Don't Get Married!
This last week, my wife and I flew to New England to attend a beautiful wedding. I have known the bride since she was born, and we met the groom last year in Portland, Oregon at my older sister’s wedding (and have subsequently hung out with him in Boston and in New Orleans). They’re an awesome couple, and it was a wedding that befit their awesomeness – perfect weather, perfect setting (the ceremony took place on a gazebo with the ocean stretching out behind them), and a perfect night of partying and dancing and celebrating their marriage.
That’s a lot of “wedding” and “spouse” and “marriage” talk for an article that is titled “Don’t Get Married!” Intrigued? Hopefully you are. Confused? Well…go ahead and follow along, and you’ll see where this is going. Maybe this is going toward MLB DFS…
This wedding took place on Friday, which happened to be the first day of MLB games after the All Star Break (hey, look at that – an MLB DFS sighting!).
You remember last Friday, don’t you? You remember that slate of games?
I sure remember it myself. I had been looking forward to that slate of games all week.
You see, one of the things I love about MLB DFS is that it gives us an opportunity to play every day…but one of the things I love about NFL DFS is that you have an entire week to prepare. Having a full week to prepare enables me to really spend time considering all aspects of the players I particularly like. Having a full week to prepare enables me to narrow down my team to the sharpest possible point.
Because DraftKings was running some seriously super-sized tournaments on that first day after the All Star Break (including a 400-entry Gold Glove with $100,000 to first place), I was particularly excited for Friday’s slate of games. The All Star Break, then, provided the best of all worlds: it gave me a chance to take a break from the daily grind of MLB before jumping back into this glorious, “every day” sport, and – as pricing for Friday’s slate was released early in the week – it also gave me a full week to prepare without the pressure of having to set a team and make my final decisions right away. As someone who almost always uses just a single bullet in tournaments, this extra time can be particularly valuable, as it enables me to really figure out who my favorite plays are at every position.
By the time the rehearsal dinner ended and I finished “staying up later than everyone else in my family to work on my team” and Thursday night came to a close at last, I still did not have a firm grasp on what my team would look like on Friday, but I did have a pretty good handle on who my favorite players were at every position.
On Friday morning, I spent another hour or two looking at players and sorting through things in my mind, then in the late morning, I took a break to walk the beach with my wife. I went to lunch with my mom. I hung out with my brothers-in-law. Finally, at 2:30 in the afternoon, I settled in for the final push on my team. We weren’t leaving for the wedding until 4:15, which gave me plenty of time to figure out my final roster.
At 3:15, I built the following team:
Lance Lynn
Kyle Hendricks
Buster Posey
Albert Pujols
Jose Altuve
Alex Rodriguez
Carlos Correa
Matt Kemp
Justin Upton
Hunter Pence
The moment I finished building this team, this was my thought: “I don’t know if this team can win the Gold Glove tonight, but I feel pretty certain that this is the best team I’ve built all week.” My next thought – I promise you – was this: “Thank goodness I didn’t come up with this team until just now. If I’d come up with it earlier in the week, I definitely would have talked myself off of it.”
Now, let’s pause for a moment. Let’s take a quick detour to NFL. If you remember me talking about my preparation for NFL, you will probably recall me mentioning that I typically build anywhere from 100 to 200 teams throughout the week, as building a bunch of “practice teams” – and trying new things with each one – puts me in position to really get a feel for what I like and what I don’t like on a given slate. Because of the unique situation the All Star Break – and the early release of pricing – provided, I took that same approach in my preparation for Friday’s slate of games. By the time I built the team listed above, I had a week’s worth of other teams already sitting in my account. As such, you certainly could not call that above-listed team my “first instinct.” It was more like my “200th instinct.” This is not a “stick with your first instinct” article. The point, instead, is this: I built that team and thought, “Yeah, this is the best I’ve done so far.” I also, however, looked at the team and thought, “Yes, it’s really good. But I think I can improve it.” I figured I may as well try, and if I didn’t feel I had sufficiently improved the team, I could go back to the original version.
I stared at the team for a while, trying to figure out what I could try differently. Then, I realized that I really wanted to use Victor Martinez (you could say, if you were so inclined, that I was “married to the idea of using Victor Martinez), and I figured there was a strong chance I would regret using Pujols over him.
Okay. V-Mart cost only $200 more than Pujols, so all I had to do was find a place to save $200. I could go Jason Kipnis instead of Altuve. That would work. I made that change.
Now it was around 3:30. I still had 45 minutes until it was time to leave for the wedding. I looked at this team and knew there was a strong chance it was even better than the previous team…
…and that’s when I realized I was also married to the idea of using Jose Altuve.
It was now 3:40. I had 35 minutes until it was time to leave for the wedding.
I decided to hop in the car and drive to Dunkin’ Donuts and grab a coffee and clear my head.
I got home at 3:55. I got dressed.
Now it was 4:05. I started thumbing back through some of the teams I had taken screenshots of earlier in the week – teams I had really liked at the time. I found one I felt safe about. I swapped that team into place. That team had Victor Martinez and Jose Altuve – the two guys I was married to using. It also had Jose Fernandez, whom I had decided I was “too scared” to not use.
Now it was 4:10. I said to my wife, “Well, we’re not going to win a hundred grand tonight. There’s no way the team we are using is good enough to win, but it should be pretty safe for cashing.”
Let’s fast-forward a few hours (no one besides the bride and groom and maybe their parents care about the wedding ceremony anyway, right?). The reception had started. I had a plate full of food. And I glanced at my phone to see that Victor Martinez had hit a two-run dong in the first inning. Boom!
Shortly after that, I saw that Jose Fernandez had started his night on fire. Boom!
I finished my food. The dancing began. Throughout the night, I only had a chance to glance at my phone a few times, but each time I looked, I was squarely in the money – with things shaping up exactly as I had predicted to my wife: my team had no real shot at first place, but it was in good shape to cash.
At 11:30, we lined up to send the bride and groom away for the “grand exit,” and at midnight we made it home. I settled down in front of my computer to see how things were going, and to follow along with the last hour or so of that night’s games. The team I had settled on using was in the top 20; of course, it had no real shot at anything substantially higher (and, consequently, it had no real shot at a big payout, as the top-heavy structure of that day’s Gold Glove meant you really had to finish top four or five to have a truly solid payout), but nevertheless, I felt good. I’d built a good team, and I would be boosting my bankroll a bit – which is always better than losing bankroll.
Then, Hunter Pence hit a home run. I’d had him on those discarded teams, but I had not used him on my final team. That was the first time I wondered where those discarded teams would have been. So I checked.
Crap.
The Pujols/Altuve team would have been in the top five. The Martinez/Kipnis team would have been in first place…
A few minutes later, Mike Trout hit a bomb. I didn’t have Trout on my team or on the teams I had discarded, so I checked the standings again. Thank goodness! No cause for major regret – my “would have been in first place” team would have fallen out of first place with the Trout bomb. Sure, it still would have been doing better than the team I ended up using, but at least the difference in payout was unlikely to be truly regret-worthy.
I picked up a few more points in a few other places…and then, Justin Upton smashed a home run. I pumped my fist and gave a little, “Nice!” as I had Upton on the team I had used. But after about three seconds of sedated satisfaction, I realized that I’d also had Upton on those discarded teams. I calculated the scores for those teams again. I checked the standings…
The Pujols/Altuve team would have been in first place by seven points. The Martinez/Kipnis team would have been in first place by 17 points.
There was not much time remaining in the night, but during what time did remain, I moved into a state of reverse-sweating the slate – hoping that some player I did not own would put up a bunch of points at once…that somehow, the night would not end with those “discarded teams” having enough points to have been in first place.
Yup – you guessed it. Didn’t happen. When the last out of the night was recorded, my Pujols/Altuve team would have won the Gold Glove – and would have picked up $100,000 – by three points. My Martinez/Kipnis team would have won by 13 points.
This is a true story, and it is certainly most painful thing that has happened to me in DFS. Up until about ten minutes before my deadline for wrapping up my week of team-building and locking a roster in place, I had a team that would have won $100,000.
“Crazy story,” you may be saying, “but what was the point of sharing it with us?”
Good question.
And here’s a good answer:
I am sharing this story with you because there were two specific ways in which I impaired my ability to succeed on that slate. There were two particular ways in which I got “DFS married.”
Firstly, I got married to the idea of using Altuve and Martinez. When I built that “first final team” – the one with Pujols and Altuve – I knew that it was probably the best team I had built all week, but I also knew I wanted to use Martinez. Once I switched to Martinez and Kipnis, I knew I had probably improved on what had already been “the best team I had built all week.” And yet, I could not bring myself to stick with that team, because I was married to the idea of using Altuve. I knew each of these teams was probably better than anything else I had built all week…but because I was married to the idea of using both Martinez and Altuve, I ended up discarding those two “best teams” altogether. And sure, Martinez outscored Pujols by 16 points, and Altuve outscored Kipnis by six points, but that doesn’t really matter a whole lot when those discarded teams were better as a whole.
Secondly, I got married to the idea that I always use only one team. You see, this is something I mention fairly often – the fact that I almost always fire only a single bullet into tourneys. I mention it because so many people make a big deal out of multi-entry guys having a supposedly huge edge, and I like to illustrate that there are positives and drawbacks to each approach, and that you can be just as successful with single- or limited-entries as you can be with mass-entries. In my head, I look at a tournament such as Friday’s Gold Glove and think, “It wouldn’t feel right if I won that tournament with more than one entry in the field, as that would somewhat counter the point I try to illustrate to readers.” But now, in retrospect, I can say it wouldn’t have felt all that bad at all if I had, you know, won a hundred thousand dollars. But because I was married to the idea of always using only one team, I never even considered throwing in an extra entry or two to “risk” these teams that did not have Martinez and Altuve on them together.
Deep in the comments section of last week’s article, someone asked me if I have a group of players I am married to – guys I will use regardless of matchup. Thankfully, this is not a “marriage mistake” I am prone to making, as I probably weigh “matchup” more heavily than (or, at least, as heavily as) anyone else in MLB DFS. But each of us tends to have little DFS ideas or approaches or players we end up marrying.
Perhaps you are married to the idea of always using or always fading Coors Field, without ever pausing to consider how the pitcher on the mound is likely to fare at Coors.
Perhaps you are married to always using a particular pitcher, regardless of which team that pitcher is facing.
Perhaps you are married to a certain approach from which you never deviate.
Maybe, on a certain slate of games, you end up getting married to a certain player – sacrificing your team as a whole to make sure you fit in that particular player.
Maybe you sometimes find yourself getting married to something I haven’t mentioned – to something, perhaps, I have never even thought of.
The particulars are not the point. The point, instead, is this: In real life, marriage to the right person can be awesome! But in DFS, marriage almost always sucks.
You see, any time you find yourself getting married to a particular idea or approach or player or way of thinking, you constrict your flexibility. You prevent yourself from expanding your scope of possibilities. You decrease the chances that you will be able to uncover that day’s “best possible team.” Each time you get married to one way of thinking, it becomes impossible for you to remain flexible and chase new ideas and take the risks you need to take. If we want to tie in last week’s article: each time you get married to one particular strain of thought, your ability to be aggressive with your teams becomes more limited. Each time you get married to one particular idea, your range of available options tightens up immediately.
Don’t get DFS married!
I wish I had a more “inspirational” – or, heck, even a more “positive” – way to end this article, but…you know, I’m still trying to figure out how to forget about Friday and move forward and keep my process strong and my results positive and my mind intact when my bankroll is roughly $100,000 smaller than it really ought to be. But take those thoughts for what they’re worth. Who knows – if you can learn to avoid “getting DFS married,” those thoughts might someday end up being worth $100,000 to you.