So since everybody decided poker was bad for you and we can't play it inside the United States I have been pretty much doing nothing. Realistically I probably been doing "more" than I was when I was at my peak of playing online, but in regards to actively making money and challenging myself intellectually I have been doing nothing. This past summer though, I found a way to combine my three favorite things, Gambling, Sports, and Math, and make money doing it. What combines all of these things? The answer is daily fantasy sports.
What are daily fantasy sports? Daily fantasy sports use classic rotisserie scoring, but instead of picking a team for the entire season of football, baseball or whatever, you pick a new team every day. They offer a variety of buy ins and structures, very similar to what online poker sites offer for poker. For example, they have their large field tournaments where they pay 10-15% of the field with 50+ players often registered. This closely mirrors MTTs. They also have 3-10 man tournaments where they pay 33% of the field, much like the Sit n' Go for poker. They also have the 50% of field gets played structures, aka double ups. I would recommend draftday.com to get a feel for the industry.
My friend and I had dabbled with baseball the summer before, but basically just got a feel for the different sites and the concept of DFS. This year we started the summer with specific bankroll guidelines and areas where we thought we could gain an edge over our opponents. As the summer rolled on, my eyes were opened to how much the sites were failing at pricing players. They neglected many factors, giving the observant player a significant edge over the casual fan. Using the available advanced statistics that attempt to counter the effect of luck in the short term, and interesting park related and match up related discrepancies in player performance, one could win enough to beat the site fees and then some. This summer we won the Draft Day DOCOFs Baseball Championship main event for $6,200 and gain not one, but two seats into the Draft Street DSBC( Draft Street Baseball Championship) valued at $2,500 per seat. We had success in other smaller tournaments on a variety of sites, giving us a very solid profit for the summer. All while doing something that was fun and mentally stimulating. The best part of DFS is we were operating within the law of the United States(Fantasy sports are given a skill based exemption under UEIGA) and receiving very fast payments on Paypal.
What interested me the most about playing Daily Fantasy Sports though was the strategy and theory behind selecting your team. Do you play the same team in the small 3-10 mans as you do in the big multi-entry tournaments? Is it wise to enter more than once in a tournament and if so what level of overlap can your team have and still be profitable? With specific regards to baseball, should you select a lot of players from one team in hopes that they score a lot of runs (stacking)? If so, what tournaments do you you do this in? There are plenty more questions like this that deal with the theory of DFS, and there isn't really a formulaic answer to any of them, but I do think I have come up with some basic guidelines to help in these situations that I will share in later blog posts. But anyway, just wanted to get that up there that I have a new focus and it's pretty sweet and I will be posting about it.
Thanks for reading,
-jshilling09
