Stuff Happened - Week 3 Edition
Q: What’s the best format of daily fantasy football for me to play? Is it head-to-head? 50/50? Multipliers? Flat pay-out tournaments? Top-heavy tournaments?
A: It depends.
From there, we could go into the differences in what you’re trying to achieve. Are you just happy seeing a black number, or are you trying to bring home that one payday big enough to justify the time investment to your wife?
But, there’s a more accurate way. Just use hindsight. If your lineup was in the 45th percentile in score, you were probably best in head-to-heads, to minimize your losses. Just over 50th percentile? 50/50 it is. Did you have a top 30% lineup? Triple Ups and deep pay tournaments. Did you have one of those lineups where you’re flashing your phone to strangers on the street? All tourneys! Hindsight really makes this easy.
I bring this up in order to make my way to a topic in the COMMENTS section of my Fantasy Grout article this past week, and to slip in a humble brag. You can see for yourself, but I’ll recap it here. xpac21 called Al_Smizzle’s Milly Maker win “all luck” before fourseasons chimed in with the oh-so-common sentiment that “anyone can win if they have 150 lineups at their disposal.” JMToWin replied with the very logical suggestion that he put in 150 lineups in a tournament where he can afford it ($0.25 Arcade, $37.50 for max entry) and experience the results for himself.
JMToWin is of course right, and I’m guessing the reason he understands this is that he’s experienced it first-hand (discounting the possibility that he’s just smart). The failure goes one of two ways. You either pack in a tight core of players and the core misses, or you try to cover everyone, catch pieces of the best players, but come nowhere close to making a “9 for 9” lineup. Either way, money in doesn’t equal money out.
My personal experience comes from my years working with killab2482. In the sporadic times we decided to take big multi-entry shots, we made every lineup “by hand”. That’s one of the reasons why we needed a team, in hindsight. We won a handful of seats that way, and candidly, lost a bunch of money too. It’s so easy to lose mass multi-entering. In fact, on FanDuel, in Week 17 of 2013, it was our core tournament lineup that swept every GPP on the site. We didn’t multi-enter a single tournament that week.
Circling back to the question about the best game format, using hindsight as my guide, I think my best format last week would have been mass multi-entry. I had a great week on DraftKings, but I crushed on FanDuel. Playing mostly tournaments, with a few Double Ups as a hedge, my site-wide ROI for DraftKings currently sits at 100.4% and at 893.6% for FanDuel. Moreover, I hit a good chunk of the Optimal Lineup in my core, and many of my ancillary pieces were near optimal as well. I’m “seeing it well right now,” and my ROI this season is 164%.
That wasn’t humble at all. Acknowledging there’s no way I can keep it up, does that help?
Anyway, I’m going to do it. I’m giving MME a shot. I don’t play high volume or high stakes typically, and I don’t much have the desire to do so. Still, I’m going to figure out how to use RotoGrinders’ lineup generator, I’m going to pack a tight core of players into 150 lineups, and I’m going to fire them at the Quarter Arcade. Then, I’m going to recap the results next week. And, I’m probably going to lose.
Money, meet Mouth.
Stuff Happened, Week 3
Let’s start with the best, and go from there. Here is the Optimal Lineup, for the Sunday Only slate on DraftKings.
You can infer from the salary used, only $46,400, that it was also the highest scoring, salary ignored. The reason it was able to come together so easily was the top quarterback and tight end for the week were a combined $500 over the minimum (T. Siemian and Z. Miller).
Meanwhile, at running back and wide receiver, it was non-Grout players that were a tier or two below the top, that filled-out the lineup, Pryor, excepted. McCoy and Murray were running backs #8 & #9 by salary, when you stripped out injuries. Hilton, Jones Jr., and Sanders were wide receivers #16, #20, & #21, price-wise, among healthy pass catchers on the Sunday Only slate. The ghost of Kordell Stewart’s past, Terrelle Pryor Sr., was just $3,400, as noted by the Grout’s Yada, Yada section, last week. More on that in a bit.
Behind the optimal backs, though were a bunch of Grout guys and David Johnson. On the other hand, of the next five receivers by score, four were between $7,400 and $6,300, and the other was Antonio Brown. You can be sitting on the nuts, and fading Antonio Brown is still terrifying.
Making a Millionaire
This week, Papagates continued the Gates – Millionaire trend. Last week, it was Al Zeidenfeld winning in spite of Gates being in his lineup. This week, Papagates won with a Gates-related screen name, in a week where Gates was injured. Next week, smart money is on St. Peter.
Papagates shared five players with the Optimal Lineup (L. McCoy, M. Jones Jr., Terrelle Pryor Sr., T.Y. Hilton, and Zach Miller), and his score was just over 82% of the max. Of the 53 points he was shy of perfect, an unbelievable 32 of them came from his defense. In his defense, though, the Chiefs were only 1% owned, a likely by-product of the Dolphins 33.1% ownership.
Of the remaining 21 points he was short of perfection, 13 were the difference between his Vereen and Optimal’s Murray, 7 were the shortfall between his Brown and Optimal’s Sanders, and he lost about a point with Stafford instead of Siemian.
Maybe the most pertinent deficit though, is the fact that he won $1,000,000, while Optimal didn’t exist and therefore won nothing.
Grout for a Shout
First off, we got Week 2 cleaned up. It was still dethdealers & Texxdogg who caused the volume to go up, with their selection of Dennis Pitta. A couple other selections were mixed up, so they got corrected. Also, Jeremy Langford’s touchdown and not much else was accounted for, and the final results were updated. Onward!
Not only was Terrelle Pryor Sr. the last man standing in Cleveland, he was a handy man too. He passed. He ran. He received. That is, he crushed. (He also seems to have made TheSeige quite happy.) At a salary of $3,400, he went for 34.9. Over 10x PT/$K! That SwaguarsFan was the only one to sniff him out is great. It allows me to highlight an excellent RotoGrinders handle. In the name of Swag, let’s have one Swaguars Fan congratulate another.
Now, let’s have a look at the season’s standings through three weeks.
I guess Terrelle Pryor Sr. can’t do it all. He was only able to leap SwaguarsFan up to 2nd place, as our Week 2 Shout recipient, dethdealers followed up 7.929 from Dennis Pitta with 7.486 from Darren Sproles, to jump into the lead. With three weeks completed and a two-thirds threshold holding bar, those with two picks in are eligible. Next week, that number jumps to three, so come on back now, ya hear?!
Lastly, JMToWin and I took the JMToLose Challenge title too literally this week, and had a good ol’ fashion Lose Off. I picked Trey Burton, who allegedly was in the game against Pittsburgh, though my eyes told a different story. Still, 2-for-19 on a tight end minimum $2,500 was good enough to lose less, as JM rolled the dice with a banged up Tyler Lockett and crapped out. An injury and a blow-out are apparently a costly combination. Unfortunately, this week still counts. The standings.
GiantBallofOil – 2, JMToWin – 1
See you in the Week 4 Grout!