Sunday’s Sundry
Early in the season, I feel as if the pricing hasn’t quite caught up to the productivity of the players. For example, Daniel Jones is by no means the sexiest name in the world for fantasy football, but he is a league-leading option at the quarterback position through the first two weeks of the season. Paying up for recognizable names and past performers is one of the easiest ways to strike out in DFS.
The strategy here is simple. Pay down whenever possible, and look for idiosyncrasies in the DFS market. When playing the classic game mode in DFS, your margin of error increases substantially, unlike in a showdown where you have to predict the top five scoring options from each team, classic is much more lenient. Showdown leaves little room for any strategic basis to your lineup for that same reason. This is why the smaller the slate, the less a player pricing matters.
Classic is the opposite. Selecting from a group of nine games means that pricing is all that matters, and the lineups that win are typically ones that found loopholes that DraftKings didn’t anticipate. You can miss on the top five guys and still end up in the money. This puts a larger emphasis on roster construction, and budget management.
The phrase “on any given Sunday” has always meant that any team or player can show up at any time, and conversely that good teams can fall apart at any time. You can do all the research in the world about what’s supposed to happen, but the knowledge we attain before the game is played has very little bearing on what’s taking place on the field.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the game itself is random. I don’t see fantasy football, or daily fantasy sports as a roll of the dice. Rather, I see the job of a fantasy football player as a meteorologist or a day trader, except, instead of trying to chart the price of a stock with technical analysis or monitoring the movement of natural phenomena from space. You are tasked with reading the tea leaves of articles, draft kits, statistical models, etc to etch a range of outcomes and the various probabilities of those outcomes. That’s why it’s more important to focus on the process more than the outcomes. There can be a 90% chance of rain, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to rain tonight.
On the stock market, there are two basic approaches to investing. “Bulls” are people who believe, and invest on the basis that the market will increase or go up, whereas “Bears” have the opposite approach and invest in the hope that the market will fall. When one wins the other loses and vice versa. A similar idea applies to DFS.
The collective over-under’s of the week represents the market (the S&P 500 to be more exact). There will be Bulls who hammer the overs and Bear’s who lock in the under. The players themselves represent individual stocks, leaving your DFS roster as the portfolio. In the same way that if stocks fall, the various indexes that measure the economy fall as well, the performance of players affects the outcome of the game which determines what side of the over/under will win.
I don’t believe that there is anyone given strategy that wins at DFS. The market, or more specifically the combined performances of each player, and their various prices determine what strategy works each week. My approach to DFS has always been akin to a Bear on the stock market. I’m looking for discounts, undervalued assets, and a slump in the market at large. I believe that most people expect the best outcomes or the easiest answers and that’s why I bet on the idea that things won’t go as well as people hoped. It could serve you better to do the exact opposite of my approach. It just means that you’ll profit whenever I don’t and vice versa, but there will never be one side that is wholelistically correct. May the market forever be in your favor.
