Table Selection and Hourly Rates
Table Selection and Hourly Rates in Daily Fantasy Sports
If you wanted to figure out where you stand compared to other daily fantasy sports grinders, where would you start? Luckily, this concept has been beaten to death before in the poker industry, and I think we can look there for some clues to developing a measuring stick for daily fantasy sports skill. There are different schools of thought between what matters is the stakes that you play at vs. what matters is your hourly win rate. I am solidly in the camp that hourly win rate is how the success of poker players should be judged, and the same should be true for daily fantasy sports grinders.
If you look at any other industry or profession, from CEOs to Professional Athletes to Movie Stars, what they are being paid is in general, proportional to their value. Higher paid athletes and movie stars are more talented in their respective industries, in general than then their lower paid peers. That’s why I do not buy the argument that a typical TV-“Pro” poker player who is a lifetime loser at the tables is better than the $.50/$1.00 Holdem Grinder who earns $25/Hour long-term. The so-called pro, may have won a tournament to gain recognition, and then used that to get endorsements and backers to play on the world tour with the best of the best. However, if he can’t hold his own on tour (many “pros” can’t) and loses money at the tables, he is simply not better than the $.50/$1.00 holdem grinder. “But, wait a second!” “The Pro is up against much tougher competition” you say. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”
The fact is that he is choosing to select tables with tougher competition, and table selection is part of the skill in playing poker, like it or not. Your win rate in poker is based on your level of in game skill, and your opponent lack of in game skill. If you choose to play players that are better than you, then your poor table selection skill will outweigh your good in game skill, and your overall skill level will be poor. The measuring stick for poker should be hourly win rate, and $25/hr beats a long-term loser everyday. Hourly rate for a poker player is the amount profited divided by the number of hours spent at the tables.
So let’s take this over into the daily fantasy sports world, and think about table selection skill in the context of overall fantasy sports skill. I will use the Heads-Up example as it is the simplest. Your chances of winning a Heads-Up fantasy league depend equally on two things. It is based on your fantasy skill and your opponent’s lack of fantasy skill. If you are highly skilled at selecting a daily fantasy sports team, but choose to match your self up with people of higher skill levels, you will be a long-term loser. If your fantasy skills are below average, but you are able to consistently match yourself up with worse fantasy players, you will be a long-term winner. Table selection is just as important as your fantasy skills to your hourly win rate. Without solid table selection skills you are leaving money on the table.
How to calculate your hourly rate for daily fantasy sports?
This is a little more complicated than in poker where you just need to keep track of your time spent at the tables and what you have won. For daily fantasy sports there really is not any time spent at the tables. The time is spent researching the match-ups, projecting player scores, and building optimal fantasy teams against the structure you are choosing to play. There is also some additional time doing table selection and entering leagues. The bulk of the time is spent researching and building a team, so the more leagues you can leverage this effort against, the better for your win rate (assuming you are a winner). But, you do not want to throw table selection out the window to get more match-ups, as additional match-ups against more skilled opponents will lower your win rate. So let’s say that you spent two hours researching your team, and one hour entering it into 25 leagues and ended up profiting $100 as a result. Your hourly rate would be $100 divided by 3 Hours or $33/Hour for the day. It does not matter if you are entering dozens of low stakes leagues, or a few high stakes leagues. The only thing that matters is how much time was spent, and how much profit was earned.
So what is the take away here? It really does not matter who you can beat, or what stakes you play at. What matters is how much that you earn, and how much effort that you put into it. Someone who earns more money for the same level of effort is a better daily fantasy player, even if they can’t beat the player who earns less. They are smart enough to avoid the players they can’t beat, and that is 50% of the skill in daily fantasy sports. This weekend, I went 58-3 at fantasy football at FD. I was matched up against about 50 different opponents, and they were all of a lower fantasy skill level than me. Sure I had a pretty good team this week, and that is part of it, but there is no way I would have gone 58-3, had I mixed in more skilled opponents. I hand pick all of my opponents, and never allow my opponents to hand pick me. If you want to improve your hourly win rate, hand pick match-ups against the fish, and never jump in the water with the sharks. This site is the best resource available for fantasy table selection, so take advantage and improve your hourly win rate.
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About the Writer: After much research and preparation, Blinders turned his vision and passion for fantasy sports into the first Daily Fantasy sports site with Salary Cap based games in June of 2007: FantasySportsLive. He is a longtime online poker player and blogger, and the only daily fantasy grinder who was willing to take on Buffalo66 in his multi-sport fantasy challenge. Last NFL Season Blinders went 71-10 on FanDuel alone.