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How to Optimize Fanduel’s Dinger Tuesday Promo

by ROI Guy | Last Updated: April 9, 2024

If you ask most sports bettors what their favorite promo is, you’ll usually hear one answer: Fanduel’s Dinger Tuesday.

This promo has changed a lot over the years, which means that the strategy needed to optimize the promo has changed as well. In this post, we’ll go over the current iteration and talk about how to maximize profit from this promo.

What is Dinger Tuesday?

Dinger Tuesday is a promotion that Fanduel has run for a few years now. It has changed a bit over the years, but the basics are as follows:

Different Versions of Dinger Tuesday

The most important thing to remember is that in 2024 there are now 2 versions of the promo, and your strategy should change based on which version you have.

The picture above with the green highlight is the good version of the promo. If you have this version, you can bet on a player to hit a HR in each game and get bonus bets for every HR hit in all those games.

This next picture with the yellow highlight is the one I have. If you have this, you can still bet on a player to hit a HR in as many games as you want, but you will only get a maximum of $25 in bonus bets in TOTAL (so you only get credit for 5 home runs across all games you pick).

If you have this second version like me, it only makes sense to pick a player in 2 or 3 games to hit a home run instead of playing every game. Definitely not as fun as the good version, but still profitable.

Which version you have can change each week, so make sure to check the terms each week before betting.

Dinger Tuesday Strategy

Now that we understand the promo, how can we maximize it? Let’s go over the main questions people ask when determining how to attack this promo.

How do you decide who to pick to hit a HR?

There are a few ways you can find profitable bets, with the 2 main categories being “Bottom-Up” and “Top-Down” betting. Bottom-Up betting means that you are trying to calculate the odds of a player hitting a home run, often through the use of a model. I prefer Top-Down betting, so that is what I will discuss here.

In Top-Down betting, you are looking at the market as a whole to try and decide on a “Fair Value” for a prop. As a simple example, if most sportsbooks have the line for the Chiefs at -13, you can assume that -13 is more or less the correct spread. If a single sportsbook – especially one that isn’t usually considered “sharp” – has the line at -10, you can assume that is an incorrect line, and that the -10 has value.

With Player props, finding outliers can be useful as well. If Fanduel has Aaron Judge HR at +260, and most other books have his HR at +200 and no HR at -270, then +260 is likely a good price.

There are a few websites that can help you monitor the prices each sportsbook has for different props. The 2 main options used for Dinger Tuesday are Oddsjam and DarkHorseOdds. Both are fantastic options for Top-Down bettors, or for any bettor who wants to ensure they get their bets in at the best possible price.

Top-Down betting is a complicated topic, and simply finding props that seem like outliers will often not be enough to make a profit. However, price shopping at the very least is a useful tool to have in your betting arsenal, and if done correctly can lead to profit. For Dinger Tuesday, it’s a great way to find bets that are profitable when paired with the bonus bets you will receive.

Should you bet more than $25 per HR?

Dinger Tuesday is a promo in the “bet and get” category of promotions – i.e, you make a bet and get something in return.

Unlike profit boosts where you usually want to bet as much as you are allowed (while also staying within a unit system of betting such as the Kelly Criterion), the goal with a “bet and get” promo is to while still getting the reward. For Dinger Tuesday, that means that each bet on a HR hitter should be for exactly the minimum bet size of $25, and not more.

The reason for this is simple. With a profit boost, you are boosting the odds of the bet in order to make the bet itself have value. Now that you have a valuable bet, you want to bet as much as you can while still maintaining responsible bankroll management.

With a bet and get, the bet itself is not necessarily valuable. While it is possible to find a line on a player to hit a HR that is valuable on its own, that value has nothing to do with Dinger Tuesday – in other words, if you’re lucky enough to find that valuable line you can bet it whether you have the Dinger Tuesday promo or not.

However, in most situations you will need to rely on the Dinger Tuesday promo to make money by betting on the HR. Since the money you are making comes from the Bonus bets you receive and NOT from the bet itself, you want to bet as little as possible (in this case $25) while also getting the full bonus bet reward.

Should everyone play this promo, regardless of their unit size?

No, not everyone should play this promo. When done correctly, this promo offers amazing value. However, due to the $25 minimum bet size, certain bettors with a small unit size should skip the promo altogether.

To determine who should play this promo, the first step is to calculate the average value of each play. Once we know the value, we can move to the next step of providing a unit recommendation, and determining who can safely bet $25 without going over that recommended bet amount.

To calculate the value of a Dinger Tuesday bet, you must calculate:

  1. How many Home runs will be hit in the game
  2. The value of the bonus bets you receive
  3. The expected loss (or profit) of the bet before factoring in the bonus bets

A typical MLB game has roughly 2.4 Home Runs per game, depending on the year. Some games have a higher expected total and some a lower expected total, but as a general assumption, most games can be expected to have 2-3 Home Runs per game. To be conservative, let’s assume 2 home runs will be hit in the game, giving us an expected bonus bet of $10.

That $10 bonus bet is not worth $10. On average, if you use your bonus bets correctly, you can expect to receive 70-80% of their value. Again, to be conservative, let’s assume that the $10 bonus bet is worth 70% of its value, or $7.

Now that we calculated the expected value of the bonus bets, we have to calculate the value of the bet itself. Home Runs, like most player props, are markets with a large amount of vig (also known as the bookmaker’s edge). A standard mainline spread will typically have a vig of 4.77%, while betting on a player to hit a Home Run will often have a vig as high as 7%. The higher the vig the more you will lose on an average bet, so the higher vig on player props is not ideal. Making things even worse, vig is not distributed evenly – on a longshot bet (such as a player to hit a Home Run) the majority of the vig is put onto the side of the longshot, making it even more difficult to find profitable plays.

Bottom Line: Betting on the Home Run market is tough, and if you are playing Dinger Tuesday by picking random players you will get crushed, even after considering the bonus bets.

Luckily, we can use the Top-Down betting techniques I mentioned earlier to lower the house edge. Each game is different depending on the exact lines available and the exact amount of projected Home Runs, but typically my recommendation is to play Dinger Tuesday if the $25 bet is 2u or less for you. If the $25 bet would be more than 2u then skip this promo.

If I have the good Dinger Tuesday, do I have to play every game?

No you do not. Each individual Dinger Tuesday play I make is profitable on its own merit if you have the good version of the promo, but you absolutely do not have to play all of them. You can play all of them, pick and choose the ones you like, only play the plays I make for the limited version of Dinger Tuesday, or anything else you prefer.

Ask yourself “How would I react if we lost all 15 plays”? That is unfortunately a real possibility, and is fairly likely to happen at least once over the season. If that happening would hurt you mentally, I advise tailing fewer plays so that losing out will not be as harmful to your mental well-being.

What should I do with the bonus bets I get from Dinger Tuesday?

I wrote a more in depth post about bonus bets here, but I’ll summarize the important parts below.

After Dinger Tuesday – particularly if you had the good version of the promo – you’ll have a fairly large bonus bet coming your way. Since this is Fanduel, that bonus bet can be split up and placed on as many bets as you’d like, so be sure to take advantage of that.

There are 2 main strategies for optimizing bonus bets:

  1. Put the bonus bets on longshots that have value
  2. Convert the bonus bet

Putting the bonus bets on longshots is what I recommend to most people. Its simple, fun, and mathematically optimal. Here are a few ways to find good longshots to use:

Another option is converting the bonus bet – i.e, hedging the bonus bet play on another book to guarantee you make some money (typically around 70% of their value if you do it right). Oddsjam and DarkHorseOdds are once again great resources for this.

I plan on making a guide on how to use those sites in the future, but they both have free trials if you’d like to experiment on your own. Personally, I prefer the first option of placing them on longshots unless the bonus bet is very large and cannot be split up, but converting them is a valid option as well.

Final Thoughts

Dinger Tuesday is an amazing promo. It’s fun, profitable, and one of the best parts of sports betting during the summer months. Hopefully, this post has helped you understand how to maximize this promo, and explained a bit about how I go about making my picks.

Good luck everyone, and have a happy Dinger Tuesday!