DraftKings, a pioneer in both daily fantasy sports (DFS) and sports betting, has unleashed an interesting new hybrid product: DraftKings Pick6. Let’s dive into how to play DraftKings Pick6 as we discuss how it works and how to make money from it. Keep reading as we give you our expert advice for DraftKings Pick6, including a breakdown of their payout structure — and talk about their current signup bonus offer: a no-stress first entry worth up to $50!
Like a pick’em site (think PrizePicks), DraftKings Pick6 users build lineups from a pool of available players and choose whether those players will record more or less than a given statistic. However, like a traditional DFS site, users compete for prizes in a peer-to-peer format — for example, contests full of five-player lineups may offer an $8,000 prize for users who get all of their picks correct to split as well as a $2,000 prize for users who get all but one pick correct to split. Your payout depends on what everyone else is getting action on.
How to Play DraftKings Pick6: Expert Tips & Advice
Introducing DraftKings Pick6
DraftKings Pick6 is a new DFS game that combines elements of sports betting with traditional DFS contests. Much like other pick’em sites, you’ll build out a lineup of two-to-six players, and you’ll choose whether they’ll record more or less than a given statistic. Choosing more players increases your potential payout but decreases your odds of getting everything correct.
However, things get slightly more complicated after that. Unlike most other pick’em sites, all DraftKings Pick6 contests are peer-to-peer. That means your payout will vary depending on the performance of other players.
How to Play DraftKings Pick6
If you’re interested in playing DraftKings Pick6, click here and get started by making a new account. If you’ve already registered at DraftKings, log in to your existing account.
Once you’ve done so, you’ll be greeted by the lobby screen. You can sort player picks by team, game, sport, date and statistic. Currently, only the NBA and NFL are options.
DraftKings Pick6 currently allows users to choose between the following NBA markets: points, assists, rebounds, 3-pointers, blocks, steals and PRA (points, rebounds and assists combined).
The following NFL markets are available as well: passing yards, rushing yards, receiving yards, receptions, total touchdowns, passing touchdowns and interceptions thrown.
Note that users cannot mix picks between different “pick groups,” or sets of games (similar to DFS slates) and sports. Sorry, Philadelphia sports fans, that means no Joel Embiid–Jalen Hurts combo lineups for you! It also means no lineups can feature players active in both Thursday Night Football games and Sunday afternoon ones.
How Do DraftKings Pick6 Payouts Work?
Let’s get down to brass tacks. If you’re interested in tips on how to choose which NBA player projections to add to your lineup, you can read my guide on the topic here. We’re not going to worry about what to choose, we’re going to worry about how to make money.
After you’ve built a lineup, you can choose how much money you want to risk on it. Users must enter a whole number because for each dollar of Entry Fees you pay, your lineup will be entered one time in either one or multiple peer-to-peer contests.
Since your lineup is distributed across one or more peer-to-peer contests and you aren’t competing against the house, DraftKings Pick6 cannot guarantee you a given payout amount. Instead, the site has estimated prizing to approximate how much you would be paid out for a given lineup. DraftKings updates estimated prizing amounts as the site collects more data, but here is a breakdown of their initial estimated prizing amounts as of March 2024.
DraftKings Pick6 Estimated Payout Chart
| Picks | Profit (All) | Odds | Prob. | Profit (1 Wrong) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two | $148 | +148 | 40.3% | N/A |
| Three | $341 | +341 | 22.7% | N/A |
| Four | $770 | +770 | 11.5% | N/A |
| Five | $1,035 | +1035 | 8.8% | $126 |
| Six | $1,850 | +1850 | 5.3% | $190 |
So how do DraftKings Pick6 estimated payouts compare to payouts for traditional parlay bets? We’ll use the standard price for a player prop bet at DraftKings Sportsbook, which is -115 (53.5%), in our analysis.
Standard Player Prop Parlay Payouts at DraftKings Sportsbook
| Picks | Profit (All) | Odds | Prob. | Profit (1 Wrong) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two | $249.53 | +249 | 28.6% | N/A* |
| Three | $553.46 | +553 | 15.3% | N/A* |
| Four | $1,121.69 | +1121 | 8.2% | N/A* |
| Five | $2,184.04 | +2184 | 4.4% | N/A* |
| Six | $4,170.16 | +4170 | 2.3% | N/A* |
Using Math to Win at DraftKings Pick6
So what conclusions can we draw about how to make money at DraftKings Pick6 with the charts above? First, two-pick entries are a far worse deal at DraftKings Pick6 than at a sportsbook. You’re paying as much as some bettors would pay for a single player prop with a two-pick entry; however, you also stand to benefit from other users who make inefficient selections and can win up to $320 or so. The breakeven odds for a single pick in the two-pick entry are -175 (63.6%).
However, lineups with more than two picks seem to offer far more value, and because prizing is peer-to-peer, you can benefit substantially from your peers’ inefficient picks. For a three-pick lineup, you would need your props to have average odds of -155 (60.8%) or shorter to be getting the same deal as at the sportsbook. That ticks up to around -140 (58.3%) for four-pick entries, but it gets worse from there.
Five-pick and six-pick entries have a breakeven threshold of roughly -160 (61.5%) at the current estimated prizing numbers. That means you’ll want to find legs with higher win rates than those odds — for example, if Julius Randle to record less than 26.5 points is an offering, and you know he has stayed under that number in 10 of 15 games (66.7%), you’re getting an 8.4% edge on the -140 but only a 5.2% edge on the -160 if he continues to score at his current rate.
Five and six-entry lineups are distinct from traditional parlays in that you can still secure a profit even if one of your selections does not hit. While the returns aren’t great — profiting only $200 on a $100 six-pick entry that goes five-for-six doesn’t sound all that appealing to me — it does give you a leg up over sportsbook users. Now, let’s dive into how to use OddsShopper’s tools to make money with DraftKings Pick6.
Using OddsShopper’s Optimizer to Win at DraftKings Pick6
If you’re looking to find legs at DraftKings Pick6 with positive expected value (+EV), our DraftKings Pick6 Optimizer does the hard work for you. By indexing the odds across the sports betting landscape and using them to generate breakeven prices for each pick, you can find options that will yield a profit over the long term. However, you won’t be able to find those entries every day, and the tools will help you choose your spots efficiently:
This Pick6 entry doesn’t have +EV — although it would if we added some more legs. As discussed above, the implied probability of each Pick6 leg decreases with each leg we add.
In this screenshot, we can see that the legs are trading at -162 — but if we add six, those odds decrease to -136, making it easier for us to find +EV.
In this case, the true odds of the Isaiah Hartenstein pick are -144. For Tyrese Haliburton and OG Anunoby, they’re both -137. That means we’d need six picks with comparable true odds to get a lineup with +EV, which, on a busier sports slate, you can almost always find.
But just because you may not be able to find enough legs to build out a Pick6 entry with +EV every day doesn’t mean that our tools can’t help you in other ways.
They can help you pick and choose the slates to target — and they can help you with other sites, including PrizePicks, Underdog Fantasy, Sleeper Picks and more.
Additional DraftKings Pick6 Rules
Because of the peer-to-peer structure of DraftKings Pick6, some additional rules apply that users should know when considering their entries. Every DraftKings Pick6 contest has a maximum entry limit of 150 entries. While you can have more than 150 entries active on a given night, because there are multiple contests at any one time, your payout may vary based on the outcomes of other lineups competing in the contests in which you are entered.
This note may not be important for all DraftKings Pick6 users, but high-stakes players should know that the site isn’t designed to take massive amounts of action on a specific lineup all at once.
Because each dollar you risk on a lineup is divided into a separate entry, lineups you risk more than $1 on will often be distributed across multiple contests. DraftKings Pick6 has a specific algorithm that places your entries in (1) contests in which you don’t have action, then (2) contests in which you do have action but on a different pick set, finally (3) contests in which you have action on the same pick set.
This distribution system increases the number of lineups and users against which your lineup is competing against. While a single entry (or dollar) could get lucky and be the only winner in its pool — or be unlucky and have to split a prize between a large number of users — submitting multiple entries (or dollars) minimizes the role variance will play in determining your payout.
