Since he began playing Daily Fantasy Sports at the beginning of the 2014 football season, Grant Neiffer has experienced the kind of success that elicits joy in DFS marketers and envy in most of the rest of us. But of his 8,000-plus wins since last September (on FanDuel alone), none matched the $100,000 jackpot he scored with a single entry in Wednesday’s FanDuel Super Slugger tournament.
“This was by far the single biggest day I’ve had,” said Neiffer, who won his $1,065 entry into the tournament with a qualifier win on Monday and said he swept contests on every site he played on Wednesday. “After I set my lineup, I went out with some buddies. When I checked my lineups at around eight o’clock, I was like … wow. Then I stayed up sweating it. It was a pretty stressful two hours.”
Not bad for a guy who had never played Daily Fantasy Baseball at this time last year.
“I literally started playing on a fluke,” Neiffer said. “A buddy of mine sent me an invite during football season and we had a little competition—the first person to get to $100 buys the other one lunch.
“It really escalated quickly from there.”
Though the 26-year-old accountant is good with numbers, Neiffer says his DFS success comes from his knack for lineup creation rather than a proprietary algorithm or hours spent with spreadsheets.
For Wednesday’s big winner, he went heavy on Pirates hitters and benefited from Neil Walker’s 17.5 points and Starling Marte’s 9.75. But it was his choice of Marlins that separated him from the field. He was the only lineup in the 400-team field to roster Justin Bour (8.5 points), and not many more were on Adeiny Hechavarria (2.5 points, 1-percent owned) or Christian Yelich (3.75 points, 1.2 percent).
“It was basically just finding what fit,” said Neiffer, who’s known as gneiffer07 on FanDuel. “I loved the Pirates’ lineup. I figured it wasn’t going to be as highly owned as some of the other ones, and there was a whole bunch of value at the top of the lineup.
“And then with Miami, after I set my (Pirates) stack, I just checked to see if there was another stack of guys with some value at low salaries at the top of their lineup, and it just happened to work out perfectly with Yelich, (Hechavarria), and Bour.”
Toss in a sterling performance from Carlos Carrasco, and what started out as a race to $100 just 10 months ago has now netted Neiffer $100,000-plus in a single night.