Thanks. Now that the journey is almost over I definitely wish I did a better job of keeping the thread up. Baseball ending so poorly and then NFL week 1 being such a disaster kinda broke me, for a few days at least. I've never really had high expectations so having them crash down to earth (in spectacular fashion) wasn't easy to deal with. The hot start to baseball this year had me believing again but obviously that's been stamped out yet again. The second time isn't so bad. I'm gonna give this thing one last shot here and all I can do is try to do my best, but truth be told I already know the outcome. I'm at peace with it and ready to move on.


OK, enough of that ****. All business going forward

I'm skeptical of MLB cash games being beatable in any meaningful way. How many playable slates are there in a season?

Yeah, I first thought this 2 years ago and I can't imagine how conditions could have possibly improved. I did a little bum hunting and it just feels scummy, but that aside it's very time consuming and enjoy losing money over a 5500-4500 "cold streak" due to absurd rake.



How many playable slates are there in a season?


I pretty much only play the main slates with few exceptions. There's around 180 days of baseball:

-10 or so terrible slates bordering on unplayable. I play some of these but at much lower volume. No idea why the guys that max enter everything every night would do so on these days, but most of them probably still do.

-20+ that are just kinda meh

-around 50 that look really juicy for various reasons. If I end up with the dreaded job and still do this part time (unlikely, except for football) these are the slates I'd focus on.


Short answer; It's not totally unreasonable to play every day if you want just don't be a jackhole and force volume on a 5 game slate with rain and the best pitching option being Greinke @Fenway or whatever.

Some of those "juicy" slates are gonna be heavy consensus lineups for whatever reason too, like Kershaw outprojecting next best pitcher by 15 points and there are a limited number of must-play value bats to get him.

So what I'm not saying, however, is that you can't get an edge. I see bad MLB regs every day, let alone fish with like batters vs. opposing pitcher stacks. On the other hand, the variance is insane compared to NFL, and the volume/#_of_huge_donks is not comparable in any way. So if I my cash ROI in NFL is somewhere between 10-15%, I would expect MLB to be half of that at best. And the variance is higher. A well-timed Scooter Gennett + Anthony Rendon stack by itself could outscore the best cash lineup you've made all year.

So two things would not surprise me if they turned out to be true. (1) The cohort of reg players, taken as a group, are losing to rake, or not winning very much in ROI terms, and (2) if we properly simulated the game conditions kind of like a poker variance simulator, we'd find that for any given season, the probability of a winning player to be breakeven or worse is surprisingly high.

And pro-tip: playing only the main slates is a huge leak.

Another way to think of this is that the amount of signal that can be predicted in MLB hitters is about the same as NFL D/ST (correlation coefficient of predicted:actual is somewhere between 0.15-0.20). Pitchers, RBs, QBs are roughly double that. So imagine picking a QB with 8 D/STs in NFL. Only MLB is even worse than that, because the absolute error is larger. Scooter Gennett was probably worth around 9 points in FanDuel equity when he scored 98.8. Ain't no 9-point defense doing 99 in an NFL game.

good read man...ill throw in my 2 cents as a "pencil-paper" guy...I played MLB heavy last year and the year before and was profitable...don't remember the exact figures, but guessing it was middle single digits...not setting the world on fire at all...haven't really played much at all this year...came to realize that "pencil-paper" guys are at a disadvantage against the optimizer guys...I, like you, feel that the optimizers just don't build lineups the way I want to...and at the end of the day I was spending a ****ton of time building lineups by hand for a wage than was worse than what id make at mcdonalds...

also just think that if you are playing in those big GPPs with 150 entry maxs and you aren't putting in 150 lineups that's a tough sell as well...I'm not into the theory, 'oh it gives you every combo so of course you're gonna win'...im into the theory that if I'm stacking 4-4 I can have a couple of shares of those combos that land me on scooter gannett, eddie Rosario and win me a GPP where if I only put in 30 lineups probably not having those guys in a stack...

have you ever thought of just sticking to the smaller 3 max, single entry stuff and the 100 mans with limited entry? if you are trying to make a living on this guess that wont work, but those seem like you can at least have a shot being a "pencil-paper" guy...

Good discussion in this thread lately. MLB def has a tonnnn of variance and seems super hard to be profitable

Cash games seem to be all about volume just post tons of h2hs and jump in the 50s and double ups and hope for the best.

Excited for NFL and NHL already

Interesting stuff on variance. I don't have a lot of time today so I'll try to address it more in depth when I do. As for these points:


By juicy I don't necessarily mean super chalky **** like Kershaw + a 14 total @Wrigley. Last night was close to what I'm talking about; Max, couple lesser aces, several cheap options (this is where the slate falls short of what I'd call juicy as I didn't really care for any of the cheaper options, and even w/o better options I'd have preferred a couple more of the crappy but usable options), tons of solid stack options, and a few nice less obvious options where you know they'll be <2%.


The GPP offerings on off slates leave a lot to be desired. I used to play most of the 3 game+ late slates and any mon-sat day slate worth getting up for but it just doesn't seem worth my time and effort. I don't think I've played one of these all year save for the first week with a lot of day games. Also, I play every single day so I need a little time for me and for the ole brain to reset.



Until this week I was max entering a lot of the games I played. Now I'm taking my time and trying to focus on quality over quantity. I can't imagine my EV has gotten worse. I've never bought into the idea that having more entries meant some kind of inherent advantage. It just doesn't make sense to me and doesn't fit with my experiences or what I've seen.

I meant the stuff like all-day, early only, late night, locked, mixup, etc., when there are enough games on them to get an edge. I like to play the cash games in those and then the GPPs on the main.

Super relieved to salvage anything and get 40% of my buyin back tonight after mostly fading ARI (who won 16-5 @Coors). Luckily with all the homers this year totals are way up across the board so there's not as much focus on Coors. Also, my pitching mix was close to perfect, which helped. Other than that it's been a pretty good last few days.


Looking at the Sat main slate Fri night I didn't see much I liked so I planned on taking Sat off. I had a bunch of errands and chores and I want to see It Comes at Night. After i got up I didn't feel like leaving the house (lol) so I banged out some lineups, +$1K, sadly my best day in weeks.

Sun- I didn't do much prep Sat night and I was leaving at 1pm so I put in a light volume 2 hour shift, +$2K, nice, pretty sure this was my best day since my week 1 bink.

Mon- More of a typical day, -50% on around $1500 volume

Tue- I had a lot of Corey Seager shares (monster game) in a lot of nice stacks and with a lot of nice pitching. I peppered the top 1% including several 99.9 outliers, unfortunately the best of them were 1 piece away from a huge score. Managed a +$2500 day w/o a top 5.


New process- As you can see I'm not really sticking to my plan of playing around $500 a day (or limiting myself to 100 lineups for that matter). They aren't really hard and fast rules and truth be told I felt like I was leaving a little too much on the table playing so low, at least on nice slates, like Mon and Tue. I'm trying to strike the right balance between the high volume sometimes rushed and/or robotic lineup building that had become my daily routine with the slow and easy and probably too safe process I was using last week. Slow and safe would probably be my best bet if those were the only two options, and I'l be happy to go back to that if need be, but for the time being I'm going to try to max out w/o slipping back into my old, rushed routine.


This will probably sound crazy after a fairly meaningless +$4K upswing, but I think I'm back! lol. It has a lot more to do with my analysis of thousands of sharp lineups than any tiny winnings, but I'm not gonna lie, it's easier to think straight when it doesn't feel like your soul is being slowly crushed in a vice. Also, for all intents and purposes I've admitted defeat in this thread and more importantly to myself. The pressure is off. They can kill me now but they can't eat me.


Tomorrow nights slate is very limited, gonna play low volume all built around Bal bats waking the F up. Feast or famine

Good stuff man, has to feel good.

Wishing I had more Orioles right now

Good to hear things are looking up man

I don't know how much I've written in here about my thoughts on "going contrarian", but aside from a few top experts the idea is mostly misapplied and a real money burner in the wrong hands, and that's most everyone picking worse plays on purpose as some kind of a get rich quick scheme, lol. I don't pay much attention to it, esp now that the sites have overcorrected on Coors pricing (back a couple of years ago when they were always too cheap you could count on 50+% of lineups having some exposure. That's actionable!) The majority of my favorite plays (on a full slate) end up <10%. Often times a super obvious value play that I just assume will be chalk ends up in the 2-5% range.


Anyways, like I said I don't even think about %'s much or go looking for spots to apply a contrarian strategy. That said at times an opportunity jumps out at you and Pineda could easily be 40%+ tomorrow, maybe even 50%+.

-Biggest vegas fav, by a lot

-Lowest implied total against

-W/O looking it up he must have the highest K projection

-Super reasonably priced

-There's no clear second option. I mean Odorizzi, Gray and Roark are decent options, but I have very little confidence in any of them, so I'll be spreading it around with them and 3 or 4 other guys to limit the odds of a big chunk of dead lineups (on pitchers I don't want, Stras and Archer hurt me Fri night, but I was willing to lose a big chunk on them)


So there's the pros, how about the cons, or the reason I'm targeting him.


-game theory, game theory, game theory

-While good, he's been prone to the blow up

-Park, yes it's baked into the vegas total, but tell me how it's baked in when Choo and Lucroy both hit first row wall scrapers (that would have been easy outs in 25 other parks) to turn a gem into a dumpster fire.

-Tex bats match up well and are reasonably priced for the most part.



This is the template





I'll keep making lineups using 3 or 4 of these guys until I hit 150 or start running out of combinations I like, which is unlikely using so many pitchers.



No idea why I posted all that, hopefully someone finds it interesting at least. And if anyone thinks I'm FOS feel free to chime in.

I mostly nailed my hot take, Pineda got knocked around and out of the game after 4 innings after allowing 3 HR's and 7 earnies. I still managed a pathetic -50% ROI on the day. What went wrong:

-Tex did nothing the rest of the game

-I had a lot of Choo, but less Beltre and zero of the 9th hitting utility guy that hit the other HR. Lucroy and Odor on most squads and they combined for a single and a run.

-Most of the stacks I combined with Tex were total duds, even the decent ones all had at least 1 ofer.

-Tex was leading NY 7-0 when they knocked Pineda out, went on win 7-6. The wrong (highly owned) guys for NY did all the damage (namely Sanchez and Judge) and the chalk NYY stack ended up being the winning play, ugh.



I was a little off on % as Pineda was only 25%, in the $3 game at least, probably a little higher as you move up but I didn't bother to look. And really, he was such a free square auto-play that this experience just reinforces my thoughts on going contrarian in general. It's mostly a waste of time and energy.


It's fun to try different things though, I'll continue to pick my spots.

I started grading a small sample of random lineups a couple nights ago (10 randoms, 10 pros per night) as part of my nightly results review. It's pretty simple, 3 I deem profitable, 2 BEish, 1 loser, 1 circled terrible (1 out of 40 for these so far). I'm doing this to get a better feel for where the heard is going, steal ideas, and to monitor the general condition of the games. Tiny sample so far but the avg lu is looking better than I would have thought, even excluding the pros. I mean I've got the random players at 10/20 rated 1, or losing lu, but all but 3 or 4 of those could have just as easily been a 2. It's a little harder to rate the pros as I keep coming across lineups that I hate, and would never run out there, like:




I'm sure this would have been a crusher lu 2 years ago, now, I dunno. It's really tough for me to rate lu's like this. I mean I know what I want to rate it a 1+ or 2-, but the results these guys have experienced with this kind of lu is a solid 3. I'm defaulting to mostly 2's on these for the time being.

I'll post more on this once I've built up a bit of a sample. Also, I hope I'm wrong and that is and will continue to be a winner. I think mine are a lot stronger, so I should win more. Even if I'm wrong and these are better I can easily add a bunch of lineups like that to my mix.

I've been getting killed. I had one good week in May and June but those upswings were short lived and quickly erased. My bankroll continues to get smaller and smaller, as it has pretty consistently since late May 2016 other than a couple little blips and 1 nice week to start this season. This is starting to feel more and more like a failing business.


I still want to believe, and really, I mostly do, but the numbers are the numbers and it's just not working. I've been going back and forth on some drastic ideas over the last few days and I'm pretty sure I've made my final decision:


-Cash out half my bankroll

-Scale way back at MLB, basically start from scratch

-Leave enough to run a last ditch NFL hail mary



I know I've said I didn't want to bring this stuff into the thread but this is a little different as I'm actually doing something about it now. I'll be back here when and IF something changes or around football time. So see ya around football time, lol.


The writing was on the wall going into Sep last year after getting absolutely destroyed in June and Aug and I really should have made a big push at football to find out. Instead I dicked around, played tiny volume and saved it for this year. Anyways, these next 6 months truly are make or break. If nothing else I'll be back to report the final verdict.

I don't understand what you hate about the Verlander lineup. And are you saying you'd run out 150 combos of Rangers stacks? If so, seems like ur_doing_it_wrong.

I mean it's super standard and I see a lot worse from big names. It's either 4/4 just for 4/4's sake, not taking into consideration the quality of the 8. or it's some let's pick 8th hitting, glove first, 35% K-Rate doods and worst catcher on the board, hitting 9th because the plays are so bad in a vacuum no one will play them FPS bull****. Don't get me wrong, these lineups have won in the past, and I see so many of them a lot of players obviously think they're still winners today. I just think you can do a lot better. SS sucked tonight, Segura was a very reasonable 3300 on FD, 4%. Schebler and Suarez @Coors were very obviously under priced on DK tonight, 4%, 5%. How fancy do you have to get with 8th and 9th hitting scrubs? I didn't look at Kepler's % tonight but you don't need to go bottom of the barrel like those other guys when you can regularly get plays like Kepler hitting 4th (vs Parker ****ing Birdwell) for 2600. Zimmer was 100 less than he was the other day and hitting first tonight. 5%, or 1% more in a much better spot.


My lineups are more often than not 4/4 all 1-6th, or 4/3/1 with the 1 being a huge upgrade over someone like Buxton. Sometimes I'm forced to do a Yan Gomes type total punt, but that's usually to help get a lineup I like a hell of a lot more than that one under the cap, typically with a more expensive SP.


As far as Tex, yeah, I rarely put all my eggs in one basket like that. I stack a lot of teams around a core of 4 or 5 stacks so really 25% exposure is high for me. Even if I decide I want to use an individual player 100% or even 50% I rarely get there because he doesn't work with enough stacks. I'm just trying different things.

There are no "huge upgrades" over Buxton when the prize pools are so asymmetrical. I do agree that having multiple 8/9 hole scrub punts is probably not good. I try to limit my lineups to one per team. But like, Buxton is exactly the type of guy you should be willing to take a chance on if you're going to reach for 8/9 hitters. He's the fastest player in MLB and has a ~ .150 ISO. Consider this lineup on the slate vs. Bridwell:

P Alex Wood
C Evan Gattis
1B Marwin Gonzalez
2B Jose Altuve
3B Miguel Sano
SS Eduardo Escobar
OF Max Kepler
OF Byron Buxton
OF George Springer

The only thing I am worried about here is getting chopped. That's attenuated somewhat by my belief that the field is still too scared of Jaime and that the Astros would be criminally underowned. There's absolutely no trade I want to make here to get Buxton out of this lineup.

I'm just trying to offer some different perspective on who is playable from the bottom of the order. I almost never use those guys in cash lineups and trade up for the extra ABs. It sounds like you are doing that for GPPs. I think you can proudly take any 7-9 guy that either has a .150 ISO or speed. The guys I would be avoiding are the slow fat ones with no power, and even then, maybe not always.

I appreciate the feedback, interesting stuff.


I want to pick this apart a bit so I understand it better.

Is this because you believe 4/4 is so much stronger than 4/3/1 that you'd rather that core+Bux because it's so much stronger than that core -Bux + say D Peralta in the 2 hole@home vs a weak R (like tonight)? If I came across that exact same lineup tonight and had the few hundred left over for Peralta I wouldn't think twice about the switch. Lesser plays too, like say Beltran, A Jones, Choo or Goodwin tonight. The way these guys spit out the 4/4's I think you'd actually have less of a chance of an exact duplicate lineup even mixing in the much higher % Goodwin.



As much as I'd rather upgrade Bux than stand pat with your example lu I will say that it is much, much stronger than the Verlander lu I posted. I mean I had a few lineups that look weak like that tonight, but that was to get Max in with otherwise expensive stacks, big difference.


Another issue I have with these 1-2-3-7 type stacks I see is at what point do you start losing a big chuck of the correlation value? I've been going 1-2-3, 1-2-4, 2-3-4 and tossing out the weaker, less correlated 6-8 hitters more and more. It sounds like you probably think this is a mistake?

Yes I think it is a mistake. Direct correlation to the other hitters is only one part of the correlation. The other, more important correlation is to the run total. Assume I prophetically told you in advance how many runs each team would score, but I didn't tell you the names of the teams or any of the player names or batting orders. For example,

Team A -- 16 runs

C $3300
1B $2200
2B $2300
3B $3500
SS $2700
OF $2900
OF $3500
OF $3700

Team B -- 13 runs

C $2600
1B $3200
2B $3300
3B $3000
SS $2100
OF $3900
OF $2500
OF $3300

.
.
.

Team J -- 4 runs

.
.
.

Team Z -- 0 runs

etc.

Would you rather have access to only the information above, or instead use all of the detailed information you currently use?

No, I don't believe anything is "that much stronger" really. And I'm not thinking about cores at all, just team totals. Actual team totals are wildly divergent from projected ones. If you like the Twins well enough to roster 3 of them, I can't imagine how you couldn't find a fourth, given that in order to win some big donkament or winner-take-all satellite, they'll almost always have to put up a monster run total.

Right, and I think that is the best argument for swapping out 1 guy. I still like to go 4+4 on these stacks that I know people just won't have. If it's some popular team like the Yankees on a 6 run total, forget it. Need to do something tricky there.

Good stuff LM, you've definitely changed the way I'm approaching things.

Also, JFC it's hard to take a GPP down nowadays:




Granted anyone stacking Hou 1-4 had a 160 point head start, but 292 and NAILING my scrub throw ins for 11th, boo hoo.


I've got a ton of work to do around here but I'm really looking forward to 4 days off. I'll be turning a lot of attention to football shortly but I don't want to just run out the string on baseball like I did last year. 4 days of drunken foolishness then it's nose to the grindstone til Xmas. Gonna leave it all on the field.

I wonder if 4 Pirates would have gotten you there somehow? If you ever win the Squeeze, then congrats, you ****ing earned it lol. Crazy thing is that some of the NFL stuff is 10x larger which blows my mind.