Blair Andrews reveals 10 running backs that high-stakes drafters are taking earlier than your home league opponents. Are these sharky selections the key to fantasy glory?

You don’t have to be a high-stakes fantasy player to have just as much “at stake” in taking home a fantasy title. Even those of us who compete for large sums of money still relish the opportunity to beat our friends and family. Yet sometimes it can still be valuable to pay attention to what high-stakes players are doing, to follow the players who have the most skin in the game, as it were.

The concept of “skin in the game,” popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is often misunderstood. It’s not that having more to gain or more to lose will magically make you better at whatever skill is necessary for performance at your chosen task. It’s not even that those who have more at stake will necessarily work harder to ensure a favorable outcome. In fact, skin in the game isn’t an appeal to any sort of expertise.

Rather, the key idea is that a population where each member has skin in the game will naturally select for more favorable outcomes over time, because underperformers will be increasingly excluded. If you are bad at fantasy football but continue paying $2,000 entry fees, you’ll eventually run out of money and have to stop entering. But if you’re good, you will win more money and enter more often.

High-stakes play thus acts as a sort of evolutionary playground for fantasy football strategy. The strategies that work survive, and those that don’t die out. The high-stakes players who chase the sort of player profiles that tend to succeed will live to play again, whereas those who chase the wrong sort of player profiles will be removed from the population by financial ruin (or something near enough).

This same sort of evolutionary mechanism isn’t operating at the level of free (or even low-stakes) fantasy football contests. Therefore, there is immense value in paying close attention to the decisions that high-stakes players are making, especially where they differ from the decisions that more casual players make. Comparing ADP from the FFPC’s marquee contests — the Main Event and the Big Gorilla — against ADP from home league providers gives us a sense of where these decisions differ most. It is in these differences that we find the skin-in-the-game mechanism operating to its maximal effect.

With that in mind, here are 10 running backs that high-stakes drafters are taking way ahead of your home league opponents. I’ll highlight the format where each player represents the best value, but all of these players are significantly cheaper in home leagues, almost regardless of where you play. This article will focus on players who are the best values in leagues on ESPN, CBS, and NFL.com. If you play on Yahoo, Kevin Szafraniec has you covered.

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