Tell me if you’ve heard that one before...

My name is Dan Quinn and I’m obsessed with daily fantasy sports. Phil and I started Run It Once together many years ago, and he was nice enough to indulge my passion and launch Draftboard with me several months ago. While he focuses on the nascent launch of Run It Once Poker, I’m working on perfecting Draftboard.



We offer NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL contests and pride ourselves on having the most fair contest structure in the DFS industry. We also have real time animations that track your players as they accrue fantasy points.

We’re dedicated to building the DFS platform that players want, and that’s why we started this thread. If you have any ideas for new features, things that bother you about other sites, or you just want to tell us how badly we mispriced Kershaw, this is the spot for it.

If you haven’t tried Draftboard yet, we bonus $1 on sign-up so you can try us out risk free. Right now we are giving 2+2ers an additional $10 if you deposit $20 or more. Simply post your Draftboard username in this thread and we’ll credit your account within 60 minutes. Include an idea or suggestion for improvement along with your username and we'll double your bonus!



A couple things we know we have to address:

• Our mobile app is not completed yet. TLDR but we hired a high end studio to build out our iOS app, and their lead iOS dev resigned halfway through the project. We hired that individual directly and he decided to stop working entirely several months later. We then hired a Tokyo based developer who was nice enough to inflate his hours dramatically, so he’s gone as well. If any of you are proficient in Swift, shoot me a PM.
• We operate in a limited number of US states and Canada only. We’re very risk averse when it comes to interpreting state gaming laws (Phil and I are both small humans and would not last long in prison) and the fee structure in several other states ($50k + revenue tax for several) means that we simply can’t operate in them.
• Our contests are 10 or 2 man. We think this makes the experience more personal because you know every one of your opponents, but it does result in small prize pools. I don’t personally think DFS and lottery-sized payouts need to be combined, but if I’ve got that wrong we’re basically cooked as there’s no way we can approach the payouts offered by Fanduel and DraftKings.

Thanks for reading this far and I’m looking forward to your responses!
Dan

Dan- I am an avid DFS player for golf, NFL, and sometimes NBA. I only use DK. I am attracted to the low buy-in/high score possibility of the larger fields, and I'm sure most are. I am not a pro (I'm down lifetime), but dedicate a decent amount of time researching. Last PGA season I entered $1,294 and had a net loss of $397, and last NFL season I entered $1,150 and had a net loss of $311. I'm tinkering and trying to get better every week! It's sort of a hobby to me, and the small DK investment makes watching the events so much more fun. Also at stake are bragging rights among family and friends. Since you're offering a better payout structure than most, I'm sure you'll attract savvy players looking for the best price in the 10 and 2 man matches. I like the real time updates your site has. Unfortunately, I feel that most DK players LOVE the big score possibility and are drawn in at first because of that,then they may choose to play smaller field events. Good luck with the site and the app! Competition is great for the consumer.

Thanks for the response, Foxxy.

As we grow the plan is to add and expand on promotions like NFL Record Breaker and NBA Dynasty, both of which offer that big money possibility. Record Breaker paid out $10k to any user that broke the record NFL lineup total, while Dynasty pays out $10k to the user with the highest total score across their ten best NBA lineups.

If you'd like to give the site a try tonight's NBA contests go live at 8 EST.

How did you blow a 25 point lead in the Super Bowl?

You're cooked. A Very Large DFS Site employee told me very candidly last year that they tried numerous ways to nudge newer players into fairer games, and that "none of that matters." The only thing that seems to matter are large prizes; it is literally just another manifestation of prospect theory.

Unless you are willing to take big risks (it doesn't seem like you are), I think you are wasting your time. The analyst forecasts for this industry are grim. Honestly, the core gameplay of daily fantasy is too simplistic, and as such it deserves to die the quick, miserable, and certain death that it faces.

Thanks for the post LMM,

It's a tough spot no doubt. The average non-pro wants lottery style payouts aka the big dream but those aren't possible without mass multi-entry/higher skill disadvantages and low payout percentages. The end result is a very low cash rate which leads to mostly money-losing days and a poor user experience.

Our contests are structured with flat payouts (50/50s vs double-ups and 30% payouts in our tourneys), which increases a players cash rate dramatically, leading to more winning nights and higher user satisfaction.

Feedback from our users is incredibly positive. Once you've stopped trying to 1000x your money you realize it wasn't even a necessary component of the DFS experience in the first place. We just need more users to experience Draftboard, but it's tough when you can't advertise 6-7 figure prize pools.

That said, as I mentioned a couple posts up we're committed to rolling out promos like Record Breaker, which provide that massive upside. Last football season the two $10k winners binked off a $1 and $2 contest, respectively.

I realize my post sounds extremely negative, but I actually do have some constructive thoughts that I'll write up when I get a chance.

I read it as more matter of fact but I suppose "quick, miserable and certain death" is a little dark... Looking forward to your suggestions!

I'll have to write this in parts as time permits, but it is mostly theoretical as opposed to tactical.

The most important issue, imo, is that the core gameplay is too simplistic compared to other competitive games that enjoy long life spans. It's a simultaneous-move game with a finite strategy set that is identical and known to all players far in advance of the start of the game, and individual strategies are easy to implement (however, the work required to generate good strategies is non-trivial). As such, the marginal cost of entering multiple contests is negligible. Furthermore, strategies can easily be copied, transferred, sold, distributed, etc. to players who have low costs and/or low skill.

If I were starting a daily fantasy product, I'd begin by addressing those fundamental issues and attempt to design a core gameplay mechanic with more sustainability and more strategic depth. I don't mean to imply that this would be easy in any way--good game design is notoriously difficult! It needs to retain the quality of being easy to play while still retaining depth. "A minute to learn, but a lifetime to master." Tout/expert consensus advice like "absolutely play Brian Dozier tonight on Fanduel" would be replaced by "it depends" and "in situation A, you should probably use strategy Z."

My perspective: I'm a statistical modeler / programmer and have been grinding this for several years. I code in a slow language (R) on a slow computer and can still rip through tons of databases and generate a zillion unique lineups in a matter of seconds. In other words, there really is no computational complexity barrier that you might see in poker or chess. The part I actually find enjoyable is the strategic part, like making GPP counterpicks or identifying new stacking strategies through research. A lot of that is based more on intuition, and I may often be wrong but it's the part that is "fun."

Hi LMM,

Thanks for the post.

It’s tough to deal with copying of lineups. We don’t have a large issue with it at this time, partly because all our contests are 10 or 2 man but also because we’re simply not a large enough site.

We think we have a nice solution to the low marginal cost of submitting multiple lineups to the same contest. Our lobby lists contests pools. At lock time the actual contests are created through random opponent selection with first entries matched up against first entries, second vs second, and third vs third. This means that if you enter the contest pool once, you’re competing against a single entry from other users in the contest pool, regardless of how many times they entered it. If you enter twice, your second entry is competing against users that entered two or more times, etc. If you make the assumption that skilled players tend to be the ones who multi-enter, each additional entry you make into a contest pool should face tougher opposition than the last.

I totally agree with you that DFS in its current state is not overly complex. That said I still think it’s a fun and engaging game that users of all skill levels can enjoy. We’ve toyed with a number of variations on the standard game but haven’t come up with something yet that we're comfortable offering in the current legal climate. Doesn’t mean we’ve given up though. There’s nothing I enjoy more than dreaming up new game formats!

Love it.

Randomizing some aspect(s) could allow each player to have a unique strategy set available. If you mean something roughly along those lines, then I agree it could be legally dicey.

Regarding complexity, I break DFS into two components:

(A) Generating an accurate set of predictions.
(B) Choosing an optimal strategy based on those predictions.

So far, DFS has been mostly about (A) due to both its nascency and game format while (B) is an easy exercise in solving (mixed) integer programs. While some of the methodology for (A) is incredibly complicated, the marginal gains on predictive accuracy are decreasing; eventually we'll reach a point where room for improvements in accuracy will be negligible. Maybe we're already getting close in some sports.

So I'd focus on adding complexity to (B) by approaching it as a computer science problem. For instance, I try to imagine changes the sites could make that would render my integer programming scripts intractable on modern hardware. The answer may be they can't, but here's an example I saw where I thought they could have done better:

One of the large sites recently introduced a new format where you roster a "captain" worth 1.5x normal fantasy production. It's fairly trivial to solve and also not terribly interesting imo. It's far more complex done this way:

Everything is the same as the standard game format except,
(1) Designate one of your players as the captain.
(2) You're awarded bonus points if and only if the captain is the highest scoring player on your team.

It's a simple variation, but properly solving it is in another stratosphere in terms of computational complexity. You'd probably either need chance-constrained optimization or a stochastic recourse model in addition to functional forms for the probability distributions for scoring. In other words, even if every contestant had access to the most accurate projections available, it may still be possible to design a game such that no one could generate a provably optimal solution.

I really like this idea. It accomplishes everything you mention while being fun for casual players as well. It also doesn't appear tacked on or make the lineup construction process any less simple/efficient.

My only thought is that it might be annoying to lose to a lesser lineup just because your opponent's captain went off. I'm going to give this some more thought but either way, I'm going to add the concept to an email survey we're sending our users in a couple weeks to see what they think.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I definitely see concern with people being annoyed if they whiff on the captain. A counterargument to that might be that it's more valued due to its rarity of occurring. There are probably some ways to implement it that reduce the annoyance effect, such as using tiered bonuses for the captain, e.g., highest scoring = X points, 2nd highest = Y points, 3rd highest = Z points, where X > Y > Z. You could also use the captain to break ties.

So, I think there are many different ways you could go with this, but the key is that some points are awarded conditional on the performance of the other players you choose. There's more specific stuff you have to consider like, in baseball, pitchers score way more than batters on average under most scoring systems. You'd probably need to either remove captain eligibility for pitchers or just make their bonus smaller.

Anyway, lots of stuff for you to think about there. Hope that helps!

Yup we'd definitely not allow pitchers or hockey goalies to be named captains. Makes nice sense for the latter since they're not allowed to be captains IRL.

Thanks for all the help!