Daily Fantasy, Daily Life: Volume VII - What The Princess Bride Can Teach Us About DFS
I’m old enough to remember when you could just play the best plays in DFS tournaments and carry on with the rest of your day.
It was a more innocent time, back in 2014. Anyone playing daily fantasy sports who had the slightest idea of what they were doing – you know, basics like making sure injured players weren’t in your lineup – could expect to be profitable. I assume cash games were soft back then as well, but I’m a tournament player, born and bred.
lang=“en” dir=“ltr”>If you’re knowledgeable about NHL, I’d suspect the
FanDuel</a> games are soft: <a href="http://t.co/HI3goCHqZv">http://t.co/HI3goCHqZv</a></p>— Adam Levitan (adamlevitan) October 16, 2014
But yes. It really was as the forefathers remember: Play the best plays, win money.
lang=“en” dir=“ltr”>
cj_lutz</a> I really like DD flexibility with positions and you can't beat the easy competition on FanDuel.</p>— Dan Back (dan_back) October 29, 2013
Of course, as DFS rose in popularity, so did sites that aped RotoGrinders and did the heavy lifting for you. Today, optimizers rule the day for the vast majority of DFS players, and not using a great one – like ours, naturally – is definitely setting yourself up for, if not failure, at least not-quite-success.
And it’s not because the optimizers are so good at identifying the “best plays.” Nor is it because they’re so good at identifying ceiling plays or floor plays. Nor is it because they’re so good at pinpointing ownership percentages.
It’s because they’re so good at all of it – and more – and there is so much of it.
Between all the sites and people who do this work, the amount of information there is about any one slate of games is off the charts. Really: Imagine if you subscribed to every service. There would be no way to parse all the information – especially assuming you have a job and a life outside of the DFS world – and even if you had a bot or whatever to crunch everything, you’re still going to end up with a lot of noise surrounding what might be actionable information. And it’s “might be” because – as we know all too well – there are actual human beings out there playing the games. (Of course, if you’re a cash game player, pay no mind. Take the RotoGrinders optimal lineup, play it, rinse, repeat.)
But for a tournament player? Well … being a tournament player today is reminiscent of the “battle of wits” scene in The Princess Bride. Take the next few minutes to watch it, even if you’ve seen it before. It’s instructive.
OK. So what did we learn, besides that (the fictional) iocane powder is from Australia, that one should never get in a land war in Asia, and to never get into a battle to the death with Sicilian?
We learned that we very well may have reached the “we’re so smart we’re about to outsmart ourselves” portion of the program.
In short, and in Wallace Shawn-as-Vizzini voice: “I obviously can’t play the best plays, because the best plays are the chalky plays, and if I play the chalky plays, you’re going to play the chalky plays, and if the chalky plays hit, then I won’t be separating myself from you, so I need to play good plays that aren’t chalky, but you, being the clever one you are, also know this and thus are also playing the non-chalky good plays, so in an effort to combat that, I will play kind of objectively bad plays in an effort to make sure I have a unique lineup, but of course you will do the same so …”
So maybe, just maybe, we should just go back and play the best plays and see how that works out?
Is it possible that just like Vizzini, we are trying so hard to outsmart our opponents we end up keeled over dead in the end? (Of course, the Man in Black had built up a tolerance to iocane powder, but let’s not dither over details.)
Now granted, you’re not going to win a lot of tournaments – especially large field tournaments – with full chalky construction. But we really might be in a “zig when everyone else is zagging” kind of moment. At this point, I’m pretty confident most people playing DFS can figure out the right plays based on optimizers, and I’m reasonably certain most people playing DFS “know” that building tournament lineups based on the “right” plays is the “wrong” way to do it.
So while everyone is busying themselves making sure to get off the chalk … might playing the chalk be the right idea?
Well, let’s take a look at our own Keith “eys819” Eyster, who on this past Monday night bested some 24,000 other players and took down the NBA $80K Four Point Play on DraftKings. He made some great tourney-playing decisions in his winning lineup, like playing the slumping Stephen Curry at 18% and the red-hot yet under-appreciated Gary Trent Jr. 9%.
But he also played Andre Drummond at 76% and Isaiah Jackson at 56%.
Now really: Current next-level DFS thinking would say you fade Drummond and Jackson in a large-field tournament. But again: Princess Bride, man.
“Drummond and Jackson were grading out in LineupHQ – their RGV and Smash percentage – I don’t remember exactly what they were, but they were massive numbers,” Eyster said. “I felt like Drummond was a must and Jackson was really close. I locked both of them into every lineup.”
Even though they were going to be so owned? Especially Drummond, where three out of four lineups included him?
“I think 25% of people made a mistake last night,” Eyster said. “If you didn’t play him at 100%, that was a mistake.”
In short: You drank the iocane powder.
Now Eyster did point out he’s far more willing to eat the chalk in NBA compared to NFL (and especially MLB, where Mike Trout might be facing a soft-tossing lefty and then proceed to smash the four hardest-hit balls in the history of the sport but they end up directly in the mitt of the left fielder at the warning track, don’t get me started) but that overall, if the play is correct, he’s going to play it.
“I know that I’ll just differentiate elsewhere, and force some lower-owned plays into my lineups,” he said.
Of course, to win a tournament, everything has to go right. But hamstringing yourself by not playing the crystal clear top plays because you think I’m going to be doing the same might, at this point in the evolution of DFS, be worse than entering into a land war in Asia.
Cover Image Credit: Jason Getz / Imagn