Good afternoon all,

I have been around poker and fantasy sports for a while, but have recently taken an interest in DFS. I put some $$ on Draft Kings and am ready to go, but before I dive in, I'd love some basic strat that will help me succeed?

I looked around briefly and didn't see any basic dfs strat, but if there is already a thread in this, please direct me.

Thanks!

trying to figure out whose alt this is

nobody with any advice worth giving is going to give you any, i talk over this stuff with a bunch of people but there is reciprocity and community vibes to that, it's all done in private and not to a complete stranger

it's a zero sum game and there's very little room up top, majority of my income comes from 6 man 50/50s so simply adding a single competent person could kill all profitability

touts are absurd and none of those subscription sites are worthwhile

my only advice is to pay attention to rake, which means draft kings is not a good place to play at if you'll be doing this

Hahaha. I used to be on here many years ago(username was Julebag), but I spent most of my time at the Triple Draw and PLO forums as I had no interest in fantasy at the time. I no longer have the e mail I used so I started over. I really am just a beginner looking for some basic advice.

Thanks for the info!

cool cool, pay careful attention to payout structure and rake

there's a number of contests that are reasonable and others that are pure lotteries

sometimes the payouts are so top heavy that even if you crushed it and cashed way above expectations, without a single top 2 finish you'd lose a lot of money on the year

i used to monte carlo gpp structures to determine whether or not they were worth pursuing and that was really eye opening - stuff like where if you guarantee you never finish in bottom half of results and yet still lose money because without that top finish most payouts are min cashes and just treading water and the times you finish in the top 20th percentile you still get nothing

it can be a pretty big time suck to do things well and the downswings are way more painful than the upswings

in poker when you lose you can easily dissect the plays and see you ran below ev or make this specific mistake(s) and can then work on that, when things go horribly wrong in dfs you don't know if it's because you suddenly suck or you just ran really bad and that can be devastating and zap all your confidence

Thanks again for the tips! I'm definitely not looking to "make money" necessarily but it would be nice to have a hobby that I can at least break even on, god knows I spend enough on my golf hobby(obession), haha.

Take care,

Immediately withdraw your money and never play. The glory days are far in the past.

If you still insist on playing I'd be happy to give you further advice.

Hahah, I appreciate the candor for sure, and I'm definitely not looking to be a grinder who earns a living off of it or anything, more so just looking for some basic strat/routines that will help me become somewhat competent.

Thanks!

Ok here are some general tips for a rec type player:

1. Plan out your year. Meaning figure out what sports you want to play and stick with those sports. Dont ever just throw in a lineup you made without doing any sort of research in a random sport you know nothing about. You'll get killed. Early on figure out what type of games you like to play ie classic, showdown, tiers, snake draft and then stick with that particular type of game so you can get better at it. Also, and this is very important, if you are playing multi entry tournaments, Max out whatever you enter ie single entry obviously only 1, 3 max....play 3, 20 max.....play 20. DO NOT play 150 max tournaments unless you're putting in 150 lineups. You'll be enticed to do so because those are the bigger tournaments with the big payday up top, but you'll get slaughtered thinking you can put in 1 entry and compete against the best in the world who have entered the contest 150 times. Find a contest within each sport you are playing and play the same contest every week. Dont skip around playing different contests. Starting out I'd probably recommend playing in a 3max contest. It will familiarize you with a multi entry contest and help you develop different strategies for multi entry contests, but it doesnt take forever to hand build 3 lineups compared to say a 20 max entry contest.

2. Bankroll. Figure out how much you want to play per day and/or per year and stick to the plan until you bink something significant. For instance say your bankroll for the year is $1000 and you want to play NFL and PGA. NFL reg season is 18 weeks and PGA is roughly 44 weeks so that would be 62 sessions meaning you should be playing no more than 2% of your bankroll per session and that is IMO the MAX you should be playing, especially just starting out. I'd probably recommend playing 1% of your roll per session so that would be $10. As you notice if you follow this advice there is ZERO percent chance of ruin if you play $10 per session in this scenario vs a chance you could go broke within a year playing $20 per session. That's why I recommend playing 1% of your bankroll starting out per session.

3. Optimizers. You will absolutely need to purchase some type of optimizer and with that will come player projections. Just a cost of doing the hobby. Otherwise you're just guessing. Quality varies between optimizers. Others can probably comment on this better than myself as I dont use an optimizer or projections (I give pretty sound advice but I dont follow everything I say for various reasons). I have used an optimizer like linestar briefly which i think costs like $15 a month. Also I believe rotowire has one for around the same price. The best one out there, fantasycruncher, is $30/month for their "lite" product and goes up to $150/mo for their top of the line product. If I were you, I'd just go with the $30 fantasycruncher product. Might as well use the best thing out there.

4. Contest payout structures. These vary wildly. Some contests pay an obscene % of the prizepool to 1st place. You want to avoid these contests generally speaking. I think a good gauge for a contest prize structure is finding one that pays around 10% of what the payout is for first place ie 1st pays $1000, 10th pays $100.

5. Never play cash games ie 50/50 contests or double ups. These contests prize is basically doubling your money ie 100 entries 50 people double their money. DFS has become so competitive that it's pretty pointless to play these and you're totally missing out on the upside of tournaments.

6. Withdrawals. Dont be that guy that puts money in their account, wins $10, then withdraws it all only to redeposit the following week. You're costing the company money which in turn hurts all of us in the long run with higher rake.

7. Play on Yahoo instead of Draftkings. Yahoo is really trying to attract new customers and have some great contests some without rake, some that will give you 100% of your entry fee back even if you dont cash, etc. The competition is a lot softer as well and they have beginner only contests.

8. Set realistic expectations. I dont know how smart you are or what your educational background is, but these days you are competing against some very smart people ie people that have PhDs in Math and Statistics and the like. I would say in your 1st year a good goal would be to break even. You are going to lose. A LOT! So just be prepared for that and dont get frustrated. Even the best players are pretty much looking to hit a few big tournaments a year to make their years profitable and even they lose a lot. Dont let it affect the rest of your life. Take a break if you need to (it can really get to be a grind).

That's about it off the top of my head. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

really good advice in general but have a small quibble with the two above

if you're playing $10 a slate (ie in this example $40 a month as pga/nfl don't overlap much) then paying $30 a month for tools to use on $40 a month of buyins is a terrible investment

you're also going to have a lot of identical lineups and heavy on popular plays and then you'll need to deviate in which you're no longer using that optimizer anyway

you can make your own projections and build your own optimizer in excel pretty easily - it's better to do on R or python. there's also a lot of free projections available which i honestly don't think are any better or worse than something you're paying for

if you are doing 150x then yes, something like using fantasycruncher will make your life easier - but you'll save money in the long run paying money to someone to build you a 150x and then doing that on your own - i also wouldn't touch fantasycruncher with a ten foot pole, when the burrito brothers were accused of collusion he stepped in to their defense and said that they each have their own accounts and login at different times with different ips and uploaded different projections so fact they never overlap is a coincide

which if you sit down and think about that for a minute - he's either a lying ftard who made up all that data to help out two brothers cheat or they keep your projections and lineup information and store it - something that they have no incentive to do whatsoever unless they had nefarious reasons, something they don't need to do at all, they also keep a record of the lineups it creates for you - when asked about how this is basically insider trading how they can know the exact ownership and lineups used by their clients and could thus create highly leveraged and totally unique lineups based upon that his only answer is "well I don't live in a state that allows dfs" - so someone (or many people) either owning/employed/friends of fantasycruncher are definitely getting that info - that info is just way to incredibly valuable - imagine if the owner of a hud had personal access to everyone's hole cards an hour before the hands were dealt - that's what were talking about here

regarding the storage of data, most websites don't even store your password and whenever anything is sensitive they go way out of their way to ensure they never actually have access that it's a closed circuit where you are interacting with their product but they can't interact with yours - i work in tech, i'm not speculating, they went out of their way to store that information or the owner is a liar who supports cheaters so you be the judge if you want to support that business

and there's nothing wrong with cash, that's where most of my play and income comes from, tourneys are extremely top heavy so you can run very well and still lose your shirt because without that top 3 finish it doesn't matter how well you run

also, if you'll do yahoo/fanduel and want to line my pockets with pennies i have an affiliate link for you to sign up with - unsure what i get with fanduel since never got around to using that, yahoo gives me 1% of your rake - but if you want either lmk and i'll pm them and then if we ever cross paths i'll buy you a dinner and drinks

i play 99% on yahoo and only bother dealing with other sites during moments i see a big unnoticed opportunity

glgl

1. Agreed, on the face of it, paying $30 a month for an optimizer when you are only playing $40 a month in contests would appear to be a "terrible investment". However, you are paying for the optimizer/baseline player predictions/ownership % to be able to pretty much immediately jump into the games and be somewhat competitive. You are doing this in the hopes that it will allow you to move up in stakes and in the long term it will be viewed as a "wise investment".

2. Eventually he would need to come up with his own projections/methodology within the optimizer. From my understanding, Fantasy cruncher is a robust program which allows one to tweak many variables. I have never personally used FantasyCruncher, so maybe someone else can jump in here.

3. He said he was wanting to be a rec player. Therefore, there was no need for me to bring up the fact that you can build your own optimizer if you want to take Python or R classes (or pay for use of a program to build your own optimizer with limited/no programming knowledge) along with college level advanced mathematical courses necessary to develop advanced algorithms.

4. I'm not going to get into who or who isnt cheating as that is off topic and not relevant to this discussion.

5. IMO cash games havent been relevant for 6 years. That is my opinion. Obviously we have differing opinions. I used to mainly play cash myself, but for myself (and I believe for most players) it became pointless around 2015. Not every tournament is top heavy as I specifically instructed him to look for tournaments that werent top heavy and how to spot them.

Thanks for your input. I enjoy talking about DFS and love to hear differing viewpoints on it.

yeah man agreed, i tend to sound like a douche a bit (see my undertitle) so glad you didn't interpret what i said as hostile

Wow, that's a lot of great info, thanks so much!

Yeah optimizers are definitely completely new to me, but I will definitely look into them.

Obv I have a lot to go over now, and that's great. For starters it sounds like I need to take my $$ off DK and move it to Yahoo.

Thanks again!

link plz?

no link, just doing it on my own and didn't share

tl:dr vast majority of contests you'll never be profitable, even with a huge edge, unless you go above expectations in top 3 finishes but really it's only 1st that matters, multiple 2nd and 3rd place finishes pay less than a single first place ie 1st pays 50k, 2nd pays 20k, 3rd pays 10k, 4th 3k, 5th 1k, and 10th gets $300

that'd be like a $20 contest with 10k people entering and 10th place, an absolutely elite finish, is only a 15x payout

in fact you can give yourself such an absurd edge that you never finish in the bottom half and in most 10k sims you still lose money without a bunch of top 3 finishes simply because only top 20% payout and most are min pays, like lots of structures even have it so the min pay is less than 2x buyins so you finish top 20% get $30 back on your $20 entry fee

so you have 5 entries with a normal distribution where you can only finish in top 50% of entries, 3 of those don't cash, one cashes for a min of like $40 so for those 4x entries you've invested $80 and got back $40 so in order to break even you'd need to finish at least 75th for a $60 payout out of a contest of 10k entries and the vast majority of the time you won't

occasionally you'll get that top 3 and your roi looks insane but overall you need a tremendous edge over the field & a ton of run good to have a chance in gpp due to the extremely top heavy payout structure

but recreationals just look at the money up top wanting that 6 figure score so that's how it works as they don't care about losing $100 each week but do chase those life changing scores

Cruncher and Labs are both fairly easy to use.

The mistake a lot of players make in large field GPPs is going too contrarian when trying to make unique builds.

they cost too much to be worth it, even if you don't have the skills to do it yourself, you could still divert those annual sub fees and pay a guy on fiverrr to build you a projections and optimizer program to run on your own



that's an absurd price to pay imo

That is a lot, but that's also for all sports. I'm a one sport (NFL) kind of guy, and the price is much lower.

.............

top heavy af

Any idea what a top GPP'ers ROI is? The variance is truly insane but I guess with all the multi entries and the ability the play hundreds of tournies at once helps.

Why would maxing out entries in a tournament be a good idea? If your first lineup is your most profitable and each one after is slightly less profitable, at some point your lineups are probably significant losers. If I had to play a tournament against pros where each pro entered 5 lineups vs entering 100 lineups, I would think my ROI is higher in the 100 lineup tournament.

I think there's a combinatoric argument for playing max entries though I'm not sure it's right. Let's say Mahomes is 20% owned in tournaments, the average 150-max player will have 30 lineup combos, so if you're playing 20 lineups they have a deeper set of combos than you even if you lock him in. Each additional lineup you enter lowers the EV of your previous lineups though, so if lineup #150 was +1% roi on its own it's probably -EV to add it to the portfolio.

If playing 1-5 lineups you'd definitely prefer a 5-max entry contest to a 150-max though. Even if lineups #6-150 from the pros are worse and competing against themselves those are still going to be better than an average lineup in the contest. The min-cash line can be soft in really large field 150-max tournaments, but you're not playing to 1.5x your money in those.

Check out Ron Stewart on you tube doing drafts.

He uses a tool that shows his % owned of each player so he can own most players within a few percentage points of each other within reason.

Thats what most of the max entry guys are doing

I agree to some extent - I don't think ownership % even matters as the goal is to score the most amount of points, not have the lowest owned player. I do think it's more so in big GPPs about having a heavily correlated lineup that either completely tanks or hits hard - I think it's best when you can stack a team like the Giants vs Eagles going all in on the game blowing up, and that lineup is going to tank the majority of the time. Basically you're taking on the highest variance possible for the biggest upside - I avoid RB's as they have less variance with lower ceilings, and you really need a QB that can boom or bust. I think with the fields so big, the payouts extremely top heavy, and true ROIs prob under 15%, the bankroll you need to actually play professionally with hopes that your strategies are correct makes it not a viable option.

You are at a distinct disadvantage if you are only putting in 1 lineup in a 150 max. I'm not sure where the assumption that your first lineup is always your most profitable or "best" lineup. I dont understand that. To me that sounds like a bunch of theoretical nonsense. If I make 150 lineups and play in the same 150 max contest every week, I doubt my first lineup will ever be my best lineup in a football season.