Monday DFS slates are like the last ten minutes of a swap meet. The good stuff is gone, the selection is thin, and you're left trying to find value where nobody else is bothering. Which is the whole point. Pickings are slim and the folks who do their homework can separate themselves in a hurry.

SportsLine's daily fantasy pro has put together a full breakdown of the top FanDuel and DraftKings picks for Monday's games, worth your time if you are building lineups tonight.

I always tell people the same thing about DFS on a Monday. The casual player spent the weekend grinding NFL preseason bets or watching golf or doing whatever normal people do on weekends, and they show up Monday throwing darts. They grab the hot bat from Sunday night baseball and slap it in there without checking who is on the mound. That is where you eat.

The edge on any slate, especially a thin one, comes from actually reading the pitching matchups and figuring out which starter is living on borrowed time. Could be a guy whose fastball velocity has been trending down for three starts. Could be a lefty getting exposed the third time through the order. You can pull up the expected fielding independent pitching numbers or the expected batting average against, and those metrics will point you in the right direction. I have been doing this long enough to know that a pitcher who got shelled his last time out carries something into his next start that the spreadsheet cannot always measure. Confidence matters. Rhythm matters.

The trick on a short slate is finding that one mid-range bat nobody else is rostering. You stack the obvious plays, everybody does that. The tournament winner is the guy who took the low-owned outfielder hitting second in a lineup that quietly scores five runs. That is where reading the actual game matters. Who is hot? Who just got moved up in the order? Who is facing a starter they have historically squared up?

My golden rule on this stuff has never changed: never bet more than you can afford to lose. DFS is no different. Play your cash games conservatively on a thin slate. Save the big GPP shots for Saturdays when the player pool is deep enough to create real separation.

Go check the full picks and lineup advice over at SportsLine. The slate is what it is but the opportunities are there if you know where to look. On a Monday night in August, that is all you can ask for.