The DFS Angry Mob's Toolbox
If you play daily fantasy sports, you’re almost certainly aware of ChipotleAddict and papagates. You know them because they are in nearly every tournament you are in, likely mass entered. The fact that they tend to sift to the top of the leaderboards might help your recognition of them. They’re also brothers. Oh, and they’ve been in the cross-hairs of DFS conspiracy theorists since papagates took down a share of the top prize of the Fantasy Football Millionaire in Week 3 of the last NFL season.
I thought we’d take a look at the tools (beyond pitchforks of course) that the angry DFS mobs use in rioting against these two top five grinders.
TOOL 1: “Look how much they win!”
This is the most rudimentary of the tools in the toolkit. A hammer, if you will. It’s perfectly exemplified by this TommyG tweet:
This tool basically says that they are brothers, and they both win. That can’t be fair. It’s the DFS equivalent of an excessive blocking penalty. Of course, it isn’t against the rules to be successful or for your family member to be successful either.
Furthermore, spanning from 4/11 through 4/24, I pulled a CSV for every day where they both max multi-entered a tournament. It isn’t like these brothers have the same lineups. In fact, there are places where their ownership varies wildly from one another. Here, you’ll see 61 instances over those 13 slates, where their ownership varied by more than 30%. Many people, in filling out 150 lineups, wouldn’t even have a 30% position in any one player. They vary by that margin!
TOOL 2: “They get around entry limits by creating 300 lineups and by each entering 150 of them.”
This is a basic tool, and a more sophisticated version exists (see below). That makes this the flat-head screwdriver of the toolkit. It presupposes that these two brothers are creating one batch of lineups using lineup builder software, and each entering half of the entries. This collusion accusation was disproven by David Stetler, owner of Fantasy Cruncher, in this post on the RotoGrinders forum last fall. He confirmed to me this week that nothing has changed in the way they build lineups on his site:
Separate log-ins. Separate IPs. Most importantly, separate projection inputs. They are not creating a single batch and splitting it up.
TOOL 3: “They admitted to working as a team when they did a DKTV segment, using collective pronouns.”
This tool is antiquated, as it references a 2015 live sweat show. I guess its tool equivalent is a hand drill, as both the video and tool don’t really apply anymore.
It says that both brothers used terms such as “we” and “us” to describe ChipotleAddicts’ sweat (which they did), and it proved that they were working as a team. Now, I could be persuaded to believe that early on, they worked more closely together, before their bankrolls hit the “two comma” mark and before the entire DFS community came crashing down on their heads. That video is as outdated as when Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant described their NBA Finals matchup using “we” in 2012.
Also, if using the term “we” is proof you’re working jointly, it means that Bill Simmons is officially working with the Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, Kings, US Olympic team, and his daughter’s soccer team.
TOOL 4: “They work together to circumvent entry limits, by creating complementary sets of 150 lineups.”
This is the Phillips head screwdriver. It’s more nuanced than the flat-head version. It assumes that rather than creating one batch of lineups and splitting it up, they are creating two sets of lineups which work in unison. There are several parts to this tool.
Part 1 – No Overlap
Here’s John Proctor exemplifying this idea:
The main problem with this part of the tool is that they do overlap. Regularly. Almost every tournament:
*- If overlap is only defined phonetically, this is technically an overlap as well.
Of course, if two guys were working together, it would do them no good to both enter the same lineup. Despite some vast ownership gaps, these two guys do overlap, a tell-tale sign of two people creating lineups independently.
Part 2 – A Pattern
I’ll leave this to you to decipher the sophisticated coordination taking place.
Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there’s a way these lineups are textbook examples of collusion, that I am not seeing. If so, let me know, and we can dig further. Until then, when someone uses this “tool,” accusing ChipotleAddict and papagates of circumventing entry limits via complementary lineup sets, I can only reply this way:
TOOL 5: “It’s a conspiracy, and all the game and information provider sites are in on it!”
Tool: Dynamite.
But, don’t forget the illuminati, the aliens, and 2pac. You can’t rule them out either.