Introduction to Daily Fantasy League of Legends: Basics, Strategy, Stats, Stacking, and More

I've waited for quite some time for this day: FanDuel is offering daily fantasy contests for League of Legends.

If you don't know what that is, that's fine. Really. League of Legends an easy game to learn, and millions of people watch it and follow it.

So let's get you up to speed on FanDuel's daily fantasy offering for League of Legends.

League of Legends: The Basics

League of Legends (commonly shortened as LoL or League) features a few prominent professional leagues. FanDuel offers contests for the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), the North American league, and for the League of Legends European Championship (LEC). Each league features 10 teams.

As for the game itself, League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game, which put very simply means players work as part of a team to destroy something of the opponent's. Here's a good visual walkthrough of how a game plays out, but I'll sum it up here as well.

In League, each team has a Nexus at their home base, and the other team fights through minions, turrets, and opponents to march through the map and defeat their opposing team's Nexus. The Nexus can basically be considered the end zone, and the first team to score wins, only the more appropriate analogy would be like the first team to get to the end zone and tear down the goal posts wins.

Each team has five players, and the map is split up into three lanes: top, middle, and bottom. A jungle connects the middle of the map and is effectively a blind spot for players in the three lanes. The game is split into five distinct roles.

League of Legends: FanDuel Roles

The six distinct roles on FanDuel are taken directly from the actual in-game roles in the game itself.

Top: The top lane battle essentially features a one-versus-one battle between opposing Tops. As the game progresses, they roam, and Junglers can cause problems and disrupt the lane.
Jungle: The Jungler roams the map and can attack any other lane. All lanes are susceptible to sneak attacks -- "ganks" -- by the Jungler.
Mid: Similar to top lane, this begins as a one-on-one matchup in the middle of the map but can be attacked from either side via the jungle area.
ADC: ADC stands for "Attack Damage Carry." The ADC fights in the bottom lane and is pocketed (supported) by the Support role. The ADC's goal is to rack up kills and lay down damage.
Support: Supports heal the ADC and/or support them in other ways. Kills will be rare, but assists can get high.
Team: FanDuel offers a Team spot, which rewards points for wins and special accomplishments, such as getting the first kill -- "First Blood" -- and baron kills, which offer power-ups to team abilities.

FanDuel Rosters

You'll be rostering seven total positions, six players and one team position. You roster one of each of the five positions -- Top, Jungle, Mid, ADC, Support -- and one Team position, which racks up different stats.

One of your seven picks is designated as your STAR, and that pick has his FanDuel points multiplied by 1.5.

League of Legends: FanDuel Scoring

The scoring format is quite straightforward and is split up into player stats and team stats.

Three of these are very obvious. Kills are obtained by slaying an opponent. Assists are credited by attacking an opponent within the last 10 seconds before the kill (without laying the final blow) or by passive contributions in that time. Deaths are obvious.

Creep score (CS) is obtained by killing minions to obtain gold, which lets characters purchase powered-up items.

The map is protected with turrets, which need to be cleared for teams to move toward their opponent's base. Barons and dragons (or drakes) reside in the jungle area; defeating these offer power-ups to teams. First Blood rewards teams gold boosts, which helps get an early-game lead. Wins and quick wins reward bonuses.

Quick Tips

Here are some quick tips to keep in mind. All data in this sample comes from the 2019 Summer Split, via OraclesElixir.

Winning Teams Get Kills and Score Points: Kill:Death ratio correlates very strongly with wins, and teams from the LCS and LEC averaged more than 2.0 kills per death in the 2019 Summer Split. Teams that win averaged 22.4 team FanDuel points per game, and losing teams averaged 6.8.
Losing Players Score Roughly 60% as Much as Winning Players: This is pretty split across all positions in the data set.
ADCs Score the Most Points on Average: ADCs averaged 35.0 FanDuel points in winning games and 21.0 in losing games, most of any position in either split.
But Other Positions Score, Too: Here's a handy table.

This means flexing ADCs in your STAR slot (to access the 1.5x multiplier) makes sense. ADCs led in-game scoring in 44.2% of the games from the 2019 Summer Split. Mid led in 30.2%, and Top was third at 15.5%. Jungler led just 9.7% of the time, and Support never did.

Stacking Is in Play: Rostering multiple players from the same team can help rack up fantasy points, and the bigger the stack, the more likely it is that a particular team won. In League, the game can snowball, and that can lead to dominant performances. Here is how the positions correlate to one another within a game.


Getting a high-scoring ADC/Support duo is enticing, whereas the more isolated Top lane doesn't depend quite as much on the rest of his team. Stacks can be focused in other ways.

Putting It All Together

Teams that win get fantasy points, and teams that are proactive and successful at taking down power-ups will rack up fantasy points.

We can expect heavy favorites to be popular picks on FanDuel, and we can also assume that finding underdog winners will get us some leverage on the field.

Stacking is in play, so if you have a good feeling on a team, roster multiple players from the same squad.

Oh, and welcome to Summoner's Rift.