Underdog’s Weekly Winners: The Best Ball Tournament That Pays You Every Week

Dylan Wilkerson Sports Betting Expert

12 minute read

If you've ever drafted a best ball team in August only to have your season quietly die by Week 9, Underdog's Weekly Winners format was built to fix that exact problem. Instead of grinding through 17 weeks hoping your roster peaks in the fantasy playoffs, Weekly Winners hands out a fresh cash prize pool every single week of the regular season, meaning a slow start in September doesn't have to ruin your shot at a big score in November. Click the module below to sign up with our Underdog promo code and get drafting!

Updated on 7/6/26

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Here's everything bettors and fantasy players need to know about the format, how the rules work, and the strategy that separates cashers from the crowd.

What Is Weekly Winners?

Weekly Winners is a best ball contest on Underdog with one major twist: instead of one giant payout at the end of the season, the prize pool is broken up and redistributed every week. You draft your roster one time, before the season starts, and that roster never changes — no trades, no waivers, no setting a weekly lineup. Underdog's scoring engine automatically slots your highest-scoring eligible players into your lineup each week.

The difference from a traditional best ball tournament like Best Ball Mania is that Weekly Winners doesn't care about your cumulative point total across the season. Every week is its own separate contest. Score well in Week 3 and miss the cut in Week 4? It doesn't matter — Week 3's prize money already hit your account, and Week 4 is a clean slate. This structure has made the format one of Underdog's most popular offerings because it delivers a payout opportunity almost every Tuesday morning of the NFL season instead of forcing players to wait until January.

The Rules

• Format: Snake draft, standard best ball rules — no in-season roster moves.
• Roster construction: Weekly Winners rosters typically run 18 total spots — 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 FLEX, and a bench that fills out the rest, giving drafters plenty of bench depth to work with.
• Scoring window: Contests run from Week 1 through Week 17 of the regular season. Each week counts as its own individual scoring period, running from Thursday Night Football through Monday Night Football.
• Automatic lineups: You don't set a starting lineup manually. Underdog's algorithm plugs in your highest-scoring eligible players at each position automatically once the week's games wrap.
• Player replacement: If a rostered player is ruled out before their game starts, you are out of luck. Hopefully your players stay healthy!
• Payouts: Prize money is distributed weekly to the top finishers on that week's leaderboard, rather than in one lump sum at season's end. $100k in prizes will be distributed in weeks 1-17 with $20k being paid out to the top-finisher every week.
• Ties: If multiple entries are tied at the end of a scoring week, those entries split the combined prize money for the positions they're tied across.
• Multi-entry: You can enter this weekly winners contest a total of 150 times.

Because rosters lock in before Week 1 and never change, the entire game is decided at the draft table. There's no ability to chase matchups, stream a hot waiver-wire pickup, or bench an underperformer. Whatever you draft in August is what you're stuck sweating in December.

Why Strategy Looks Completely Different Here

In a typical season-long best ball tournament, drafters build for balance — you want depth at every position, you want your bye weeks staggered so you're never left thin, and you're trying to build a team that can be good across 17 weeks and great in the fantasy playoffs.

None of that applies in Weekly Winners. Since only one week's performance matters at a time, drafters are better off building rosters that maximize ceiling in any given week rather than floor across the whole season. That single fact changes almost everything about how you should draft.

Best Strategy for Weekly Winners

1. Stack aggressively — QB plus multiple pass catchers. Correlation is your best friend when you only need one enormous week. Pairing your quarterback with two of his pass-catchers (WR-WR, WR-TE, or a full three-man stack) dramatically raises your team's ceiling in a given week, since a big quarterback performance almost always means a big game for his top targets too.

2. Stack bye weeks, not avoid them. In a normal best ball league, you spread out bye weeks so you're never short-handed. In Weekly Winners, the opposite is true. Since every week is judged independently, it's often better to cluster your bench players' bye weeks together rather than staggering them, so you have maximum active depth on the weeks that matter most for your build.

3. Prioritize spike-week upside over weekly consistency. A wide receiver who is a reliable 12-point-per-week player is far less valuable here than a boom-or-bust receiver who occasionally goes off for 30. Research on the format has consistently shown that a small handful of top-drafted players at each position account for a disproportionate share of true "spike weeks" — so don't be afraid to lean into ADP darlings at the positions most likely to produce a league-winning week, particularly quarterback and running back.

4. Get unique late in the draft. Tens of thousands of entries typically populate a single Weekly Winners contest, and only the very top scores each week get paid. If your team looks identical to thousands of others through the first several rounds, you need a way to separate from the pack. Many sharp drafters deliberately reach for lower-ADP players in the middle-to-late rounds — not necessarily the "best" player on the board, but one far less likely to be rostered by your direct competition, so a big game from that player creates real separation on the leaderboard.

5. Don't overinvest at quarterback or tight end. Since this is a one-QB format for most builds, rostering more than two quarterbacks is generally a wasted roster spot — you're never going to start more than one in a given week, so those bench spots are better used on running backs and wide receivers with true ceiling outcomes. A similar logic often applies at tight end, where the position tends to be top-heavy; many successful builds carry either two true difference-makers at the position or several dart throws, rather than a stack of mediocre middle-tier options.

6. Build for early-season upside — projections get murkier as the year goes on. Because every week pays out equally, and your roster is drafted before Week 1, your draft-day evaluations are naturally more reliable for the first several weeks of the season than they are for Week 15 or 16. Some of the sharpest Weekly Winners drafters put extra weight on players they're confident will perform well early, since that's the portion of the schedule where pre-season analysis holds up best.

7. Target correlated game environments, not just correlated rosters. Beyond simply stacking your own team's players, some of the highest-scoring weekly rosters have included players from both sides of a single high-scoring shootout. If two offenses are projected to trade points all game, rostering skill players from both sides can multiply your ceiling in that particular week.

The Bottom Line

Weekly Winners rewards a completely different mindset than traditional best ball. Rather than building the most well-rounded, resilient roster possible, the goal is to construct a lineup capable of an outlier week — even if that means sacrificing consistency in the other 16. Lean into correlation, target ceiling over floor, and don't be afraid to get weird with your player pool the deeper you get into the draft. In a format that pays out 17 separate times a season, you only need to get one week right to cash.

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Dylan Wilkerson

Dylan Wilkerson has over 5 years of experience reporting and analyzing the sports betting industry for various sites. His portfolio includes work for SportsHandle and Action Network, in addition to VegasInsider. His favorite sports are the NFL, College Football, The PGA Tour, the LIV Tour, and Cricket. Dylan has a broad and deep understanding of various sports-related topics. More from Dylan Wilkerson