Long-term vs. Lifetime Profitability in Large Field Daily Fantasy Leagues
I wanted to take the opportunity to explain the difference between long-term profitable and lifetime profitable as it relates to large field fantasy sports leagues. To be lifetime profitable, it means that for a specific large field structure you are currently profitable after all of your trials. This does not mean for a second that you are long-term profitable. Long-term profitable means that if you were to continue playing the same large field league over and over again and made it to the “long-term” you would still be lifetime profitable. So what exactly is long-term for a large field fantasy league?
As usual, I will lean on online poker for clues to the answer, as very similar things have been studied there for years. In this case, there are really no differences at all between a large field daily fantasy league and a multi-table poker tournament (MTT) in terms of the meaning of “long-term”. Lets take a $10, 1000 player, poker tournament and $10, 1000 player, large field fantasy league that both pay out the exact same prizes to the top 100 finishers. It really does not matter how the outcome is determined. You have the same exact payout structure, and number of entries in both tournaments. In online poker, the long-term for a 500+ entry MTT is equal to the number of entries in the MTT. Smaller fields typically should be run at least 500 times. You would need to play the 1000 player MTT 1000 times to get to the long-term. The reason for this is that with “average play”, an average player would finish once in each of the 1000 possible places over 1000 trials (on average). To see if you are better than average you need to see if you capture more combined prize money than prizes 1 through 100 over the full 1000 trials. If you don’t do the full 1000 trials, you do not have the opportunity to finish in each and every spot once to see how far you vary from average.
For a DFS large field league it is exactly the same. To get to the long-term in a 1000 player league you need to run it 1000 times. A typical recommended bankroll is big enough to get you to the long-term, so that would be around $10 × 1000 or $10,000 for the example MTT/league. With the limited number of large field DFS leagues running unless you are doing 50+ entries in unlimited entry leagues all the time, you will probably never make it to long-term in a 1000+ large field league. For the WSOP main event which draws about 7000 entries, long-term would take 7000 years. It is much easier to see if you are long-term profitable in heads-up leagues or poker cash games where you can get the volume of trials required. That’s why I always played cash games for money and MTTs for fun when I played online poker. I knew I was long-term profitable in cash games, but had no idea about MTTs even though I was technically lifetime profitable there. That’s why I tend to focus on heads up DFS leagues where I can get lots of data quickly on my success rate.
Daily fantasy sites that focus on the large field fantasy leagues more than heads-up leagues tend to produce a lot of lifetime profitable players (win one $5000 prize and it is hard not to be). While they are also producing some long-term profitable players, its hard to prove it a large portion of their entries are in large field leagues.
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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.