So this was the kind of night I've been working for. No huge binks or anything, but solid return. My biggest 1 day investment in baseball and my biggest payday at baseball.

Here's the $3 game:



The $5:



The $10:



The $25:



Total:





Day 34

Buyins $3870, Payout $20,197, +$16,327

Season +$18,800


Notes:

1- There's a slight discrepancy between the combined payout of the 4 contests I posted and my total payout, that's due to winning a few bucks in the monthly vip freerolls that were held tonight (in case anyone is auditing me)

2- I had absolutely no feel for this slate. I felt rushed and disjointed all day, totally off my game. I considered not only scaling back but maybe scraping the whole session and canceling everything. I think there's a good chance I was still churning out +EV lineups but I can't remember feeling more lost or confused during the lineup building phase of my process.

3- I'm skipping the early slate tomorrow. Got some work to do outside and I plan on catching dinner, couple 3lb small mouths, or at least a mess of bluegill.

gratz dude. you earned it

very nice man, well done.

I saw you had quite a few lineups up top for a while last night mostly because I think your Greinke lineups got out ahead of some of the other highly owned pitchers. Congrats on the big night.

Been lurking in this thread since the beginning. Just wanted to say congrats on the big day!

Thanks gents. it was a lot more fun having some good news to report for a change, plus I was starting to get a bit embarrassed. Unfortunately month long losing streaks like I had from April 5- May 5 aren't all that rare (for me at least). I'll probably have another one yet this season (I may have even started a new one tonight, shudder at this train wreck )





Day 35

Buyins $1382, Payout $461, -$921

Season +$17,879


Not enough 4pm games to bother playing the late slate tomorrow, so I'll be done at 1, half day!


Bull pens-

Ari seems fine for now.

Cinci is a disaster. They made some moves this morning




That didn't save them from more ebolaids tonight





This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a bunch of tired arms that mostly don't belong in the big leagues, in the big leagues. Even little turds like Aaron Hill can shred these bums (3HR's 7RBI) This guy had hit 3 HR's from last July to half way through tonight's game, enter Cin bull pen, CAREER RESURGENCE!

Been following this thread from the beginning, congrats on the big day!

Thanks. Not much went my way today. I was overweight Machado (who had a monster game) and the Mets bullpen held on to protect Harvey's win. Other than that it looked like one pf those -90% days, so many ofers, and mostly bad pitching. I'll settle for this (thanks Manny Mac)




Day 36

Buyins $1278, Payout $706, -$572

Season +$17,307


This Cinci pen continues to impress:




Ari pen blew a lead and then went into extras again:




Lamb and Corbin were my secret weapons today, didn't work out too well but Corbin was good at least (needed that 12 point win tho) Not sure what happened to Lamb as he didn't get hit hard and only threw 60 pitches.

+1

Going more boom or bust tonight than my typical diversified value strategy. Using this guy 279/279:




That's rare for me. Lots of unconventional stacks and other plays as well. Back to my regularly scheduled nitiness tomorrow.

The Fernandez gamble worked well even though the bull pen tried to blow it in the 9th. He was by far the best pitcher tonight:




Everything else seemed to work too, I had many NYY and ARI stacks. I had a lot of dud stacks but my most used players mostly went TF off. I knew there would be some crazy high scores tonight but figured I must have hit that magic combo once or twice with so many of my most used guys going off. Before I checked results I was thinking +10K minimum, not quite.




I won money in all the games but other than a 13th and 22nd out of 70K in the squeeze I didn't even make a run at any binks:




kinda frustrating on a night when everything seemed to go perfectly. Then again it erases a couple pretty ****ty days losses, so I'll take it!


Day 37

Buyins $1379, Payout $2958, +$1579

Season +$18,886

What would you say you like to look at most when targeting your SP for GPPs?

Also would you say FanDuel is better than DK in terms of GPP and Cash even though you don't play it?

Dependability, upside, and match up. Mostly I use top tier high K aces as their production is more stable than any hitter. Of course I'm always sniffing around for value based on price and match up, I use these guys in smaller doses.


I wont get into all the ways that DK has ticked me off over the last year, but it's a fine site in general. It mostly comes down to personal preference. I get a kick out of posts on RG about how some players can only win on 1 site or the other, mostly small sample size noise.



I took a quick look at box scores around 10 and figured I was having a decent night (Bos stacks, NYY and Mil stacks, tho Lucroy's 0-6 wasn't too cool). Then I just looked again at final box's and wasn't too keen on this:




A game I had zero shares of due to weather concerns (and there was an hour+ delay). I had small shares of Happ and Wood, who were both good, but mostly Smyly and deGrom, who weren't. Hoping for a break evenish night:




Boom, nice. Most of my better nights this season have also been somewhat disappointing as I felt I should/could have done better, so it's nice to be pleasantly surprised for a change. Still no binks, this is my closest and most of my $ won tonight:




I used Machado and Franco about 10 times as much as I used Donaldson, insert one of them into his slot and we're talking turkey. The bink is coming soon.......


Day 38

Buyins $1618, Payout $4897, +$3279

Season +$22,165



I'm busy tomorrow before and after the 7pm slate, so I'm skipping the 1pm.

When I saw this:




I was pretty giddy. I didn't think he'd be as low owned as his last start (3%) but I figured low owned, wrong. He was 30-40% owned across the board so I was actually slightly underweight. Pedroia and Morales had big games and were among my most used players, but that wasn't enough tonight.




Ouch! Wasn't expecting that.


Day 39

Buyins $1437, Payout $548, -$889

Season +$21,276


I don't know if it played much of a factor tonight (besides for Max being 10 times more owned than his last start) but I've noticed the group think being a lot worse than in the past. More and more players are coming up with their picks from similar sources (be that touts, free optimizers, lineup sellers, similar algos). Like I can't explain this other than that people suck and are lemmings:




Howard had the slightly worse pitcher (if you consider Pineda anything but a total train wreck at this point, I don't, so zero points in Howards favor). I'll eat my hat if Morales wasn't the better play tonight. Even if I'm wrong (I'm not) Howard sure as **** isn't 6.5 times the better play, crazy.


In the long run it's a huge advantage for me and anyone else willing to dig in and come up with their own plays, but it sure ratchets up the variance from day to day, like with Max tonight, or Granderson a couple weeks ago.


Here's an interesting bull pen situation to keep an eye on:




Cle has tomorrow off, but Hou goes into Fenway for 4 games against the red hot Sox bats before getting Mon off. I checked back and they had played 12 straight before Wed with moderate pen usage in that run. Red Sox were already going to be popular this weekend, and for good reason, but this just adds a little more fuel to the fire.


Moving up So I've been thinking about moving up and how I want to move up. It's not exactly like poker because you can just add more and more tables, except I can't really. I've been playing the limit at $1-$10 contests (250 per slate) since day 1, so there's nothing there. I had planned on playing more $5 games and less $2 or $3, but the $5 rally is smaller than I was thinking it would be (typically $20K-$30K with $2K-$3K to first) I play 5% of first so only 20-30 entries there (when I was planning on 100) but anyways that's mostly small potatoes and a small increase. I've also got to the point where I always play 5% of first in the $25 slam, but it's usually only $10K-$15K to first so $500 or $750. I've been going ham when they run a bigger game, but that's only every couple weeks.


So assuming I want to stay with FD only for now my options are pretty limited:

I can move way up to the $300 monster. Big jump, and they've been pretty tiny this year, like 300 man fields. I'm all about that upside boss, that's why I spend hours and hours cranking out micro squeeze entries. The $3 squeeze pays $12,500 to first $7K to second tomorrow. So really if and when I ever do make that move it would only be like 1-5 entries a day.

I can play more than %5 of first in the Slam. This is probably the easiest solution, at least until I get to 10% of first, dunno how far I'd want to go past that. I'll be playing around with it over the next week or 2 to see how it feels.

In the meantime I'm adding the Home Run to my rotation, why not:

What made you have Morales ranked above Howard?

I don't use projections much, but they can explain the difference better than I.

Morales 2015 highlighted, 2016 ros projections circled:




Howard:




So not that Morales is anything great, but he's head and shoulders better than lump of dung Howard. The pitching match up did indeed favor Howard more (on paper at least) but that's wiped out by the huge difference in parks, and the fact that Morales will for sure play the whole game (and always against opposite handed pitchers as he's a SH) whereas Howard could easily see a lefty, or worse be PH for and replaced by Ruf.

It's really not even close. Flip flop parks and it starts to get closer, but I still take Morales. Also, my point wasn't really that Howard was a terrible play, I had a few shares myself. My point was that there's no way to explain the difference in usage other than touts and the like.

Why are you using overall stats instead of his stats vs RHP? I didn't look at bullpens but he's getting at least 2-3 AB vs RHP right?

I was going for more of a general snapshot of what kind of players they are at this point in time, but sure here's the splits.

Howard 15:




Morales 15:




Morales smoked him, wOBA +.044, wRC+ +31, and then Morales was also above avg vs lefties, while Howard put up a 9 wRC+, not 109, not 79, not a horrible 59, but a 9, I've never seen that.

Small sample? Sure. How far back into Howard's career numbers do you want to go to extrapolate that into something that has anything to do with the player he is today? He's had 3 career phases, 1 Powerhouse stud, 2 dependable middle of the order production, 3 useless bum that's still in the league because Philly just can't cut bait on that albatross of a contract.

thanks that makes sense. I didn't factor in how ****ty he is vs lefties. I know very little about baseball but read that generally lefty batters struggle alot more vs LHP than righty batters vs RHP.

I had to look after Kershaw's awesome game, got a little sweat going:



Go Cards, at least Piscotty, Holliday, Carp, and Adams...

A Piscotty single, walk, anything in the 9th looks to be worth about $4K, maybe more....

safe at first on an error!

Sadly that doesn't count, now if Adams can knock him in....

****in a Adams

Mother bitch that Molina hit cost me $2K, crazy ****