Winning DFS Is About The Format Part 2

In the last post, we discussed how winning in daily fantasy sports is about understanding the format. I probably could have elaborated more but I started to go in a different direction of trying to give examples, demonstrations, and "toy games" or "models" of what it was I was trying to say applies to tournaments. So I want to continue the discussion.

If the dice roll is a metaphor of DFS, a heads up or 50/50 can be the "closest" 50% of the field gets paid and "guessing 3,4, or 3.5 is the only viable strategy". An analogy for being "closest" might be not looking for any of the longshot plays and instead just trying to split the difference between all entrants and hope that enough of them have enough individually bad picks.

Here's a better illustration of how "being average" can actually win more than 50% of the time. Imagine there's a simple game where you only have 3 choices at each position. B is the average. IF you believe no one can consistently handicap the market, or at least that for every winner there's a loser and most decisions balance out such that the market is efficient meaning that players are most strongly distributed across the mean, median and mode and evenly on both sides.

source:http://www.regentsprep.org/regents/math/algtrig/ats2/normal67.gif

Then always using the wisdom of the crowd is still a winning strategy even though "most (mode) people are often about average(mean)".

Imagine stacking several of these distributions at each position. Some half the people are above average, half are below average at a given position. But the percentage of people that consistently beat the average is very low.

While some players may have an edge picking RBs, and others may have an edge picking WRs, and some may get lucky, and some may get unlucky, over a very long time frame, it's entirely possible a very very small percentage of people, and perhaps no individual will consistently beat the average. Based upon this theory, if we consider "b" to be the average response we can add up the totals.

	a	b	c
QB	14	15	12
RB	15	20	10
WR	16	17	18
WR	19	20	21
WR	13	15	18
TE	20	15	19
K	7	8	10
D	10	14	10

on average choosing ALL b wins even though individually sometimes c is better and sometimes a is better. The point of this is that going with the crowd actually can win in a cash game. Why? Your profit comes from the people who THINK they can pick better than average but are not. those that THINK they can pick better than average generally outnumber those that actually can, and so very few lineups will be exactly average in every single spot.

I'm not entirely convinced that "being average" all the way across the board is necessarily enough to always not only beat 50% of the field more than 50% of the time, but also beat the "rake" or the "fees" that are collected by the operating site such as fan duel or draft kings. So you may have to find an edge, or not play in a given week.... OR otherwise you must use a combination of tournament strategies and cash game strategies. I'm more confident tournament strategies do actually have a positive expectation after fees.

However, since tournament strategies are often looking to play a few longshots, you will rarely have the most common players on your roster. If those players happen to go off and have one of those 3TD performances you will be very very likely to see your bankroll go down that week. There is a complex bankroll management tactic that actually shows one of the ways to more boost your bankroll over time is to apply an edge and reduce varience. Risking a small amount is one way to reduce varience. Another way is inversely correlated outcomes. In the case of fantasy sports the inversely correlated options are betting on the more common players. However, if you bet on the more common players in a tournament format, we already covered you are going to be more likely to be negative EV. So instead what you do is you use a tournaent philosophy for tournaments, and use this cash game philosophy of going with the crowd to "normalize" your results. I would aim for a ratio of 2 to 1 where you have 2 times as many cash games as tournaments, ortwo times as much money at stake in cash games as you do in tournaments. So if you are risking 9% of your bankroll in a week, you'd risk 6% in cash games and 3% in tournaments.

I'm not sure of the exact number in a given week that you should have at risk for a number of reasons yet, but I will work on getting a better answer for that later.

Going with the most common options at a minimum will get you to win 50/50's 50% of the time. Higher if enough people have individually bad picks.