Daily Fantasy LCS NA Week 7: Vulcun

The tournament prize pools on Vulcun have continued to grow, with $10 buy-in tournaments on Saturday (prize pool of $5,000) and Sunday (prize pool of $7,500).

If you’re not as interested in large field tournaments, but prefer smaller contests such as head to heads, there’s a lot more action (especially at buy-ins ranging from $5 to $25) on Alphadraft.

The odds on most teams are fairly similar for both days of LCS NA Week 7.  Cloud 9, CLG, TSM and Team Liquid are all favored both days.  The only change in favorites is that Team Dignitas is favored on Saturday (D1) and Gravity is favored on Sunday (D2).

The other big development for LCS NA Week 7 is that there are some interesting subs to consider.  The first one is that Piglet will be back for Team Liquid in place of Keith. Given his relatively high price on Vulcun ($1658) and lack of success earlier this season, I think I’m going to take a wait-and-see approach with Piglet.  It helps that, while favored, Liquid isn’t a very heavy favorite.

The other team that’s changing its lineup is Winterfox.  Paragon will be their ADC, while Altec moves over to support and Imagine will be on the bench.  Winterfox is an underdog in both games, so their moves normally wouldn’t be of much interest to me. That said, Paragon is only $450 and Winterfox is only a slight underdog to Gravity on D2, so I might consider using Paragon as an extreme value pick on Sunday, especially if he performs well on D1.With Paragon an unappealing value pick against TSM on D1, there’s another player that I’m eyeing.  After his disastrous first week with Team Dignitas, I don’t think a lot of people will be picking Azingy!  That said, he looks like almost a ‘must play’ choice for D1…Dignitas is in the somewhat unusual position of being favored, and his price on Vulcun is an absurdly low $212.  That should free up a good amount of salary cap space for a strong lineup at other positions.

All that said, it may not be necessary to dig too deep for value.  Several of the CLG players look somewhat underpriced, and for day 2 the entire Gravity team looks severely underpriced.  I still haven’t figured out what Vulcun’s approach to player pricing is, but it looks like they may have deliberately softened things up this week. 

My tentative lineup for D1 has three players from Team Liquid (the maximum allowed on Vulcun), two from TSM (including Bjergsen), two from CLG…and Azingy.  I was a bit surprised that I didn’t end up with more guys from Dignitas, as they’re cheap and they’re favored.  That said, most of them have low scoring averages and I was able to put together a lineup that I’m pretty happy about without taking the risk of selecting more than one of them.

If you’re interested in further analysis, check out this defense against position data.