Mid way through the second quarter of the early games and this is shaping up to be a total disaster with several core players hovering around 0 points. Bold prediction: I go -75% or worse

back to a point you made earlier about "top" DFS players not speaking out about bull**** and touts and a variety of other stuff...it's LOL...I don't want to say poker has ever been a bastion for do gooders and $hit, but at least there are/were some higher profile people who would speak up about the bull$hit...guess they want to make sure they can get in on the grift...amazing how many DFS guys are selling packages of some sort or another...

another funny thing about the industry's future health...I signed up to DK/FD through RG at least 3-4 years ago and they gave me access to their premium content "indefinitely"...found out "indefinitely" ended on 9-1-17...pretty LOL decision by them considering I would put 5 figures through the NFL in a month...either DK/FD aren't giving them a % of my rake any more (doesn't sound right because i'm sure they are a top affiliate) or RG is run by a bunch of ****** morons...there's no way in hell I'm playing DFS and contributing any % of my rake towards them after they basically told me to pound sand...cal can go jam it up his a$$...

I understand your frustration, and yeah, the poker world hasn't exactly set a high bar for integrity, it would be nice if DFS could at least appear to reach for that.



Today felt like such a bloodbath. Going into the 4PM games I told myself it wasn't over yet and if GB/Sea was a shootout I could maybe turn it around. Needless to say I felt sick to my stomach when I turned off the game half way through the second quarter at 0-0. I really thought I could go -90%.

I played around $2K on DK:




That was a huge relief because it took a few minutes for all the payouts to add up after the late game ended (it's usually instant) So when the first number I saw was $250 I thought I got absolutely destroyed, phew.


This isn't great:




but really, I expected much worse. Also, this includes sat buyins and not payouts, and I won around 100 $7 sun mil seats. So all else being equal tomorrow it looks like I'm gonna lose around $1K- $1500 on FD, $1K-$2K total. I'll have the exact numbers after both slates (thur-mon and main sun only) separate and pay out.

+1 to bloodbath

So the Mon night games surprisingly improved my results a little, and I did a little better on sats than I thought (on FD, on DK I won 0 MM seats on a couple hundo in sat entries)





I haven't added everything up yet but it looks like I lost under $1500, maybe even closer to $1K, which feels pretty great as it seemed like a -$5K+ weekend in real time. We live and learn and move TF on. That said I don't want to learn too much from this weekend, it was so ****ing stupid! It was a nice friendly reminder of how far off the rails this thing can go, though.


Looking ahead to week 2 a couple things jump out:


1) Unlike week 1 this week has a lot more super juicy matchups. I'll be building the majority of my lineups around GB@Atl, NE@NO and Steelers. There's a few other spots I like but I'll be building around those QB's and pass catchers. I plan to be overweight all of them.

2) I'm glad I'm back on DK because FD's pay structures on anything over $4 are terrible. $3M pays $1M to first. I don't have it open but I think the $33 pays 25% to first, $12 20 or 25%? ok, so I'll just play the big $5, or $10, or $25 games with standard payouts, np. Oh wait, they don't offer anything like that. There's $3 or $4 games, or lottery, or DK. Brutal. The big $8 game on DK looks like my best option going forward.



I'm playing about $1K on FD baseball Tue. It's so weird, I live it all summer and then a couple days off and I feel completely out of the loop (OotL great movie BTW, written and I think directed by the VEEP guy, brilliant and hilarious!). In Aug I tell myself I'll try to play every day (except Sun) once football starts but in reality there's a good chance I wont put in any meaningful volume after tomorrow, which I believe was my last day playing MLB in 2016/ This **** is a lot of work

Hey LA, I've been following this thread for awhile now, via lurker status. I appreciate your sharing of insight and your experiences here. I was thinking about your comments on sites like Rotogrinders, and was curious as to what sort of value you would assign to Pro Football Focus and their content? I have been thinking about signing up for their lowest tier level of membership. Do you have any thoughts on PFF?

Best,
ZA

Hey ZA, I don't want to blow this off but honestly I'm not the right guy to ask as I'm pretty reflexively anti-pay for any DFS related service. I don't know much about PFF or the product they're selling but I'm pretty sure they're respected in FF circles, for whatever that's worth. I follow Jeff Ratcliffe on twitter and listen to his solo pods a couple times a week so I don't hate him at least (and that's saying something as I poop most of these guys straight into the turd bucket).


I know most of the top guys subscribe to FC or labs, or something, but that's for projections and lineup building tools. The way I look at it is if someone needs those sites to compete, they probably can't even with the sites, if that makes sense. I mean take FC away from Awesemo or Ehaf and those guys are still going to ****ing crush. Maybe I'm way off and someone with just a little bit of talent, like me, could make a killing by signing up for RG incentives. We're not likely to ever know...




I wouldn't say the salaries are tough on FD this week, but I'm trying to squeeze in as much Gronk, and Julio, and Thomas, expensive QB's, and a bunch of other studs as I can. Then I stumbled on these guys (with a couple nice correlations)




and of course that really opens things up:




Pretty sick, these 2 are very boom or bust, but I think the odds of booming are a lot higher than the typical 5400 dart throw. I'm sure they'll be talked up a ton this week but I haven't heard it yet.


There seems to be many more juicy correlation plays this week. For instance I like Parker/Allen better than any wr/wr play last week, at least for the price. There's really 5 or 6 combos that I'd like to play in every lineup, which obviously isn't possible.

Thanks for your feedback. I paid for a month or two of RG incentives last year and didn't really like the content much. I found most of the free playbook info on DK to give as poignant insight as the incentives package. I could have just been using the extra info sloppily.

Thanks, again for the feedback. I will be continuing to follow and may chime in here and there. Happy building.

ez

I haven't had much to report lately, truth be told I've been pretty down on DFS. The games are getting tougher, the rake has gone up yet again and I have zero confidence in the clowns running the industry, especially DK. What they want is some kind of unbeatable sports based scratch off lotto to emerge from the ashes of what we once knew as DFS.


Football's been hit or miss, mostly miss with 1 decent lineup:





to cover up a hugely disappointing first half of the season. This has been a such a strange year. It feels like a total failure and the end of my DFS career, yet despite a steady bankroll bleed from mid-April through early Aug and my second best NFL week being +$400 half way through the season, if the year ended today I'd actually make a few K more than last year.


All that said I have no other palatable options ATM so imma try to make it work again next year (and hope for that big score, say a $100K day at MLB) And if I'm going to try to make it work I'm gonna work my ass off and try to keep a positive attitude. With the terrible end to my 2016 MLB season I was so glad it was over and I could work on football. Other than watching the World Series as a baseball fan I didn't even think about or look into MLB until Feb. This year ended on a much better note and I wanted the season to keep going. I've been doing some preliminary work on the 2018 season for a couple weeks and I'm really looking forward to it. Also, I'm really digging into football this week like I haven't for the last couple weeks. maybe I'm burned out because even winning $20K in week 6 didn't really do much to change my attitude, now it feels like the juice is back. I'd like to rip some ass these last few weeks but I'll be ready to attack MLB the day I get back from Florida regardless.




"(OotL great movie BTW, written and I think directed by the VEEP guy, brilliant and hilarious!)"

This was me suggesting one of my favorite movies a couple months back, except it's In The Loop not out of the loop, JFC, what a dumbass.

I feel like your perspective would be massively different if you had score .5 more points

good luck man, don't know how youre still doing it. worse grind than poker. at least with poker you used to get some rakeback, now that's non-existent.

think I said this earlier, but when RG lifted my premium subs after signing up through their links (and entering mid-to high mid 4 figs a week during NFL and MLB) I knew that was a bad sign for the industry. theyre trying to suck every last drop of blood outta this thing before it implodes on itself.

Meh, I dunno. Like I said at the time winning $20K didn't change much about my outlook, tho it was a nice infusion to the BR and sure, $40K would have been better. At this point my roll and outside finances are in pretty good shape. My days of having close to a $100K roll and planning to run it up to $250K so I can really go for the kill are over. I mean that would be great and all but not too realistic w/o a time machine ride back to 2014. Now I'd be happy to grind out $30K-$50K with just a little upside, and heh, $25K last year and $30K this year with just awful, soul crushing months long downswings, that were hopefully at least a little bad luck. I'm kind of rambling but I guess my point is I'd sacrifice some of the cash for a better feel on how this is going to work 2018 and beyond. I think it's fair to say that the ball could bounce right for me 4 or 5 times next year and I have a huge year, totally realistic. otoh I could see me making $100+ in 2018, thinking I've finally figured it out and then losing $40 or $50K in 2019, lol.





Yeah, you have to be a little sick in the ****ing head to put yourself through this. As bitter as I am I still love it I love baseball and baseball stats and making a living off of it really is a dream come true for a guy like me. That's why the dream dies so hard....




Frustrating week in football. Gonna end up a few hundred $ but I was hoping for an outlier as most of my core guys overperformed.

Lots of Brissett, Goff, Cam, Russell, Dak, Brees with less Carr/Ryan which seems like a great mix today to go along with huge shares of ty Hilton. too much Evans and not enough Kamara I guess. about 10 99.7-99.9 percentilers, but no bullseyes.

The reason it sucks so much to nail your QB's and not get paid is because when you whiff:





You get destroyed. Goff, the one +QB I did have in the mix and for the second week in a row I threw him out there with everybody in every conceivable way, except possession receiver Robert Woods, who somehow had an even bigger game than his huge game last week. What a ****show!

So I'm back from Fla and ready to immerse myself in 2018 MLB. First, yeah, wow, I kinda bailed on the thread again, not to mention the second half of the NFL season. Burnout is a real issue when you're living this **** 24/7 for 9 months straight. I need to work on that.


Recap- Nothing seemed to go right in football, I lost around $8K on pretty pathetic volume (meaning horrible ROI) with the exception of my $20K bink. I'd give my season a D for player picking, D- for adjusting on the fly, and an easy F for work ethic. B+ for sniffing out that 1 outlier though (A+ if Evan Ingram had 3 less yards on MNF giving me a $40K 1st instead of a $20K 2nd). All in all a pretty pathetic showing but I'll take the +$12K. I was right around +$20K for MLB, so just over $30K, or around $55K total in the 2 years since I started this thread. Not what I had in mind, but not a disaster. I can limp along like this trying for the 1 day that sets the 5 year plan.


Outlook- A lot of weird **** happened in football, and I missed most of the good weird ****, and it showed in my results. Despite that I'm pretty confident that NFL GPP DFS is pretty close to a free roll. At least if you play my style (lets call it a diversified value strategy, and of course not tilting away the ole bankroll). As for MLB I just think too much of the expert play isn't, yet. At this point I've actually got a viable backup plan (that doesn't involve flipping burgers) I can change gears on short notice but I'd really like to give this two more years to see where I'm at, so that's the plan unless the wheels completely fall off first.


Here's my manually adjusted park factors going into last season. I was able to look this over with fresh eyes, plus another years worth of data, and I wanted to make some changes. Newer rankings below




1 Col

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

11 Ariz (???? Humidor ????)
12 Cubs
13 Philly
14 Min
15 Cle
16 Hou
17 KC
18 Wash

19 Atl (new park, 1 year of data)
20 NYM
21 TB
22 Pit
23 STL
24 MIA
25 SD
26 LAA
27 LAD
28 OAK
29 SEA
30 SF

Excited for the updates this is one of my favorite threads.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I've been doing a lot of reading and listening to a few podcasts (sharps; Sporer/Mason on FG, Jenstad/Erickson on RW, and some vanilla ****, like CBS/ESPN/random, all geared to full season.) but I haven't really put my full rotation and BP work in so I'm just gonna post some random thoughts here as we approach the season.




Bummer! Great hitter and won me $25K with one swing of the bat (and oh so close to $50K) way back early in the 2016 season, so obviously I"M A FAN!


FD changes- They turned 2 slots (C/1B) into 1 slot for a C OR 1B and replaced C (in most cases) with a utility slot.

1- I love the addition of the ut slot

2- I ****ing hate that they took C away, not a huge issue but it just dumbs down the game a little more, and it didn't need any dumbing down.

3- if they simply added the UT this would be a huge improvement. As is I think it's at least a slight negative. Nothing to **** your ****ing pants over though!!!


Strategy changes- I don't want to get into this too much but I am planning some changes. I think my model works, and I'll continue to pump out some of the exact type of lineups I have in the past, but I want to focus more on creative contrarian plays. Off the wall (but not stupid) 4/4's and 4/3/1's, and maybe more 4/4's on DK as 5 man stacks are still pretty popular there. Basically more thinking and less robotic clicking.


Bullpen- The season will be 4 days longer than usual for the same amount of games this year. Doesn't seem like a big deal over 6 months but it really cut out a lot of the easy to predict fatigue spots. There just aren't near as many 17 games in 17 days, day off, 20 games in 20 days type of scheduling snafu's there used to be. I looked over every sched and barely took any useful notes. Long story short overall pen quality factors gain importance while fatigue factors become less important. Also, I think keying in on bullpens becomes slightly less important overall.


Tracking stuff- I plan on tracking the quality of lineups I'm facing with some random sampling. It'll be a pain in the ass and all based on my opinion, so I'm not sure what it'll be worth. At any rate I plan on sharing here once I've built up some data, say early May'ish. More details then

I also have an idea on how to help predict ownership that should be better than just guessing based on my experience or worse, paying some ate up buster to guess for me. This is gonna take some time, so we'll see how long I stick with it or if it's even worth more than my off the cuff guesses. I may or may not post about this stuff.


Opening Day contests- Meh, I'm super jacked for Baseball and OD is my favorite day of the year going back to early in the first Reagan administration, I'm just not crazy about the slate/game offerings at this point. I mean I'll have a K+, probably closer to 2 on the line, but I'm just not gonna go hog wild with what I see now. First, as of now there isn't even a $3-$5 game to mass enter. I'll play 50 or so entries into the $9 Rally on FD, I just can't fire off $1350 into that, esp with 25% to 1st and like 40% to the top 6 or 7. As of now DK doesn't even have a $5-$10 game to play, 1 big field GPP and it's a $20. Too rich for me to do more than a few token entries. No big deal though, I'll pick my spots, got all summer.



Even more random than the above-

Other than Mia I don't think any other NL teams are tanking. Mia is going to be a total **** show, but with that park they've got 2 or 3 arms that at least shouldn't be huge DFS targets. Look at the AL though Det, KC, CHW, Oak, have 1 healthy good starter between them (Danny Duffy). Tex and Bal could be as bad, and those parks, oh marone! Min and Tampa have issues, if Sea losses Paxton, ouch. LAA is deep, and talented. That said 1-6 of their 8 starters have some injury concerns. If they get 800+ innings out of 1-6 they're probably fine. 350 (lol, but possible with all those glued on wings) they're ****ed. Oh forgot Tor, suspect, esp with Stro on the sidelines. Cle and Hou obv have great rotations, not much to pick at there, Bos has Sale, and that alone is good enough for a top 5 or so staff, what a hoss, but the bottom half is gonna give up some runs, and Price is suspect. NYY will crush, and they've got some nice arms, but I wouldn't be surprised if that rotation underperforms a bit, they'll still win 9-7 tho...



This thread- I don't know how active I'll be in here as once baseball starts I'm super busy. Not only am I planning on adding work via the couple projects I mentioned above to my already busy, 7 day a week schedule, but I'm trying to spend more time away from the computer as well. There's only so many hours in a day. That said I will pop in from time to time and update. I think there's a good chance my DFS "career" ends or is at least relegated to the back burner in the next year or two, which is fine by me at this point. I think it'll be interesting to half ass document it, and who knows, maybe I make it, or learn/teach something here.


Good luck this season to all the players out there. If anyone has any specific opening day questions or more general stuff before the season starts, fire away...

First couple days of the season were pretty bad. My pitching mix was good enough, but none of my stack combos were. Really any time Nick Ahmed or that other slap dick from CHW who went nuts on OD are the players of day I'm gonna struggle. I just don't play guys like that very often (though I did have a few shares of that other slap dick) and any player 1-9, no matter how terrible, is gonna be in some stacks, esp if it's a good team to stack otherwise, Like CHW on opening day, or Ari Fri. Around -50% on $2500 volume.


I wanted to throw 100% Darvish tonight (He blew up) the only thing stopping me was I know how wonky the first week or two can be, and I wanted to play a lot of Sutter from Mil. Anyways the majority of my 200+ lineups had 1 or both of them. Sutter was Ok, but a couple guys crushed him, so even though I knew I had some good stack action (a lot of ATL, more MIL, and a nice amount of them mixed together) I had no idea if any of my few shares of Grienke or fewer shares of Madea made in onto the right lineup.


Bingo:








I maybe used 10 shares of Madea out of 200+ lu's, probably closer to 5.


My nut is low but I've been mostly living off the money I made THREE! football seasons ago and the begining of the 16 MLB season, so the ole bankroll was getting to a level I was worried about. This isn't exactly a huge score, but it gives me some breathing room.


Building lineups the last few days I feel like my process has finally come together. Not that I don't think I've been playing a mostly +EV style, just that it's really easy to go through the motions and not really dig in and think things through. Also, I've been reviewing a ton of lineups and this has my confidence sky high, even before tonight. There's just a lot of bad lineups

If the 10pm game were available on DK (where I played a bigger game with more upside) tonight might have been my year maker. As is, no complaints:




No, I didn't play the same lu twice. HUGE DIFFERENCES!







Feels pretty good. What I won last year really just made up for my losses to end 2016, so yeah, May 15-May 16 were fantastic, but I've been living on that ever since. Part of that mid-summer disaster in 16 was definitely horrible run bad, but I'm not sure it should have taken so long to recover if I were playing my best.


Of course I started last MLB season off nicely as well, and lost like 14 out of the next 16 weeks (including all my profits from the first couple weeks) until a decent Aug saved my season. My nightly lineup reviews has my confidence sky high though, and I think my game is tighter than ever.


Random stuff:


I haven't even looked at bullpens, yet.

I can't wait for full 13-15 game night slates. The first couple weeks really have some terrible slates with all the day games and off days, not to mention it's been Feb weather across most of the country.

I'm typically a pitching nit, but I've decided pitching doesn't matter. Of course it does, a lot, but in this 1 day **** you have no ratios to protect, so **** it. I've been talking myself into some pretty off the wall arms. The weird slates have a lot to do with that too.

I've been building 150 squeeze entries the night before (like those 2 up top). It easier to edit the ones I need to out of 150 and build around 100 higher stakes and/or DK lineups in crunch time than build 250.

This thread is dead. I guess not making any money for a long time and dropping out, twice, didn't do it any favors. I've typed out some long posts recently but figured whats the point? Delete. It's all relative I guess. This thread is meaningless, but then again so is everything and everyone who ever was or ever will be. Let me know if I just blew your mind, I've got more of this ****...

FWIW, I'm still following the thread, although I personally gave up on daily fantasy a long time ago. Congrats on the recent big scores. As the Indians have kept improving over the last few years, I've been getting more and more back into baseball and enjoying it.

Same as karamazonk here. Grats on the score, hopefully you can get back on the crushing track.

I’m also still following and would like even more frequent updates! How much you up on season? Do you use dfs tracker and maybe you could post graphs ?

Fair enough, I wasn't sure if anyone was even reading. This thread doesn't really fit into this section, or 2p2 at all for that matter. There's just no where else I'd bother to post it as I guess this is kind of my internet home base.


As far as results; No, I don't use a tracker. I only move money around a few times a year so I know exactly what I started the year and season with in each account so it only takes a quick glance at my balances to know exactly where I'm at YTD. In 15 days I'm down $935 on DK and up $22,350 on FD (+21,415). I've had 4 winning days, $15K Yesterday, $11.5 the other day, a +$600, and a +$200. so minus about $6K the other 11 days. I tracked everything pretty closely back in 2016, that was a bit of work and I really don't want to focus on day to day results like that. Anyway, I'll be happy to update totals from time to time, but that's about it as far as that goes.


One thing I was thinking about after my post last night was how I worried I was being overly cautious in moving up after my big May 2016, while in reality it was probably not cautious enough. I mean my roll was up to almost 6 figures, and I had my bills paid for months, so yeah, take a shot, sure, but dropping $30K in 40 days was a real ball buster. I ran as bad as you possibly could, but still, I think I should have moved up a little more slowly and certainly pumped the brakes sooner.


The reason I even bring it up is that I'm really playing it safe now. My roll is big enough to take some $2K+ shots from time to time, and I will, tomorrow looks juicy. What I wont do is "move up" to where I'm just automatically playing like that because if it goes poorly for a few weeks I'd be right back to being shut out of even taking modest shots like I'm taking tomorrow. There's been times the last couple years where I felt forced to keep it around $500, and man does that suck. It's just not enough to even half ass do this. So far this year I've been playing around $700-$1500 most days w/o playing much of anything over $10. I'm probably going to scooch that up to the $1K-$2K range. Slow and steady!


Ideally I'd still like to play around $5K a day and really give this thing a shot. No idea how much I'd need to feel comfortable with that though. Probably at least $150K....

Running good, close to another bink:






I had Sea stacked with everyone multiple ways, this is probably the only one of the bunch w/o Cano. I had most of these built before the Sea lineup came out and once I saw Cruz was back from the DL and Haniger was bumped down to 6th I auto'd him out for Cruz in the lineups where I had the extra cap (Cruz was $200 more). After that I went to manually switch him out 1 by 1 with some minor tweaks but I decided against it, mostly as a time saver well into crunch time, GOOD MOVE!


Not gonna lie, I was feeling pretty damn good about my new and improved process on opening day. These early results just strengthen everything. Another multi-month ball kicking in could be right around the corner, but I think I might just be ready to crush, for realsies this time (Feel free to bump this hubris next time I'm doubting my profitability after a 3 month -$25K run and talking about selling chicken planks and hush puppies, lol). Let's call it guarded optimism, just less guarded than I have been the last couple years.



The weather for tomorrows main slate looks dreadful. I'll build 40 lineups between 11 and noon and I'm done for the day. Going out for steak dinner, Sunday nap, then catch a late showing of A Quiet Place.


I haven't looked ahead at the schedule but I'm REALLY looking forward to this mess of early season day games and wretched weather to end. Hopefully both do this week. 14/15 game MLB night slates are the ****ing tits!