Showdown and single-game contests

A single-game contest shrinks the slate to one game. You pick six players from two teams, and one of them gets a boosted slot.

• DraftKings Showdown: six players under a $50,000 cap. The Captain scores 1.5 times his points and costs 1.5 times his salary. Your lineup must include players from both teams.
• FanDuel single-game: an MVP plus five other spots. The MVP scores 1.5 times his points and, since 2025, costs 1.5 times his salary. NFL lineups fit under a $60,000 cap, and kickers are in the player pool.

Check the date on any FanDuel guide you read. Before 2025 its MVP cost nothing extra, and a 2023 NBA guide on its own site describes a five-player format with MVP, STAR and PRO multipliers. Older advice on that site can be flat wrong today.

Captain math

A captain is not a discount. Say a player costs $10,000 and projects for 20 points, which is 2.0 points per $1,000. As captain he costs $15,000 and projects for 30, which is still 2.0 per $1,000. Points per dollar do not change.

So the slot rewards absolute points, and you pay for it with salary. Here is the real trade. A quarterback costs $11,000 and scores 30. A receiver costs $9,000 and scores 24.

• Quarterback at captain: (1.5 x 30) + 24 = 69 points, for (1.5 x $11,000) + $9,000 = $25,500.
• Receiver at captain: (1.5 x 24) + 30 = 66 points, for (1.5 x $9,000) + $11,000 = $24,500.

Moving the higher scorer into the slot adds 3 points, half the 6-point gap between them. It costs $1,000, half the $2,000 gap in price. Those are the two numbers to weigh. That $1,000 could upgrade another spot, so the question becomes whether it buys more than 3 points there.

After the game, the best captain is almost always a player with one of the top scores. That is why you choose a captain by asking who can have the biggest game, then check what salary is left for the other five.

How the build changes

Every roster is a game script. With one game there is no slate to diversify across. A lineup is a claim about how this game goes. If you expect a blowout, you lean to the winner's offense. If you expect a shootout, you take both quarterbacks and their top targets. Pick the script first, then the captain who wins under it.

Cheap spots decide lineups. Five flex spots and a captain's price usually leave you hunting for value at the bottom. On FanDuel that includes kickers. Check who is active before you trust a cheap name.

You can leave salary unused. DraftKings says so directly, and the next section shows why you might.

Field behavior

The player pool is small, so rosters collide. Take 20 realistic players. That gives 20 choices of captain and 11,628 ways to pick five more from the other 19, for 20 x 11,628 = 232,560 possible lineups before the cap removes most of them. A big single-game contest can hold a lot of entries relative to that number, and any duplicate splits your prize.

Expect the crowd to put the highest-projected player in the boosted slot, because that is the easy click. That's our reasoning, not a measurement. A player can be lightly owned at flex and heavily owned at captain, so read ownership for each slot separately.

Three ways to stand apart without giving up points:

• Use a less popular captain who still has a path to the top score, such as the second receiver in a game you expect to shoot out.
• Lean harder to one team than the field does.
• Leave some salary unused, so your roster is less likely to match the rosters that spend it all.

Cash and tournaments

The cash game and tournament logic still holds. In cash, you want the safest high scorers and the captain most likely to finish near the top. In a tournament, you want a roster that wins if your script happens, even if it looks wrong when the script doesn't.

A single game is one small sample. One fumble or a missed kick can move every lineup in the contest, so size these entries to that.

Facts checked Nov 5, 2026.