David Does Daily (Fantasy): Our Survivor Guru Takes On FanDuel

Hi, I’m David. I’m going to be playing one-day fantasy football for the first time this NFL season, and writing about it here on the TeamRankings blog.

A Bit About Me

For those of you that aren’t familiar with me, I write the weekly write up for our NFL survivor pool picks section, and give also give football pick’em and survivor strategy advice in our Q&A forums. Though really those things are only one small part of what I do at TR. My day-to-day job is mostly a combination of web development, data management and analysis, predictive modeling, and product development. And I blog sometimes. Oh yeah, and answer customer support emails. That’s life at a small company for you…

I also like to gamble (if I think I have an edge, of course) and play in contests and pools, mainly using the data and analysis here on TeamRankings to enter NFL and college football pick’em pools, Survivor pools, and March Madness pools.

My Interest in Daily Fantasy Sports

I used to play traditional fantasy football and baseball, but I quit years ago because it was taking up too much of my time, and the stakes I played for just couldn’t justify the huge amount of time spent on research.

However, I’ve heard a couple stories recently of gamblers who claim to be making great money playing daily fantasy sports. They say they have an easier time making a profit with daily fantasy than with sports betting, and that has me intrigued.

I believe it. Daily fantasy right now reminds me of poker in the early to mid 2000’s:

  • It’s easy to deposit money (and legal across the USA, which is important)
  • A lot of people are curious about it, which means there’s probably a lot of fish (aka low-skill players) swimming around on the biggest sites

Back in the day I was able to learn enough about poker that I could make a consistent profit at smaller stakes tables (the ones full of the curious newcomers) — not a huge amount by any means, but enough extra income to matter to someone living off a grad school stipend.

So when Tom asked me if I was interested in writing a blog series about learning the daily fantasy ropes, I thought it was a great idea. I get to spend some of my work hours learning about daily fantasy strategy, and my boss is going to bankroll my “education?” Sign me up!

What I Know About Daily Fantasy Right Now

Not a whole lot. As I mentioned above, I haven’t played fantasy sports in years, so my general fantasy football knowledge is zilch. I haven’t built up years of knowledge about backup tight ends, I can’t tell you which defenses typically give up big numbers to slot receivers, and don’t have an innate sense of how a difficult defensive matchup affects the passing numbers of a middle-tier quarterback.

However, one thing I do have, which not many other people can match, is access to the TeamRankings database. If I want to know the average yards per carry of running backs facing the Cowboys on the road last season, I can write a database query to figure it out. Even better than that — if I’m running the query for one team, it’ll be just as easy to pull the info for all teams. And then with a few more keystrokes I can filter it to whatever time frame I want.

Right now I don’t really know what data will be useful, but hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have found something of value lurking in those depths, and maybe also put together some tools to share.

Of course, I also know a little about statistics and predictive modeling. I’m not sure if I’ll actually get to the point this season where I’m building my own models, but my quantitative skills should at least help me in evaluating information I get from other sources.

More generally, I also know a bit about bankroll management, from my past poker playing days and from my current gambling days. Now, I don’t always have the discipline to stick to the rules I make for myself, but I can at least figure out how to set them.

What I Want To Learn Playing Daily Fantasy This Season

How to win — duh. But what does that mean?

Certainly, it means figuring out how to construct a lineup that comes close to maximizing your expected points, given the available players and their salaries.

But it can also mean figuring out the answers to questions like:

  • What type of tournament is my strategy and ability best suited for (large tourneys with a single big prize? 50/50 double ups? something else?)
  • What entry fee level has opponents that I can actually beat?
  • Is it better to enter the same lineup in 10 different tournaments, 10 different lineups in the same tournament, or 10 different lineups in 10 different tournaments?
  • If I’m entering multiple lineups, how much variation should I have between them? Change every player? Change only one or two players?
  • How much of my bankroll should I be investing in any one game?
  • Is it better to play tournaments that include Thursday NFL games or not? Does it even matter?
  • What are the best daily fantasy information sources, and how can I leverage them?
  • How are player salaries set, and is there an inefficiency there that I can exploit?
  • Can I predict how popular a given player will be in a given week? And if so can I use that information to my advantage?

I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty more questions as I go. And if you have any you think I should investigate, let me know in the comments.

What To Expect: Goals, Bankroll, and Record Keeping

I’m beginning this season with a $250 bankroll. That’s small potatoes for a lot of active gamblers out there, but the main goal here is to learn, and I don’t need a big bankroll to do that.

The rules are the same for $1 tournaments as they are for $1000 tournaments, so if compare my scores to scores in higher dollar tourneys, I should be able to see how well/poorly I would have done, without actually shelling out the big bucks and taking the risk at first.

I imagine I’ll start out fairly conservatively, playing a lot of 50/50 tournaments (where the top 50% of players double their money, minus a small rake for FanDuel), rather than plunging into huge tournaments that have only a few large payouts.

Each week I’ll report my results for the previous week, though I’m not sure yet in how much detail — not because I want to hide anything, but because it’s just not practical to publish every lineup I use here on the blog.

At the minimum I’ll report any profits or losses, and give a brief review of the types of games I played. I’ll also discuss anything I’ve learned during the week, and I’ll raise any big new questions that crossed my mind. I’m hoping some of our readers will have some daily fantasy knowledge they can share with me (and with everyone else reading).

My goals for this season are pretty simple:

  • Figure out optimal daily fantasy strategy for NFL
  • Turn my $250 into $1,000,000

That’s all. Is that to much to ask for?

P.S. I’ll be playing on FanDuel this season, so if you want to test the waters with me and you’re interested in following this blog in the future, we’d appreciate it if you signed up for FanDuel using our partner link, which gives TeamRankings a little bonus. (Please make sure Promo code TEAMRANKINGS is in there.) Thanks! Here’s the signup page.