A Closer Look at FanDuel Large Field Contest Composition

Blinder’s posted some interesting thoughts on the potential downside of large field contests that allow multiple entries from the same player account.  He discusses how the best players are the ones more likely to enter the most teams, making the field much tougher.  He also included an extreme example of how multiple entries from the top players can greatly affect the overall contest.  His example made me curious of the actual composition of the large fields tournaments on FanDuel.  Riley and I delved into our FanDuel data feed to see exactly how many entries players are putting into these tournaments.

Here is Blinder’s example, which would indeed produce a very tough field:

“So, let’s say for example that 50 people in the top 10% put in 15 entries each in a 1,000 field tournament leaving 250 single entry spots for the bottom 90%. The field has now gone from 10% winning players to 75% winning players making in nearly impossible for a bottom 90% player to cash. Furthermore, this situation makes the field tougher for those in the top 10% who would normally see 90% of the field as weaker than they are. It really starts to become a bad value for everyone. What I would guess actually happens is that the number of entries becomes pretty proportional to skill level. The best players put in the most entries, and the entries drop down towards one as you move towards the bottom 90%. This would tend to even reduce the number of profitable players below 10% by allowing for a much tougher field for the best players as well.”

Wednesday is the big day for multi entry tournaments on FanDuel, with the Slam and the Rebound combining for over 500 entries every week.

Here is the composition of last Wednesday’s Slam and Rebound, which had 389 and 122 total total entries, respectively.

SLAM: So, there were 198 unique players. 122 users submitted a single team.  76 users submitted multiple teams.  22 users submitted more than 3 teams, and only 4 teams submitted 10 or more.  The scary scenario in which the top players are flooding the tournament does not appear to be reality.  Guys who entered 10 or more teams accounted for 12% of total entrants.  Guys who entered 1-3 teams account for 65% of the field.  Guys who entered only one team account for 31% of the field.

REBOUND: 76 unique users submitting a total of 122 entries.  Users submitting 1-3 teams again accounted for 65% of the field, with 43% coming from single entries.  No one submitted more than ten teams, probably because the Rebound in uncapped (meaning that rake has potential to be above 10%) and doesn’t feature a large first prize.

We only thoroughly analyzed this one Wednesday, but we did pull other days and the entries data looks pretty consistent.  The purpose of this post isn’t do draw conclusions as much as just provide data to make Fanduel’s large field contests more transparent.  It’s safe to expect for the FanDuel basketball large field contests that around 33% will come from players with more than three entries.  Whether that number is more comforting or scary depends on the player.

My main counterpoint to Blinders’ article was that growing these prize pools, not player equity, should be the major concern.  I’ve got no decent way of backing up my argument using the data feed that we receive, but I can look at some overall adoption numbers.  Here are the data for large field activity vs normal games:  

Wednesday, Feb 12

Number of unique players in the SLAM and REBOUND:
206

Number of unique players in normal heads up to 10 man games:
387

Total number of unique players:
442

So, nearly half of FanDuel’s active user participated in the large field contests, and 55 users (442-387=55) participated exclusively in the large field contests.  55 users represents 12% of the active player base that day.  While I think that number is impressive for a game concept that is new to FanDuel this year, I honestly thought it would be closer to 20%.  FanDuel’s bread and butter is and will remain the heads up games, but the large field tournaments are clearly a critical part of their offering.