The GPP Scene: Waiting for a Slump-Buster
Sunday, August 8th had made its way to the 2015 calendar. Oh great, I thought to myself. I had yet to play a single game in the FanDuel $10 Line Drive GPP all week. In fact, I hadn’t really played much action on FanDuel at all for the week, as I started to dig into football research and hadn’t had much time to play multiple sites lately. To top it off, baseball simply hasn’t been going exactly right for me since the All-Star break. The natural tendency in weeks like this has generally been for me to pick something strategic to write about.
Here was the problem: I couldn’t think of anything strategic to write about. I would have been happy to break down a live final leaderboard, but those don’t kick off for another week yet. People are starting to turn their attention to the upcoming PGA major, NFL, and college football. Talking detailed MLB strategy is likely to fall on deaf ears at this point of the season.
I had nothing to write about. What’s a writer to do in this situation? A few thoughts crossed my mind. Should I forego the article for a week? Surely, the powers that be here at Rotogrinders might frown on that a little bit. Should I write a fluffy piece to get the job done and call it a day? I suppose that’s an option. Do I just enter the usual tournaments for one day and write about that? I mulled that over for a few minutes and settled on ‘meh’ for that one.
I decided I would sleep on it. I’d see what Sunday night brought. As the first NFL preseason game played on my television set, I had a new idea. Maybe I could incorporate a little bit of football discussion into a baseball piece. The readers wouldn’t get too upset, would they? Hey, that’s happened a few times in the past. I could just ignore the anti-football comments that came out of it. Yeah, maybe that was it! My mind was made up.
Suddenly, a topic fell into my lap. I was greeted with a slump buster. No, it was not the Mark Grace kind of slump buster. This is a family website. It was actually an equally pleasant slump buster, however. Before I get into this, let me rewind a little bit. Some back story needs to be told here in order for this to make any sense.
The first part of the 2015 MLB season was kind to me. In fact, April was my strongest month of the year in both 2014 and 2015. That’s not surprising, as playing fields are always softer in the first few weeks whenever any sport starts up. (If you want SOME NFL discussion intertwined here, just look at the first slate of preseason games on DraftKings, where Adrian Peterson was 15-20% owned in most contests and didn’t play a single snap). Therefore, I wasn’t shocked to see that April was my best MLB month for two consecutive years. Things kept going well in May, and I was one strike away from $100,000 on DraftKings before Hector Rondon decided to groove a two-strike pitch to Paul Goldschmidt. Still, I won $30,000 that night and things were going great.
From that point forward, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. Except for one big night in mid-June, things weren’t coming up roses. I am strictly a tournament player for baseball, so I don’t use cash games to “steady out” my wins and losses very often. Swings happen — both good and bad — and an extended bad one was rolling ahead full steam. I started to get worn out. I was forced to re-deposit some of the profits that I had withdrawn after the good run in April and May. I was looking ahead at additional re-deposits for the upcoming football season. The thought of throwing in the towel on the MLB season while I was still ahead had started to cross my mind. After all, that would allow me a good month to focus on researching for college football and NFL.
That’s where the slump buster comes into play. With tournament play, it only takes one big hit to erase days, weeks, or even a month-plus of futile efforts, depending on the size of the tournament you are in. Now, I certainly didn’t expect this on Sunday. Warren and I had a nice conversation on the Grinders Live show before Sunday’s games, as we discussed the merits of using players that play on the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game of the week. Since these lineups are never out in time for roster lock, the players in this game constantly go under-owned. It’s a solid strategy to play guys from the late Sunday game, especially on sites that have late swap, if the game is projected to be a high-scoring one. After we had that discussion, I pivoted off some of the lineups I already had created for the day. My Astros and Marlins contrarian stacks became Dodgers and Pirates Sunday Night stacks. It had merit. The game had a nice total of eight, and both Alex Wood and Charlie Morton can get knocked around at times.
I sat around, piddling the afternoon away and hoping that my pitchers got off to a good start. They did, with Corey Kluber and Felix Hernandez combining for 63 points on DraftKings. Still, the leader of the Perfect Game GPP that I put these stacks in was at around 185 points. Surely, I couldn’t count on my Sunday Night stacks to make up the 122 points I needed to win the tournament, but maybe I could at least get a minimum cash or two and profit for the day.
The Sunday Night game was not on my television screen. I followed the game somewhat loosely on my laptop, but I was mainly excited to be following football for the first time in six months. The upcoming season would provide the “new beginning” that we all love when a new sport starts up for the year. The Dodgers and Pirates droned on with a game that was 5 to 1 in the fifth inning. Ho hum. Then the Pirates woke up. They got two in the fifth. They got nine in the seventh. A Francisco Cervelli home run in the eighth suddenly put me into first place. Just like that, a minimum cash was transformed into $20,000.
When I first started playing DFS, and then after I got involved in writing for RotoGrinders, I wasn’t very humble. I would often discuss my big wins on Twitter and then defend myself for doing so. I mean, since I was writing for a big site now, I had to PROVE to everyone that I was good! Look, I won this tournament! Here’s a link! See, I won! It didn’t take long for me to realize that wasn’t the right approach. You don’t see the other players doing this (well, most of them anyway). There’s two sides to every coin. If you happened to catch my presentation for DFS Bootcamp, I was pretty honest with the numbers. I’ve made $210,000 in a month before. I’ve lost $160,000 in a month before. The winning side is great. The losing side is not. Variance is a testy animal when it comes to MLB DFS tournaments, and it takes a lot of patience to conquer it. I wasn’t posting on Twitter when I was losing, though, was I?
Here’s the point: When you get that big hit that brings you out of a big slump, it’s a great feeling. It rejuvenates you and ignites the passion that we all have for DFS. That’s the purpose of this article. If you are struggling, take this as a sign to stay patient. More importantly, continue to play within your means. Don’t over-extend to chase that big score. Just hang in there, keep plugging, and you too could be a beneficiary of an unexpected slump-buster at some point. We always talk about the bad beats, and those are never erased from our memory, but don’t forget about those unexpected wins. Even as a Cardinals fan, the Pirates are okay in my book… for one day anyhow.
Good luck, and as always, thanks for checking out the article!