This is all I play and everything is subjective, but here is my take.

Fanduel: It is littered with a ton of the major leaguers in that format. I play just the $10 and $20 so you will have twenty participants in each game and you will still have a good amount of average players in your game. The problem is that it is not a ratio of five major league guys and the rest average. Most games will have more than that ratio. Once again it is all subjective because you or someone else may only consider guys like Kaiser or Hixville major league guys. You will see ohmsy, rudzia and many other players who are not on that level, but I consider very strong who have won over five figures with not being on the site for a long time.

There are times you can get in some games there with a bunch of average players, but in my opinion it is not the norm.

I have to go and will try and write more later.

Dailyjoust, Draftday, FSL, Draftzone have that format as well.

In 50/50s, Fanduel seems to offer the largest feilds in this format with 50 entrants. Unlike in H2H the larger feilds offer better odds. As to which site has the weakest players is merely opinion. I would recommend joining at least 3 or 4 sites. The reason I say to join so many is this. As with your seasonal leagues the players (users) vary from site to site. So do the player values (salaries). We all have our personal preferences on how we construct our rosters. After a few weeks you will notice that you generally feel more comfortable with your rosters on one site compared to the others. This should become your main site played.
I currently play DraftZone the most. I love the live draft options and the player salaries there. There are very few sharks there. Not enough high volume traffic to make it as profitable as DS and FD.

I play the format on Draftday, Draftstreet, Fanduel, Dailyjoust and in the recent past FSL and Draftzone. I have not seen any sites with consistently weak players. It really is all about trying them and seeing what site fits your style. If you have had success with the Draftstreet system of keeping it tight at times with the prices than try out Dailyjoust. They will have a similar system that if you want James, Howard or Love you are going to have to throw in a good amount of value/risk players for that night.

If you go to Dailyjoust you may not see that many 50/50 games on the board. If you don’t see any you like, create your own and it will fill as long as you are not trying to squeeze it in right before tipoff.

I’m not a huge player of double-up games, but I’ve found DraftDay’s to be easily beatable so far. The thing is, daily fantasy is brutal on poor players and they don’t hang around very long. Your best move is to find the game that fits your style and stick to that. Every site has their own wrinkles in their games, whether it be scoring, roster format or salary movement. If you are doing well at Draftstreet, keep profiting there. There is no point in spreading your action around for the sake of spreading it around. By all means, try out other sites, but the key to long-term profitability is to find avenues that you can exploit.

Lastly, your game of choice may change by sport. I’m pretty good at DraftStreet baseball, but terrible at their football game, so never feel like you are locked into a particular site or format.

On FD you can create your own leagues, they should fill with no problem at $5 or $10.

While you cannot create 50/50 leagues, I recommend you try the “loser pays” format… 3 player, 2nd gets entry back, 3rd gets nothing. A great way to minimize potential losses while getting your feet wet.

Good points all around in this thread. Great tip by Buffalo as well!

I have only played FanDuel’s, but I have definitely notice what everyone is mentioning in that they are consistently being filled by more top players.

I would like to see more 50 player field 50/50s than 20 player fields to counter-act this, but I still think they are a good option for the time being for grinding a steady ROI. Just make sure to check who is entered, and wait until the end to join if possible.

Misfit, great post man. I completely agree that the bigger 50/50’s are better. 20 player 50/50’s just don’t offer much value anymore because there are too many high volume players who occupy them. If you moved to a 100 player 50/50 the ratio of good:bad players goes down and profitability goes up. And the 20 man 50/50’s will only get stronger as the season goes and the survivorship bias emerges with the noobs falling out of the game and the pros putting in more entries with their deep pockets. Also, great advice rotokevin on the idea to play across sites and find your niche.

I’ve even seen 10 man 50/50’s, which are just horrible value.

I liked these when they first came out and played a lot, but just like any other good +ev bet, the sharks soon appear and arbitrage the value out.

As for strength of competition, this is my 5th NBA season and it’s the best competition I’ve ever seen. The players are evolving and getting more skilled, just like what happened in poker. Sites like RG, FD Insider, etc. have educated casual players so well that there isn’t much gap in skill between them and good players, which makes the game MUCH harder to beat these days. I used to run into several players every day who would use guys who were out due to injury, benching, etc, but I am finding that this just isn’t happening anymore. Guys seem to have much more info so there just aren’t any easy games or gimme’s.

I know I keep harping on this, but the rake is going to have to come down to keep these games profitable. Once all your players get to a certain level of skill and information, and the gap between good and bad players narrows, everyone will be a loser with the 10% rake. If you are going to make money against better skilled players, you have to pay less to play the game.

Ive been rocking on the 50 50 until last night. For some reason, Ive won consistently on Daily Joust, never on FanDuel, and so so on Draft Street. I cant even see the screen on Draft Zone because its so dark, but I need to play more on it. Draft Day looks ok, need to check it out. Is baseball here yet???

Many of Tippy’s points are spot on. Particularly the point about how small the gap is with the casual and skill players. I play in a large chunk of the $5 and $10 games on Fanduel every night and it blows my mind that the place I finish is in the same general position in so many different contests. You will have many of the same players in each contest, but there are some differences throughout many of them. For example if I finish in seventh place I will be in that exact same spot for many other games and when I finish in a different spot on that same night it will be in sixth or eighth. It pretty much never is a scenario where I finish in third, eighth, tenth, fifth, eleventh etc… etc.. Same thing for a bad night it will mean many contests at fourteenth, thirteenth, fifteenth, no fourteenth, eighth, sixth, eleventh.

Count me in the boat of I would like to see some large field 50/50 contests. I know each site has their reasons for pro or con, but on the two big boys Fanduel and Draftstreet I don’t see any reason not to. On both of those sites they run and fill many twenty man and ten man contests. If they throw up some fifty man or one hundred man single entry 50/50 games they would not lose any business on the smaller field 50/50 because you will still have the usual suspects from those smaller games entering both small field and large field contests. None of the regulars who are there everyday with the multiple small field games are going to suddenly stop entering all those contests because a couple of large field games popped up

I’ve barely ever played the 50/50s on FanDuel because the field is too small. Right before they launched 50/50s FanDuel had a little event to get feedback from players, and I suggested that the 50/50s should be at least 100 players deep, but they’ve preferred to keep them small. I don’t really know the reasoning. If 10-20 of the best players are entering all the 50/50s, an average player may be better off trying to get lucky in a h2h against a top player. The variance of h2h favors the weaker player.

Draftday’s 50/50s allow multiple entries, so it is not as friendly a game as it appears. Also, I think a lot of the poker people on there were losing at first, but are quickly getting wise to the game, and realizing how important injury-info is (in NBA), and the basic strategies of the game. One thing that is nice about Draftday, but that I think also helps to narrow the gap between the top players and the newer players, is that you can view the lineups of all the teams in their guaranteed contests, whether you entered the contest or not. So as a beginner, you can quickly see the players that all of the top finishers are taking night in and night out.