Final FanDuel Private Tourney This Sunday — Last Chance To Win!

November 14, 2015 - by Tom Federico

Getting right to the point:

If you’re a rational human being who enjoys making sound investment decisions, you should enter our weekly FanDuel contest, the TeamRankings Football Championship, which runs through NFL Week 10.

(Enter this week’s contest now)

We are not saying this just to promote our private tourney. Sure, we want it to fill every week. But that’s not the point here.

The point is that the way FanDuel has structured this contest makes it a compelling ROI opportunity.

To understand why, first let’s review the details of the contest:

  • 660 max entrants. Our weekly contest costs $10 to enter, and is capped at a maximum of 660 entrants
  • Top 300 cash. The top 300 scores (that’s 300/660, or 45.5% of entries) double their money
  • Top 3 Win $500+. In addition, the top 3 scores each week win a free entry into our $25,000 Week 11 Final. In that tourney, $25,000 in prize money will be divided among the 30 entries, with each entry winning a minimum of $500.

Bonus Prize Potential Makes A Huge Difference

Here’s what many people don’t realize: That last bullet point above means a lot, and completely transforms the dynamics of the contest.

Even though the odds of finishing in the top 3 of our weekly tourneys are obviously not very high, it’s always a possibility, and the mere existence of that potentially huge Week 11 bonus prize is extremely significant from an expected value standpoint.

Let’s do some quick math. To simplify things, let’s assume that everyone who enters our private tourney is equally skilled at Fanduel.

  • The expected value of the basic contest is -$1. If this was just a normal FanDuel tourney with no extra bonus prizes available, the expected return on a $10 entry fee is -$1, after FanDuel takes its cut (that’s a 45.5% chance to win $10, added to a 55.5% chance to lose $10). There’s the FanDuel business model in a nutshell.
  • But the expected value of our extra bonus prizes is +$3.75. Now let’s value the bonus prize potential in our private tourneys. The top 0.45% of entries in each weekly tourney (3 out of 660, assuming our tourney fills up) win tickets to our Week 11 Final. In addition, the expected value of a Final entry is $833 and change; that’s $25,000 in prize money divided by 30 total entries. So we can roughly value the possibility of picking a killer lineup and finishing in the top 3 in a given week at about $3.75 (that’s a 0.45% chance x $833 in expected bonus prize money if it happens).
  • The net result is a 27.5% expected return in one day. Add the -$1 expected value for the usual contest prize structure to the +$3.75 expected value from the Week 11 Final bonus prize potential, and you’re left with a total expected value of +$2.75. That’s a 27.5% expected ROI on a $10 entry fee, in a day’s time.

If You’re Going To Play FanDuel, Play Here First

Is the analysis above simplistic? Yes.

Do some players who are very smart and/or experienced have a better chance to finish in the top 3 in a given week than other players? Yes.

Do you still have more than a 50% chance of losing your money if you enter our tourney? Yes. (Shockingly, this isn’t truckloads of free money being given away by FanDuel.)

But as far as potential investments go, even if you assume your odds are a bit lower than we describe above, there’s a strong case that the TeamRankings Football Challenge offers very attractive expected returns. And if the tourney doesn’t fill, the expected returns go up even more.

Of course, it’s totally your choice whether to enter or not. Our goal here is not to convince people to blindly throw their money into playing on FanDuel. But at the very least, if you’re considering playing, don’t enter any regular ole’ FanDuel contests until you get in our private tourney first, otherwise you’re just shortchanging your odds to profit.

(And by the way, you can put up to 25 entries in our contest, until it’s full.)

Enter This Week’s TeamRankings Football Championship