OT: Fantasy sports (Football, baseball, hockey, squash)

[Hunter Gathers]

Your one stop shop for fantasy discussion.

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[Hunter Gathers]

Demolishing it in two football leagues. Bout to lose to Rust in the HFB league. :|

 

[BarbaraAlphanse]

Demolishing it in two football leagues. Bout to lose to Rust in the HFB league. :|

They announced that Marshawn was out after Johnsons game started. Stafford is WOAT. i wouldn't be surprised if I lost.

I should be 1-1-1.

 

[Hunter Gathers]

They announced that Marshawn was out after Johnsons game started. Stafford is WOAT. i wouldn't be surprised if I lost.

I should be 1-1-1.

I know. It should be an easy win for me. But NOAP. RIP undefeated

 

[BarbaraAlphanse]

I know. It should be an easy win for me. But NOAP. RIP undefeated

Whoa whoa whoa. These are fighting words.

Rip undefeated had I started Drew or Johnson. Sir.

 

[Hunter Gathers]

Whoa whoa whoa. These are fighting words.

Rip undefeated had I started Drew or Johnson. Sir.

Yeah but you didn't and Marshawn is out lol.

 

[DudMan28]

Looking to add some RB depth in my 12 team league. Currently have AP, Forsett and Rawls. Available RB's are Reggie Bush, Alfred Blue, Charles Sims, and Joique Bell. Not sure who to pick up. Leaning towards Sims. Seems like hes the most talent of the bunch. Any suggestions?

 

[BarbaraAlphanse]

Yeah but you didn't and Marshawn is out lol.

You're telling me :'(. Who the hell releases playing status at 410 on a Sunday? Don't they know about fantasy ramifications. Inconsiderate.

 

[Hunter Gathers]

I know right

 

[Infinitum Vitae*]

Lolololol fantasy Squash is GOAT.

 

[ecemleafs]

i lost because of a misses extra point. a 12 point lead heading into OT of the sunday night game wasnt enough since spiller had an 80 yard td. at least dallas lost.

 

[Hunter Gathers]

I did OK in the Squash draft. Got Nick Matthew and Ramy Ashour.

 

[sbjnyc]

BTW I think we should include all types of sports wagering on this thread, not just fantasy.

Oh and one comment to sbjnyc saying it's cheaper to bet on sports as the rake is much lower and such. Absolutely true but there's a huge difference in that essentially any random person will not be able to beat sports betting. Sports betting isn't about "watching sports" and knowing the game. Everything you can think of is already taken into account by the oddsmakers who have millions on the lines in games and have a huge incentive to get the lines as right as possible. It's about line shopping, having sophisticated models/databases etc...the huge huge difference DFS has is you're not facing the expert oddsmakers HU. If you game select well you should be facing lots of rec players who are just playing their favorites and making really really -EV lineups. Hockey is actually the softest of the sports in this regard due to the smaller popularity there's way less good articles/information posted about it (in fact most of the info posted is absolutely terrible) whereas baseball and football has a lot of good advice and information that people can use.

If this was true then line shopping wouldn't add much value.

In any case fantasy sports is more like poker in the sense that the payouts and buy ins are fixed so the only risk is lack of additional deposits. Odds makers have higher risks associated balancing the lines with the wagers. My comment about sports betting is just in terms of simple value, i.e. ~4.5% rake vs 10%. Not only that, winning in a fantasy league is low probability so risk of ruin is that much higher (not counting heads up matches if those exist).

 

[BroadwayStorm]

I've lost 37 dollars on draft kings. I won 6 dollars this week. It sucks because guys who should perform, don't. And then when you don't pick them, they perform. Tools of the trade. I would have made a killing if there was draftkings in lets say 2000-2008 when I obsessively followed the league to the degree where I knew the players and the matchups really really well. I have to get back to that. It's all about likely matchups and knowing team tendencies and player tendencies.

 

[DudMan28]

I've lost 37 dollars on draft kings. I won 6 dollars this week. It sucks because guys who should perform, don't. And then when you don't pick them, they perform. Tools of the trade. I would have made a killing if there was draftkings in lets say 2000-2008 when I obsessively followed the league to the degree where I knew the players and the matchups really really well. I have to get back to that. It's all about likely matchups and knowing team tendencies and player tendencies.

Dont be too hard on yourself. Draft Kings is draws a fine line between skill and pure luck. You can make a case for why every player will, or will not have a big week. It just comes down to who actually makes it happen. Game flow, weather, early in-game injuries all play a major factor in who scores big points.

More often than not, its a crap-shoot.

 

[SA16]

BTW I think we should include all types of sports wagering on this thread, not just fantasy.



If this was true then line shopping wouldn't add much value.

In any case fantasy sports is more like poker in the sense that the payouts and buy ins are fixed so the only risk is lack of additional deposits. Odds makers have higher risks associated balancing the lines with the wagers. My comment about sports betting is just in terms of simple value, i.e. ~4.5% rake vs 10%. Not only that, winning in a fantasy league is low probability so risk of ruin is that much higher (not counting heads up matches if those exist).

Well not all lines are priced as efficiently as others. Some sites are slower to react to injury news and such. Generally the market leader makes a change, other books notice, and react to it. If you can find a +3.5 line where everyone else is offering +3 is huge.

4.5% rake is obviously much better than 10% rake but it's really a huge difference in that one in spot you're competing against professionals with millions on the line and in the other you're competing against random people just playing for fun who make lots of mistakes.

And I should clarify I am referring to heads up matches. That's probably 95% of my action. If you're playing say exclusively the NFL Sunday Mil on FD that's a 230,000 player pool for $25. First place gets 1M. You get 10k min if you come in the top 17. And place 181 and below all get less than 1000 (And place 181 is still the 99th percentile). Your risk of ruin in those huge tournaments is certainly very very high depending on how you manage your bankroll with it (and how good you are of course).

Dont be too hard on yourself. Draft Kings is draws a fine line between skill and pure luck. You can make a case for why every player will, or will not have a big week. It just comes down to who actually makes it happen. Game flow, weather, early in-game injuries all play a major factor in who scores big points.

More often than not, its a crap-shoot.

Short term on a daily basis there's a lot of luck but long term the skill weighs over. If you take a guy who has a true 60% cash % in his cash games on a daily or weekly basis he'll lose plenty of the time but in the longterm he'll approach that 60% value. Somedays though he'll go -100%, other days +80%.

 

[sbjnyc]

Short term on a daily basis there's a lot of luck but long term the skill weighs over. If you take a guy who has a true 60% cash % in his cash games on a daily or weekly basis he'll lose plenty of the time but in the longterm he'll approach that 60% value. Somedays though he'll go -100%, other days +80%.

The problem is making sure you don't lose all your money before your skill overtakes your bad luck (ruin). That means betting sensibly based on your bankroll. You can calculate the right amount only if you can accurately (and honestly) assess your own skill relative to your opponents.

 

[*Bob Richards*]

Devonta Freeman the GOAT pickup.

 

[SA16]

The problem is making sure you don't lose all your money before your skill overtakes your bad luck (ruin). That means betting sensibly based on your bankroll. You can calculate the right amount only if you can accurately (and honestly) assess your own skill relative to your opponents.

This is true. The only thing is you likely can't accurately assess your own skill without first playing a significant sample to generate it empirically. There's no way you can just know "I'll win 59% of the time' or so. And there's also tons of noise in your winrate because you can play the same player multiple times. If I play one player in 50 $1 H2H games as opposed to playing him in one $50 H2H game (and we both use only one lineup regardless) the first one is being counted 50 times if it's a W or L and the second only once. So you could play say 3 unique opponents on a day. Two guys once. One guy 50 times. And if you beat Guy50 and lose to Guy1 and Guy2 your "winrate" will be 50/52 on that day even if you had a below average lineup relative to the overall population.

For this reason while I do track my win rate I also tracking my overall average score and the average score of my opponents excluding repeats and some other info and use that to calculate what percentile my score falls into as a proxy for winrate. This obviously still has the noise of your guys under or overperforming but at least it negates the sequencing/game-selection issue somewhat. But once again it's something that you can really only do empirically. And it's also a flawed assumption to assume that your skill level is the same on game 1 vs game 1000 but not much you can really do there.

But it does come down to what you say about you have to be honest with yourself. If you're winning like 48% of the time over a large sample (I can't define large but its on the scale of months not days) it's pretty unlikely that you're just on a huge stretch of bad luck and more likely that you're just not a winning player. Not that there's anything really wrong with that if you're just playing for fun and to have something to root for during the game. It's like SF said...instead of taking the family out to entertainment for $100 one night you could deposit the $100 there for entertainment value and hey - you always have a shot at hitting it big in a tournament.

 

[Raspewtin]

I'm offended you didn't include fantasy League of Legends in your title

 

[Filthy Dangles]

Devonta Freeman the GOAT pickup.

Same here. Leading the league in Rushing TD's right now and only started in 2 of the games. Looks like he might have won that #1RB role from Telvin Coleman when he comes back.

Really like what I've seen from Freeman.

 

[BarbaraAlphanse]

c'mon Calvin. Just need you to score 5 more points that Abdullah

 

[nyr__1994]

Thoughts?

any thoughts in the latest revelation of insider trading at FanDuel and DraftKings?

I think they are both already walking a very fine line in regards to legality and this will only bring added attention to a currently unregulated gaming industry.

 

[I Eat Crow]

any thoughts in the latest revelation of insider trading at FanDuel and DraftKings?

I think they are both already walking a very fine line in regards to legality and this will only bring added attention to a currently unregulated gaming industry.

To be honest I'm amazed that sites like Fanduel and Draftkings have gone unregulated for this long. It's definitely gambling, and it's a matter of time before regulations are imposed.

 

[BarbaraAlphanse]

Stafford is the worst.

Throw it to Calvin! Two leagues depend on it dammit.