What Does the Stakes Say About Your Opponent?
What Does the Stakes Say About Your Opponent?
I was reviewing my results on Fanduel so far this year in Fantasy Football, and can see some actual data to support what I believed might be the case. My table selection criteria has been consistent throughout and I was willing to go to any stakes for a match-up that met my criteria. While you will find poor players at any stakes, in general the better players play at higher stakes, and as a result the average fantasy score should be higher at the higher stakes. Since the stakes do not have any effect on your own fantasy score, if this is true, it becomes more difficult to profit long-term as you move up the food chain. My data through about 400 trials seems to support this. Before showing you the data, I want to make a few points. Average fantasy score is week specific with some weeks having high average scores and some weeks having low fantasy scores. For a true comparison I would have needed to enter the same number of leagues at each stakes each week, and that was not the case. To correct for this, you can look at my own average score to see if the mix of leagues were higher or lower scoring than normal. All results shown were for public leagues at the 60k cap.
$5 Buy-in Leagues
Number Entered = 256
My Average Score = 104.1
Opponents Average Score = 96.2
Results = Nicely Profitable
$10 Buy-in Leagues
Number Entered = 109
My Average Score = 103.7
Opponents Average Score = 97.4
Results = Barely Profitable
$25 Buy-in Leagues
Number Entered = 22
My Average Score = 101.5
Opponents Average Score = 100.8
Results = Break Even
$50 and $100 Buy-in Leagues
Number Entered = 5
My Average Score = 99.2
Opponents Average Score = 99.9
Results = Losing Money
$25 Private Challenge Leagues vs. Buffalo66
Number Entered = 8
My Average Score = 106.46
Opponents Average Score = 131.08
Results = Getting Crushed
As you can see, my opponent’s scores were trending up as the stakes moved up, even as my score was trending down. My score trending down is an indication that the mix of leagues at the higher stakes were favoring lower scoring weeks, which should have caused my opponents scores to also trend lower, which they did not. This indicates that the skill levels are higher as you move up in the stakes, and I currently am not good enough to beat the $25 and up stakes long-term. For the challenge I am playing Buffalo66 a known great player, and his average score was 131 which I can’t compete with currently. This explains why he is crushing me in the challenge so far. There are two takeaways here. The lowest stakes should have the highest ROI for any player, with ROI diminishing as you move up the food chain. Avoiding the best players will increase your ROI, because the best players are very tough to beat, if not impossible to beat long-term. If I took the challenge anyone approach, I would probably not be profitable at Fantasy Football.
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About the Writer: After much research and preparation, Blinders turned his vision and passion for fantasy sports into the first Daily Fantasy sports site with Salary Cap based games in June of 2007: FantasySportsLive. He is a longtime online poker player and blogger, and the only daily fantasy grinder who was willing to take on Buffalo66 in his multi-sport fantasy challenge. Last NFL Season Blinders went 71-10 on FanDuel alone.