Every week, roughly a hundred thousand lineups chase the DraftKings Millionaire Maker — and every week, the winning lineup looks remarkably like the ones that won before it. We know, because we logged them.
We pulled every Sunday Milly Maker winning lineup from the 2024 and 2025 seasons (36 lineups) and we’ve kept tracking through Week 6 of 2026 (42 and counting). Winning scores, stack structures, QB salaries, ownership, DST prices — all of it. The patterns are not subtle. Here are the 10 rules the data gave us.
The headline numbers
- Average winning score: 228.7 in 2024, 235.1 in 2025. Par is ~230.
- 28 of 36 winners in 2024–25 used a QB+1 or QB+2 stack.
- 17 of 18 winners in 2025 rostered at least one player owned by less than 5% of the field.
- Winning QBs averaged about $6,400 in salary in 2024. Expensive QBs almost never win this thing.
- Winning defenses averaged about $3,100.
Rules 1–3: Correlation is the engine
1. Stack your QB with 1–2 pass-catchers. QB+1 or QB+2 was the winning shape in 28 of 36 lineups across 2024–25. Correlation is what lets a lineup lap a field of 100,000+ entries — a collection of unrelated good plays almost never does.
2. Attack games, not players. 16 of 18 winners in 2025 carried at least one opposing-team player from the QB’s game. Pick the shootout first, then build the lineup around it.
3. Go cheap at quarterback. The QB is the most expensive slot and the least necessary one. Winning QBs averaged ~$6.4K in 2024, and most 2025 winners cost under $6K. The 2026 twist: the last three winners (Weeks 4–6) all used QBs owned by less than 7% of the field — Dak Prescott at 5.2%, Drake Maye at 4.3%, Michael Penix Jr. under 5%. Spend on the stack, not the arm.
Rules 4–6: Salary and leverage
4. Blend chalk with leverage. Almost every winner mixes obvious plays with one piece the field doesn’t have — 17 of 18 in 2025 had a sub-5%-owned player. One is enough. Week 5’s winner paired 4.3%-owned Maye with DeMario Douglas at 1.2%.
5. Don’t pay up at DST. Winning defenses averaged ~$3,100 and cheap DSTs win constantly. The Week 6 winner got 15 points from a Chiefs DST owned in 5.9% of lineups. The savings fund the correlation that separates you.
6. Work a TE into the stack about 25% of the time. A tight end was part of the QB stack in 10 of 36 winners. It’s a real branch of the tree — not an every-week play, not a never play.
Rules 7–10: The build checks
7. Don’t force the last dollar. Winners routinely leave salary unspent. A unique lineup beats a maxed-out chalk lineup; leftover salary is a feature when it buys differentiation.
8. Know your par: ~230. If a lineup can’t plausibly reach 230 points, it can’t win this tournament. Rebuild it before you enter it.
9. Home field is a tiebreaker, not a filter. Home QBs went 13–5 across 2024 winners. Use it to choose between two stacks you like equally — never as the reason to make the pick.
10. FLEX is a ceiling slot. A TE at FLEX appeared in 7 of 36 winners (19%) in 2024–25 — usually a cheap second TE (Ben Sinnott, Michael Mayer) unlocking salary elsewhere. Three of the first six winners in 2026 ran a second TE too. Keep the punt-TE branch in your builds.
The 3-question final check
Before you hit enter, ask:
- Is this lineup correlated — or just a collection of good plays?
- Where’s my leverage — at least one piece the field doesn’t have?
- Can this lineup plausibly reach 230?
If you can’t answer all three, you’re not done building.
Get the one-page Playbook PDF free — and sweat Sundays with the room in our free Discord. We update the full winner database every week on the Milly Maker Stats page.
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