Daily Fantasy, Daily Life: Volume XXXIV - Forest Gump
Forrest Gump once remarked, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”
And boy howdy, ain’t that the truth.
One day you wake up jobless, and by nightfall, you got a call out of the blue for a job you applied for a year previous. One day you wake up lonely, and by lunchtime, you’ve met the woman you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. One day you wake up and think of yourself as your father’s son, and by nightfall, your entire worldview has changed – you’re now your newborn son’s father.
Yessir, ol’ Forrest had it right. All those things I just listed happened to me. Life is indeed like a box of chocolates.
But Forrest wasn’t done. He also said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
And boy howdy, ain’t that the truth.
One day you wake up and build a well-correlated, super-smart DFS lineup and, despite entering all your other well-correlated $5 FanDuel millionaire entries into smaller field tourneys as well, you don’t enter this one that finished 119th out of over 550,000 entries in the FanDuel Sunday million into any smaller-field tourneys, all of which you would’ve won if you entered.
Listen: I know you don’t want to read about my well-correlated, super-smart lineup that ended up being a bad beat instead of making my year, so I won’t except to say this: It was Tua // Tyreek // Waddle with an Andrews bringback, mini-correlation of Amon-Ra and Curtis Samuel, chalky Darrell Henderson (because he fit) and Josh Jacobs (as a pivot off popular Davante Adams) and Denver D, paying up to be contrarian.
See? Told you. Super-smart and well-correlated. And I always enter those types of lineups into small field tourneys. For whatever reason, I failed to do so with this. I know, for example, it would’ve won the 7,000+ entry $10 Sunday Scramble. And so on and so forth.
As to why I didn’t enter it into small field tourneys? Because I’m stupid. We covered this already. But also because I built this lineup while sitting in the passenger seat of our SUV as my wife was driving me, our three kids, and one of their friends to Six Flags Great Adventure. (I went on the log flume and one non-loopy roller coaster. I’m old. Leave me alone.) But yes: Instead of hunkering down and finishing up my lineups, I agreed to go to Great Adventure and finish up my lineup building while on the road. With the radio on. And my daughters sniping at each other. And my son and his friend doing baby voices for some godforsaken reason no matter how many times I told them to shut it. And – at the risk of being labeled a troglodyte – my wife was driving, which meant I was already on edge, as our family is of the “traditional” nature, namely, I do the driving. (I’m a better driver. This is an objective fact.)
So my mind was not solely fixated on the lineup-building. And it cost me.
At this point in the column, this is where I would normally say something like, “But family is the most important thing. It’s not their fault I made this mistake, it’s my own fault. A day at a theme park with my kids is 100% more valuable than winning a few thousand dollars playing DFS. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Yeah, well, (bleep) that.
I’m still (bleeping) aggravated. I mean, I should’ve just said, “Yeah, sure, let’s go, but instead of leaving at 12:30 like we did, howsabout we just go at 1 p.m. because it’s literally crunch time right now and I’m still working on my lineups like I’ve been doing every Sunday since 2014? OK?!?!”
But no. I tried to be both a super-sharp DFS player and a family man at the same exact time. It’s an impossible feat. Can’t do both at exactly the same time. You’ll just fail twice.
Moral of the story? Family first. Always. But sometimes they can wait a half-hour, for the love of Amon-Ra.
Finish this up for me, Forrest.