at captain should differentiate you quite a bit, as if arT manages to outscore Grim you’ve passed a huge chunk of the field. I do expect arT’s captain ownership to still be well below that of his teammates (sans Vini), so there again should be leverage on the field by going arT captain. There are some lineups that only arT’s price allows to work, so I do expect the ownership to be higher than it was the other day, but probably still too low for his upside.
Yuurih is my next favorite captain on Furia, as he is the only one actually outscoring arT over the past 3 months, yet he is still priced below Kscerato. He and arT will make up the bulk of my Furia captain lineups, with a bit of Kscerato and Hen1 mixed in.
