DFS 101: How to Play Call of Duty on DraftKings

DraftKings has added to an increasingly long list of esports-related games, this time introducing Call of Duty (CoD) to the fold. The Call of Duty World League – the fourth-ever franchised esport – provides a plethora of scheduled contests with top-level competition, something that can't be said for a handful of other esports-related DFS games.

Scoring

While Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's (CS:GO) scoring is largely focused on the kills/deaths of a given player, DraftKings doesn't emphasis those obvious peripherals within their CoD competitions. It's refreshing, particularly given the different strategic elements of the modes played throughout a given five-game series.

A Call of Duty World League match is a best-of-five, with Rounds 1 and 4 played under the game mode Hardpoint, while Rounds 2 and 5 are Search and Destroy. Round 3 is the only game mode which is played just once a series, called Domination.

As the table illustrates above, there's a handful of general scoring rules across each game mode, but the specific scoring for each one is essentially where the meat of strategical choices come into play.

General Strategy

Unlike League of Legends, CoD doesn't have any predetermined positional roles, but teams internally will have designated players who will often be focused on achieving different objectives, whether it's planting in Search and Destroy or early rotations for Hardpoint. Think of it much like fantasy football: each player is essentially set to gain a certain number of points based on the yards, or in this analogy, their kills/deaths, which you can roughly project in your lineup. You can pay up for the obvious baselines a player should provide, but the real value will come within the objective-focused players.

Basically, it's the additional objective scoring that can make or break a DFS lineup. While its importance is not akin to 100+ yardage bonuses, for example, it's still something that can be incredibly important when separating the top of a leaderboard. Most importantly, it can be somewhat projected/expected, since a player's internal role hardly ever changes in the middle of a game. Sometimes a player could play exponentially better in a given series/tournament – essentially a hot hand – which might force a team to deviate from their typical strategy and play specifically around that player. This might be even more crucial in the immediate future considering all of these tournaments will be played in online matches, but for this strategy guide I'd rather focus on the obvious predictors.

The game mode, Hardpoint, might be the most important of this bunch because it's the one most likely to occur twice in a given series. It's probably too early in this year's version of competitive Call of Duty to point to specific series-total figures, but generally, the more likely outcomes of a given series will be a team winning 3-0 or 3-1. While it will be more lucrative to identify which contests will go to a fifth game, it's much easier to predict which teams can push to a fourth and set themselves up for the ever-important +0.1 per second in the Hardpoint. This significantly helps underdogs as well, giving them an easier path to extra points. After all, even if a team is outclassed substantially, they can still find their way into a Hardpoint for a reasonable duration of time.

Search and Destroy is probably the second-most useful DFS game mode, if only because we should know which players will get the +3 for bomb plants. Of course, it's hard to predict if that player gets killed before they can actually plant it, but for the most part we're talking about a set person who, if everything goes right, should be getting at least nine points per game without considering their K/D. It's less defined when it comes to who might receive the +3 for defusing a bomb, but again, it's unlikely two games of Search and Destroy will even occur in a given series.

Including specific teams is an interesting wrinkle to this DFS equation, and one that hasn't been used in a variety of pre-DraftKings knock-offs that have been put together in the past. It's hard to suggest using a Team in the Captain spot, but at least at first glance, paying up for some of the obvious winners figures to be worth it more so than other DFS esports which highlight teams as well.