Talladega is looming large this week. Frankly it always looms large as the biggest oval on the NASCAR schedule, but especially this week. It’s the last true wild card race of the year and the last true race where everyone has an equal shot to win. The YellaWood 500 is on tap for Sunday afternoon in Alabama as we gear up for 188 laps of anticipated chaos. How are we playing this race for DFS? Who are the top drivers for DraftKings and FanDuel this week? What are strategies we can use to parse through the chaos? How are we building successful lineups for NASCAR DFS this week? Who are the top drivers for Talladega? We’ll talk about all of that and more in this week’s YellaWood 500 DFS playbook.

How To Build DFS Lineups For Talladega

The biggest tip I can gives is to, you guessed it, expect chaos. So we’ll build for it. There is no way to predict who will wreck out and who won’t in any given Talladega race. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t be smart about who we pick. The ideal wya to look at players this week are the drivers with the best average finishes over a long span of plate races and the drivers with the most laps completed. Sounds simple right? Yes, but those starts are most important this week. Don’t care about Green Flag Speed or Fast Late In Run Speed since every car is basically the same this week. We don’t care that much about fastest laps when building lineups nor that much about laps led since they are highly split up this week. We just want the most drivers finishing as highly as possible. Simple right? Sure, but only if wishing made it so. The other main thing we want to do this week is to limit overexposure to any one driver. We want a large net of a driver pool in our lineups rather than fewer doing more of the lifting. Why? Well, the simple answer is that we want to up our chance to survive the volatility that is a typical Talladega race. At the same time though, we want to watch our bankroll this week too. This is a race that’s better played light with any max entering happening in the smaller entry fee contests.

Do We Stack The Back?

In two words…you can. In cash builds the simplest ways to do it is to pick six drivers starting P26 or further back and hope for chaos that your drivers avoid. However, for GPPs, that’s not the most effective way to build them. Playing one or two drivers starting in the top-10, a second or third driver starting between P11 and P20 and then the rest starting P25 or further back is how we build.