JMToWin's MLB Edge Preview: Tuesday, April 21st
Each Tuesday & Friday this MLB Season, the legendary JMtoWin (2014 DK WBC Atlantis Finalist, 2014 DSBC Finalist x2) will bring you premium DFS MLB analysis like no one else in the industry can. A top-tier Grinder, and a professional writer, FD & DK subscribers can expect only the best quality throughout MLB season. Check out a sample of JMtoWin’s work from this NFL season here.
Tuesday, April 21st
Let’s plug some leaks!
Wait. That sounds weird. Almost like something sexual.
That reminds me of a story. Skip this next paragraph if you’re in a hurry, but I’ll keep it short:
In Atlantis last year, for the DraftKings Fantasy Baseball Championship (a refresher: it was a field of 50, with $1 million to first place and gradually-declining payouts from there), we were getting pretty close to the end of the night, and I was sitting somewhere around 4th place, with Cal Spears (one of the co-founders of this fine site you spend so much time on) sitting a few spots behind me at around 7th place. The two of us were pretty much the only two guys in the tournament who had Mookie Betts on our rosters, and we were standing in front of one of the TVs together as Mookie walked up to the plate. If he popped a home run (a “dong,” in DFS terms) in that at-bat, I would move up to first place, and Cal would move up to second. As Mookie stepped into the batter’s box, both Cal and I started saying, “All we need is a Mookie dong. Come on, just give us a Mookie dong.” Cal then said something to the effect of: “I can’t imagine going home and telling people I won a quarter of a million dollars when I got a ‘Mookie dong’ in the Bahamas. That sounds like something really dirty.”
(I’m not sure how to transition from that story back to the rest of this article. Did you chuckle when you read the story? I don’t know – it was funny at the time.)
Okay, back to today. Leaks. Let’s plug them.
In poker terms, of course, a “leak” is an area of your game that causes you to lose money (or, if you want to go back to old-school poker players – “Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim riding through Texas together” days – a “leak” could be anything that caused your bankroll to dwindle: blackjack, girls, whiskey – all that fun stuff that poker winnings were not supposed to go toward when that was your livelihood). For the purpose of today’s article, we are going to apply this same terminology to DFS. And we are going to aim to plug our leaks. (See? Not sexual at all!)
Of course, I do not know what your leaks are. You may not even know (yet) what your leaks are. But I am going to tell you a little story about my overall DFS experience. Unlike the story above, this is not one you are supposed to skip if you’re in a hurry. This story has to do, directly, with what we are talking about today. (Some of this may sound a lot like what I talked about a week or so ago, regarding bankroll management, but don’t stop early. Read the whole thing. It’s going somewhere – trust me.)
Last year was my first year of DFS – and it was very successful. The crazy thing, however, was that I really did a poor job of bankroll management. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why it was so successful. Maybe I would never have reached the profit level I reached if I had been more strict with my bankroll, because a couple times before my bankroll was really strong enough to sustain it, I took a shot at the Gold Glove on DraftKings (the $1060 tournament). Both times I took a shot at it, I cashed (I think I min-cashed once, and I finished first the other time; that first-place finish was a double-entry, so I actually took first and second place and pumped up my bankroll a massive amount in that one night alone).
That’s great, right? Sure. But here was the main problem: after those first few tastes of big GPP success (starting with a few big cashes on DraftStreet, and carrying over to my DraftKings Qualifier win and those Gold Glove victories), cash games seemed kind of drab. Why would I want to try to double up a few hundred dollars when I could try to win $10,000 or $12,000 or $20,000 at once? And so, for the last four or five months of MLB (seriously), I played no cash games. At all.
NFL started after that. As confident as I am in my MLB DFS skills, I may be even more confident in NFL – and the first seven weeks of the season bore this out. Through those first seven weeks, I cashed in the top 10% of the DraftKings $1060 tournament with 60%(!) of my entries (including Week 5, I believe it was, when I double-entered two teams, and took down 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place in the field of 100). There were only two weeks in those first seven weeks when I failed to cash in GPPs (if you read my articles back then, you know that I’m not a mass-multi-entry guy in NFL; I’m a “build one or two optimal teams” guy; so there were two weeks in those seven where my “one or two optimal teams” just barely failed to cash). I considered those weeks to be huge disappointments at the time. “Are you serious?” I found myself saying. “How the heck did I fail to cash?”
Still, I did not play 50/50s or head-to-heads or double-ups.
And then, the second half of NFL hit. And for pretty much the rest of the season, I finished in the top 25% of GPPs – where the top 20% cashes.
And still, I did not start playing cash games. I probably had two weeks in the entire NFL season when I would have failed to finish in the top half of 50/50s, but I didn’t play cash games at all.
NFL ended. NBA began. I had never played NBA before. I had not even paid attention to the NBA since Michael Jordan was with the Bulls. But I started studying; I started learning. I started small with my buy-ins, and I had a good first week. One week. So what did I do? I jumped up my buy-ins to “MLB and NFL” levels, with the intention of (grimace) “winning back” what I had lost down the stretch in NFL. Yeah. How do you think that went?
Mercifully, I did switch to cash games during NBA – figuring that the predictability of NBA made cash games the best route. That might have been the case, too, if I had taken the time to truly learn the sport BEFORE I started buying in at an “I know this sport really well” level! But, no – of course – I lost. And lost. And lost. And as my teams got more and more competitive – as I finally began to grasp NBA – my already-dwindled bankroll forced me to keep going lower in daily buy-ins. And then…yeah. Of course. After a couple days of cash game wins, I would jump into a high-dollar GPP to try to boost my bankroll all at once. And I would lose. And I would be forced to lower my NBA cash game buy-in again. By the time I finally figured out NBA and started hitting a high cash rate in double-ups, my daily buy-ins were far lower than they had been when I was losing, and there was not enough time to truly get back much of what I had thrown away while learning.
And then, at last (great glorious heavens and thank my lucky stars!), MLB was here. I was committed to playing mostly cash, with some days of low-buy-in, smart-strategy GPP play mixed in. I was done trying to get all my money back at once, because that was what kept tripping me up. I had the rest of the year to gain back what I had thrown away, right? What was the big hurry? And for the first few days, I did great in this area. In fact, through the first few days of the season alone, I reached the profit goal I had set for the entire month of April! Awesome.
So what did I do? You guessed it: I jumped into the Gold Glove. And lost. And tried again. And lost. And tried again. And min-cashed. And tried again. And lost. And tried again. And lost.
Now, here’s the thing: that’s not something that should be unexpected. That tournament is full of the top DFS guys, and playing that tourney basically guarantees some losses to go with the eventual big wins. It’s not exactly +EV, with how good the competition is (maybe very slightly +EV for me, but certainly no more than that), but it’s a nice thrill, I guess. I don’t know. That must be why I play it. But the time to play it is when, you know, you’re actually working with a bankroll that enables you to lose in that tournament seven or eight times before hitting a big score in it! Until then, you need to be like Knish in Rounders: “I’m not playing for the thrill of f****** victory here. I owe rent, alimony, child support. I play for money. My kids eat.” So far in MLB, I’ve cashed in double-ups at an elite 70% rate…and yet, I’m slightly below-even on the season!
I’ve been chasing the thrill of f****** victory. I’ve been trying to win back all at once what my poor bankroll management lost me in the first place. I’ve been unwilling to be a true grinder: tightening up bankroll management, and being willing to grind it out a day at a time, a bit at a time.
Why do I tell you all this? Because, I have identified my leak: obviously, I need to go cash game heavy. I’m good at cash games. Very good. There is no reason to not rely on this for steady, gradual bankroll growth. But also, I need to scale my GPP play to reflect my bankroll situation. No longer can I “play at higher levels on days when I feel like it” (even if this is how my bankroll grew so quickly last year to begin with; after all, that’s also how my bankroll fell apart!). Instead, it needs to be, “Jordan, you’re trying to grind out money for the rest of 2015 to get back to where you were when NFL ended and NBA began. So stop chasing big scores, let your bankroll grow, and let the size of your bankroll dictate the size of the GPPs you are playing.” By doing that, it will surely be a couple months before I sniff the Gold Glove again. And I need to be okay with that.
And now, you are my accountability partners. All of you. If any of you see my name in the Gold Glove on DraftKings, call me out. I’m not supposed to be there. That, currently, is my leak.
“Okay, great,” you may be saying, “but what? Why did I just read this whole intro? This whole thing is about you?”
You read it for two reasons:
1) By writing it all out, I made it real to me. And by posting it for all of you to read, I made it even more real. I turned an abstract understanding of my primary leak – and of what I need to do to plug that leak – into a concrete assertion.
2) I want to encourage you to do the same. Seriously. Take some time. Assess your profitability and your shortcomings. Figure out where your leaks are (yes, even if you are a profitable player, you probably have leaks!). Figure out what you can do to stop them. And then, don’t just go over that in your head. Write it down! Make it real. Send it to a DFS player you know. Don’t know any DFS players? Send it to me! For real. Private message me on RotoGrinders. I’ll read what you send. I’ll drop you a quick response as soon as I get a chance. I’ll even try to keep an eye out to make sure you’re not breaking your commitment to plug your leaks! It will help. Seriously.
Let’s do it. Let’s plug our leaks.
And now, let’s move onto today’s slate, and to the awesome insights I have for you today (a few more great strategy thoughts ahead, along with some great thoughts on today’s slate!) – insights that will keep pumping up your bankroll so that, eventually, you can “play for the thrill of f****** victory” sometimes if you feel like it. Even if that’s a leak.
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Each Tuesday & Friday this MLB Season, the legendary JMtoWin (2014 DK WBC Atlantis Finalist, 2014 DSBC Finalist x2) will bring you premium DFS MLB analysis like no one else in the industry can.
