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: