Thanks for the thread man, really was a good follow and helped me think in different ways, case and point Thor last night.

All the best in NFL, and have a good feeling the variance will turn around.

Thanks for sticking through with this until at least the end of the MLB season and even when things started to go sour. It's been an interesting, educational follow and I appreciate your detailing your emotional ups and downs.

I've been contemplating going hardcore into NBA DFS, but unless I'm willing to expend a huge amount of effort and time I'm very skeptical I could make it worth my while. I feel like there's an extraordinarily small monopoly at the top, then another still quite small group of barely profitable players fighting for scraps of profit, and then a massive percentage (95% of pool? more?) of losing players.

Better luck going forward.

Probably best to let sleeping dogs lie, but meh, I kinda liked doing this and I think my make or break 2017 might be interesting so let's try this again. Also, I felt really lame for bailing on the thread when I did. Having a bad NFL week 1 was no big deal but I guess I was really stressed about the way baseball ended. I don't want to dwell on day to day results as much as I did this year so I wont be posting the daily updates, but I still plan on tracking results.


Catching up:

Football sucked! I had some good weeks but it's hard to make money with no top 10 outliers. After the week 4 MNF game I was absolutely giddy to check results, figured +10-100Kish, nope, +$2500 and I knew right there my season would be a dud because you can't really nail a core better than I did (8x the field on Julio, 4x on Ryan, 4x on Ben, and a lot of other cake I'm forgetting). I had 12 or so lineups spread across several GPP's make a serious run, but alas all came up 1 slot short of a big payday.


I don't want to make a bunch of excuses but it all kinda snowballed from there. I was never able to get anywhere near the volume I wanted at the stakes or GPP types I wanted. The bigger games were too top heavy a lot of weeks and there was never enough smaller GPP action for me. Thur's esp sucked. I remember that slate being a lot better last year. Anyway, I mentioned something about not wanting to "only" play $3K a week and it turned out I only played that much a few weeks, some only like $1K, I even took weeks 11 and 12 off, Weaksauce! I'm not thinking at all about next football season, but the one thing I know for sure is I've got to change something, maybe add cash games? Yuck.


All in all I'd say I put in a D effort and got a D- grade at +$291 in 16 weeks, lol. On the bright side I realized I was just going through the motions a few weeks ago and kinda kicked myself in the ass with a "dig in or quit" ultimatum and I really put in the work the last four weeks. I even started a little MLB preliminary research and strategy planning. Another positive, these games are still for sure beatable, at least at NFL. Sure there's a TON of variance, but if I can break even w/o any top 10's and a few weeks where I put in minimal research I can imagine what this season would have looked like with harder work, more volume and a little luck. Probably not as good as my 2015 season (which was extremely lucky), but still nicely +EV.


Looking Ahead:

So yeah, despite $150K+ in profits from late May 2015-late May 2016 my DFS career prospects are not looking so good. I'm down $30K in the over 7 months since my big night on May 20th. Most of the loses came very quickly in the first 6 weeks of that, but I'm not sure if that makes it any better. I mean I guess it is because I'm not just consistently losing bit by bit, but 6 terrible weeks followed by 5+ months of not quite BE isn't a real confidence builder either. I do have a few things going for me though: past results, I know MLB and my way around the mechanics of DFS, and a (hope) that variance played a big role in my, cough, setbacks. Still, I think the odds are stacked against me at this point. The games are going to get harder and harder, the rake has gone up again (they go 15.01% and I might throw in the towel right there). Worst of all my inner brash swagger has been replaced by a naysaying husk That said I have no good job options at this time so Imma go for it. Let that be the last time the J word is ever uttered in this thread


Off Season Plans:

I leave for Fla on Mon morning, be back around Feb 5th. I may or may not bring my laptop but there wont be any work done at any rate.

Feb-Mar, I've got a ton of work to do outside, so work around here a few hours every day and study/plan for opening day every night. I'm making tweaks already but the heavy lifting waits until Feb, there's gonna be some changes.

Something new: I'm thinking about adding some full season NFBC $350 buyin online championship teams to the mix (probably 10 teams if I do it). I'm not 100% on this yet as there are some pros and cons I'm still weighing but I'm leaning to doing it. Tracking this might be interesting and possibly helpful to more people here and that's what got me to thinking about bringing the thread back.

Last but not least I want to write up some kind of pre-season primer as we get closer to opening day. Something like post 26, but more detail, probably spread out over several posts. Mostly for me but maybe 1 or 2 of you jokers can find something useful in there.





I'll be checking the thread the next few days before I leave if anyone has any questions or comments. If not, see you in Feb.

Glad to see you back, have fun in Florida!

Would definitely love to see an MLB pre season primer type series. I learned NFL was much harder than I thought this year for sure.

Where in Florida you headed ?

I'm going to try to incorporate NFBC ADP with FG projections and my opinion to rate all relevant DFS players (in a vacuum) along with a lot of misc stuff like ranking BP's and such. Anything in particular you'd like to see me cover?

What problems did you run into in football? It was a really wonky season for QB's. Week 1 just set the trend for prime MU QB's ****ting the bed.





Fort Myers Beach. The weather looks like it's gonna be niiiccceee

Gona maybe be north of Orlando Feb 3rd through 5th. You will still be a good distance away

Awesome thread I learned a lot when it comes dfs . Good luck with things in the future

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using 2+2 Forums

For MLB stuff like bullpen changes would be cool, and importance of free agency moves that have happened so far, but I'd read probably what ever you come up with as MLB seems to be your thing and iirc you're pretty numbers based as well

I started off decent with NFL but I think for me just being on a lot of the wrong players on the wrong week IE: Devonte Freeman at the rams, Russ at the packers, and then moving off Cousins and that Skins/Pack game due to wind was a weird one. I think in general I started to out think things toward the end of the season.

I'm still working on trying to nail a core and then the one offs around them for GPPs, feel like once I nail that I will begin to improve.

I'm back baby!




I still have seven more weeks of "off-season" but my vacation is officially over. Speaking of vacations; 30 days on Fort Myers Beach is exactly what I needed. I took a few cool day trips (Key West Express, drove to Miami, 3 trips to the glades) but mostly just kicked back on the island and enjoyed the food, drink, and mostly perfect weather. The one lesson learned is I want to do this every year from now on, so I need to make this thing work. I booked all of next Jan before I left.


I decided to read the thread before getting started, wow. I've got to admit that at a couple points during my worst swings it was seeping into my life a little bit (mostly in the form of a few sleepless nights) but reading here you'd think I was crying myself to sleep with a razor at my wrist every night. Posting right after checking results day after day looks really ugly during a downswing, so I'll be trying something a little different this year. I feel pretty strong about MLB and find it laughable that I considered quitting in early August. Something that has helped my confidence is that I put 58 unique lineups in the 99.9 percentile or better out of approx 25K total unique lineups built. The few GPP's I won were small, I did manage a 2/18K in a big $25 buyin for $25K but I think the average EV of those outlier LU's is more than I got paid.


I mentioned in an earlier post that I was considering playing some NFBC, that's nixed. It would be a lot of fun and kill a lot of time between now and opening day and I'm almost positive I'm +EV, it's just too much of a time suck and distraction during the season.


I've got some ideas for strategy tweaks, namely mixing in some 4-3-1, 3-3-2, and 4-2-2 stacks. Also, I'll be doing some testing early in the season to see how good I am at predicting how popular stacks will be. If I'm as good at it as I think I'll be I plan on concentrating more entries on the second tier of stacks and a little less on the more popular stacks.


Writing up some kind of bullpen report at this point would be a waste as so much is going to change between now and mid-late camp, so I'll be holding off until closer to the season. The pre season rankings are just a guide really anyway as these pens show their true colors once the season starts. LAA is my early favorite for dumpster fire tho, and that SD rotation could be one for the ages, in an AIDSy way.


I'll probably pop in with some tidbits from time to time or to answer questions if there are any leading up to the season, then it's game on.

A lot of rankings articles are starting to pop up on Fangraphs, I've found this catcher article by Jeff Zimmerman the most useful so far:

http://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/dee...atcher-lagoon/


It's geared toward full season but there's a lot to be gleaned for DFS purposes.

(Side note for full season leagues: I really like the idea of drafting both Col C's in a 2 C league. You lock in a lot of Coors AB's even if you have to play both, and if one gets hurt or runs away with the job you have the Coors guy and a ww replacement lvl C2.)


Random DFS Catcher thoughts:

Sanchez % should be sky high the first few games, and even higher if he starts off hot. I'm planning a total fade the first couple weeks unless price forces my hand, but he's more likely to be overpriced than underpriced as these algos love the hot hand.


I probably pay up a little more than the avg player at C (I see a lot of totally random true punts at the position, which is never really needed) but I'm not afraid to play min priced guys in the right spot, it's all about value. Anyways, C looks even uglier than most years and I plan on making an effort to pay for the top guys even more than usual. Not a huge change just a concerted effort to run a few less Adam Jones/Jett Bandy combos for more Alex Gordon/Posey combos.


A lot of times I'll use a 6th or 7th hitting C as one of my four in a stack to eat the C slot. This probably isn't too bad of a strategy, but one of my biggest overall strategy changes for this year is going for even more PA's, so less 6/7 hitters overall, including burning C in a stack. (This is one I probably wouldn't have posted last year, but who's reading anyway?)

I'm obsessed with ball park factors. The publicly available PF's are good for the most part, but also contradict each other at times. I've spent a lot of time trying blend the different PF's together to come up with exact(ish), long-term factors that can be trusted going forward and let me tell ya, it ain't easy. I'm never satisfied with the finished product. So anyways I decided to make my own PF's. The plan was to strip away as much of the noise as possible and come up with something very simple, while also hopefully being more predictive than what's out there now.


Here it is (but first some notes):


I don't want to get into exact methodology or sample size, that's part of the reason I'm keeping the numbers and just listing a tiered ranking. I mean it's no big secret and I'm sure someone smarter than me could reverse engineer this thing quickly and easily. That said the sample size is bigger than anything out there.


3 factors: Runs scored, HR's, and OPS


Park's not included: SD, SEA, NYM, MIA, Min, ATL. The first 4 here have moved the fences in 5 times total in the last few years (the Mets have done it twice). Min has a bigger sample but it's been really wonky. I've got some ideas of what that park really is but I don't trust the numbers yet, and Atl is brand new. So I'm ranking the 24 other parks. It's safe to say that these excluded parks averaged out to be pretty extreme pitchers park as of a few years ago, and now most, if not all still lean pitchers park, but certainly not to the same degree. At any rate leaving these pitchers parks out kinda messes up the tiers a bit (and will likely change everything in these rankings once we have a few more years of data, ex. Sea being less of a pitchers park could make Tex look like less of a hitters park, and make Oak/LAA look like even more of a pitchers park)


Hou is moving CF in a bit but as of now I'm not sure if it'll have a huge impact. I've got a lot of good data here so I'm including them. If nothing else probably a slight tick up for big power hitters (that CF was HUGE, so it's not like Altuve is going to be poking em out to straight center now)


Most of this stuff just reinforces what we already know, other things really go against the grain of common knowledge, which would be a good thing and the whole point of doing this, if I'm right. I'm itching to make a few adjustments here, but I'm holding off for now.


Tier 1, Coors

Col 1/1/1

Yes, that's the triple crown, Best Runs/HR's/OPS factor

Tier 2, Extreme hitters parks

Bos 2/18/2
Tex 3/8/3
Ari 4/11/4

Tier 3, Clear hitters parks

NYY 5/3/7
Bal 6/2/5
Det 7/12/6
Cubs 8/13/12
CHW 9/4/11
Cin 10/5/9
Tor 11/7/8
Mil 12/6/10

Tier 4, Neutral-lean Pitching

Cle 13/15/14
KC 14/21/15
Philly 15/10/17
Pit 16/20/18
Wash 17/17/16
Hou 18/9/13

Tier 5, Extreme Pitching

Oak 19/22/24
Stl 20/23/19
LAA 21/19/21
TB 22/16/22
SF 23/24/20
LAD 24/14/23

Good stuff.

I always assumed Philly was more of a hitters park will reference this list throughout the season

Philly is a lot like Cle in that they had a nice lineup when the park opened and that made it look to be more of a hitters park than it really is. That 10 out of 24 parks in HR factor is likely a 10 out of 30 factoring in the 6 unranked parks, unless Atl is a big HR park. So it is a little stronger than it looks here.


I can't really explain Hou's weak 18th Runs factor considering decent 9/13 ranks in HR/OPS. I'd think that would produce a 15th Runs rank, at worst. There could be something to it, but more likely just noise, you can find it in even huge samples.


Really surprised that Dodger Stadium would rank 24/24 in R factor, behind SF! That's a real eye opener for me.


Biggest surprise, DET, by a lot. I look over the numbers and hey, it makes sense. But then I look at other PF's and it's way off, way way off.







Here's 2016 on ESPN (FG and Seamheads only go up to 2015 as of today)




The first 2 are FG 2011-2015, and FG 2006-2010 5 yr avg's

Then Seamheads 3 year avg's

I threw in the 1 year ESPN PF just because I included 2016 in my numbers.



If I were to make manual adjustments based on DFS usefulness (and I'm in the process of this now) I would certainly move Det down a bit, Cubs down a bit, Hou up, Pit down into tier 5, LAD up (but not much) Tex down 2 or 3 notches, Bal up, maybe to 2nd behind Coors. I also plan on including Min, Sea, and SD so it'll be 27 of the 30 parks.


I'll be posting that soon, and as we get closer to opening day I plan to post an in-depth bull pens breakdown, a quick blurb on team D's, and if I have time something on my team by team rotation analysis, which is a ton of work and changing every day between now and the end of the season.

1 Col

2 Bos
3 Bal
4 Ari
5 NYY
6 Cin
7 Tor
8 CHW
9 Mil
10 Tex

11 Det
12 CUBS
13 Hou

14 Philly
15 Cle
16 KC
17 Wash
18 Min

19 TB
20 Pit
21 STL
22 SD
23 LAD
24 LAA
25 OAK
26 SEA
27 SF


So that's it, I'm done working on parks until next winter. Any questions? Here's some quick notes:


- Educated guess on NYM and Mia; safely in tier 5 with the other good-great pitchers parks.

- I'm adjusting Det up into tier 2 for my purposes this season, but I'm not comfortable putting that out there just yet. That's the only spot I'll be playing (slightly) different than this list.

- You could shake up the order within the 2-10 and 19-27 tiers and not be too far off, but still, there are differences and this ranking is more accurate.

- I would have thought I'd have TB 3-5 spots lower but that HR ranking is pretty impressive considering they play a good chuck of their away games in AL East launching pads. I'd like to see where TB would grade out playing in any of the more balanced divisions where they wouldn't have 40 road games @Nyy/Bos/Bal/Tor every year.

- Speaking of adjusting AL East parks up, the 4 non-tampa teams have the most unbalanced PF schedules in MLB besides for tampa as they all get approx 30 road games at the 3 other bandboxes in the div, to go with their 81 in the home bandbox. It makes the gaudy home numbers all the more impressive.

- All through the 2000's I thought of Tex as the best hitters park in the AL. I still think this could be true but there's 2 big factors going against it. 1- They have the opposite issue as the AL East teams, a lot of road games at Oak/LA/Sea is at least partially propping the park up. 2- I'm not sure what to make of the "diminished wind tunnel out to right" theory after they removed some plexi glass from the press both a few years ago, but the 3 year LH HR factor backs it up:




Meh sample, but it is evidence. Also, and I just noticed this now, but RH HR's and overall doubles factor is down as well. Now this is a park that has beaten Coors a couple years in the last 10 or so, so I'm not ready to bury it based on a small sample (and 1 fluky year can destroy a 3 yr avg) just something to keep in mind.



--- Handedness Factors: Well these are tough. There's a few obvious spots, but for the most part they bounce all over the place and make overall PF's look stable in comparison. I don't take in much DFS MLB content, but what I have the park factor, cough, knowledge has been bad, and when these touts start talking Park handedness it may as well just be random words pooping out of their faces. It's not even that they don't want to give up the good info, it's that they don't have a ****ing clue what they're talking about. BEWARE SMALL SAMPLES!

Hope the first few days of the season have treated you well man.

Hey LT. Yeah things are going well (so far so good). In a week I've managed to erase all the losses that had been hanging around my neck like a lead balloon starting way back in late May. So let's call it a 10.5 month BE run (JFC!). I feel like I'm seeing the board better than ever and the tweaks I've made to the process feel right (regardless of results, but of course that's easy to say when the results are there. We'll see when I hit that inevitable down swing). My optimism is a little more guarded than it was coming off an unbelievable 15' NFL season and starting 16' MLB like I was gonna make an easy 250K a year at this. That said my confidence is all the way back and I still think it's possible I end up crushing, long-term.


As for this blog, I dunno. I've added DK to the mix and that's a lot of extra work. I'm also experimenting with PGA which is sapping my time even more. Posting the daily results is off the table and I don't want to just pop in and brag when I do well.


Speaking of not bragging:




Ari stack from last Thur where I had just enough cap for Kemp (a guy who wasn't in my rotation at all, I think I used him 3/150+ because I had exactly his salary left for a last roster spot). The stack paid off, but so what, I get a lot of 100/40,000 with the perfect stack, it's the pieces around the perfect stack that matter. Kemp's 2 bombs off Harvey was the ticket puncher. If I happened to have 100 more or less cap after my first 8 players Kemp doesn't sniff this lineup and I win $50. Game of inches.

Glad you are off to a hot start hopefully it keeps rolling throughout the season and glad you're playing a little on DK!

I've just mostly started slow this season so far mostly playing GPPs and a little cash but I'm working on adjusting my strategy coming from NHL where I was felt like i was just getting used to things and feeling comfortable with it.

Golf is definitely fun and even though it's a 1x a week thing can take a lot of your time. I only play on DK and enjoy it there, how do you like the FD version?

nice bink man, keep it going

Hey, I'm clueless when it comes to these tournaments but why does 2nd place have the same points and you guys don't chop?

I prefer the FD PGA version so far. I don't have enough experience at golf for my opinion to mean much though. I enjoy building these lineups and feel like my "system" should be a winner but I'm just spinning my wheels so far. I really want to dig in and get a decent sample (like say all summer of 200 unique lineups a week) but it's already such a grind. Skipping this week, we'll see if I pick it back up. If nothing else I'll grind out the majors for some (hopefully) +EV lottery gamble.

Thanks

?? Lower right corner is the "score" column, I scored 216.6, 2nd scored 212.6




After some lineup review tonight I'm shocked at how bad, or at least really lazy, a lot of big names in the industry are. I don't want to get into too many details but lets just say they push a button to spit out a certain type of (+EV) lineups, and then enter them into the wrong games. I was thinking we might be in 2010 poker, nah. By 2010 the real sharps were exploiting every little edge. This is still 2006, albeit with higher rake.

Very interesting point - when you say that do you mean people are just running an optimizer LU in big GPPs as opposed to stacking lower owned/less talked up teams?

Also you build all your teams by hand correct?

Yeah, I played around with a couple lu builders and I can never get them to spit out lineups I would make. I might have to dig a little deeper though because I can't keep grinding out 200-300 lineups a night. I guess 200 is no problem (but a lot of work) 300 otoh has me building 100 or so the night before, and that's just way too much work. I've put in at least 12 hours a day all this week and it's just too much work. I would have loved the challenge in my 20's and 30's, not as much in my 40's.

I started out this season red hot and when I'm running well I can almost forget about how brutal the swings can be. It didn't take long for a reminder..


The first 9 days I had 3 small losers (maybe -$1K total) and no clunkers. Total just under +$30K. The last 9 days Ive had 1 winner, 1 BE and 3 or 4 total dogs, - approx $6K. As I mentioned in my last post I've been playing pretty high volume but I've also been playing mostly low stakes. I've been planning on mixing in more and more of the $25-$44 GPPs, luckily I haven't really started yet.


Tonight I got the goose egg on DK with 25 unique lineups, 2 over 100 points, hard to do with 100% exposure to Kershaw. -75% on FD with a lot more volume (and I guess more BRO, who went TF off, come to think of it I had 0 BRO or Trout on DK, always risky business)

My main focus was on:

Bos@Tor 0 runs
Tor home Bos 3 runs
Bal@Cin 2 runs
Ari@SD 0 runs


I had a lot of the right TB guys, and less, but still a decent amount of Wash, but mostly mixed in with the 4 **** bird teams above (not with each other, which would have been the ticket tonight).


I make enough lineups to where it doesn't really make sense not to make 3-5 of my best possible stacks of all the teams I consider +EV to stack, and that is a lot of teams on any given night (say 50-75% depending on match up/value) That said I'm spending more time and % of $ on a smaller core this year. So if anything I'll probably experience even more variance, gulp.



Random Thoughts

A couple years ago I was thinking 2+2 could carve out a niche in DFS, I even exchanged PM's with Mat about it. Now, wow, if you woke up from a coma today and checked the 2+2 fantasy section you'd just assume DFS wasn't really a thing any more. I understand a few of the top players wanting to keep things close to the vest, but there was never much strategy talk to begin with. It's really bizarre what has happened to the DFS threads. Or maybe it's just that 2+2 is dying faster than I thought. Sad either way


Speaking of dead, this thread is about as dead as it gets. Still, I plan on posting my bull pen hit list at the end of April. After that, who knows....

100% Kershaw doesn't work too well when it goes 15-12 @Coors. Thought I'd be alright with Det scoring 19 mother ****ing runs, but of course the re-animated corpse of Victor Martinez was 1-5 with a run.





hee-haw hee-haw hee-haw