Sleeper Picks is the DFS pick’em game available on Sleeper Fantasy. If you’ve played at another pick’em site before, you’re likely familiar with the format: build a lineup of multiple players, choose “over” or “under” for one of their statistical projections, and decide how much you’re willing to risk on that lineup — it’s that easy! But to play at Sleeper Picks and actually make money, there are additional steps and processes to consider. Let’s dive into how to play at Sleeper Picks as I dish out my expert tips, strategy and advice for the pick’em app.
How to Play Sleeper Picks: Expert Tips, Strategy & Advice
How to Play Sleeper Picks: Find +EV Spots!
The key to making money with Sleeper Picks is to identify picks that offer you positive expected value, or +EV. But to be able to ascertain whether a pick you’re considering offers +EV, you first have to understand the implied probability of that pick.
This gets us to another feature that sets Sleeper Picks apart: not all projections have the same price! You’ll have to pay careful attention to the multiplier paired with the over and under for each projection — for something to be +EV, its true odds must be higher than its implied odds.
To calculate implied odds, you can identify the multiplier for your pick and run it through an odds converter. You’ll need some market-based or projections-based model to calculate true odds. You can also use OddsShopper’s Sleeper Optimizer to do the hard work for you. Let’s talk about how it works.
OddsShopper’s Sleeper Picks Optimizer
You can use our handy Sleeper Picks Optimizer to quickly build entries that have +EV. While projections at Sleeper Picks are less often +EV than at other sites, usually due to the higher implied probability of each play, the site’s free squares for new users and Sleeper Sundae discounts can still make playing there a profitable enterprise.
Let’s dive into how the Sleeper Picks Optimizer works. Below, you’ll see a three-player lineup with a 5.4x entry payout. Our tool says this play has an expected win rate of 32%, which means we’re getting a boatload of +EV relative to the market.
The core of this three-pick entry is, obviously the Jaylen Brown free square. If you have yet to sign up for Sleeper Picks, you can take advantage of their daily free squares for your first entry, which can help you build your DFS pick’em bankroll. New users will also get their first deposit matched up to $500!
But beyond the Jaylen Brown free square, we’re keeping this play above the +EV line with the Nicolas Claxton and Ayo Dosunmu projections. While Claxton’s projection isn’t quite +EV by itself, in conjunction with the Brown pick, the full entry remains a +EV play. More importantly, the Claxton projection was far closer to the break-even threshold than all other projections from the day this screenshot was taken.
The Sleeper Picks Optimizer indexes the odds from across the sports betting world to generate a fair, or breakeven, price that we call “true odds.” Once we have that estimate, we can compare it to the implied odds of each available Sleeper Picks projection.
In this case, Sleeper’s price for Dosunmu’s under was beating the market, while the site’s price for Claxton’s under was right about in line with a fair market price. Our model estimates a breakeven price for Dosunmu to be -118 and -150 for Claxton.
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