The Most Important Day of Your MLB DFS Career
I went into the night assuming it would be a normal night.
It wasn’t.
I figured that out pretty quickly – figured it out, in fact, the moment I started paying attention to DraftKings’ $1 million tournament.
The night in question, of course, was Saturday, August 15, 2015 – the night on which DraftKings player Paulyshorts saw his life change forever with his $1 million victory (huge congrats to Paul, by the way!).
You see, here’s the thing – here’s the reason that night turned into such an interesting (and introspective – and, ultimately, educational) night: I should have been in that tournament.
That sentence was written the way it was written in order to provide some food for the haters (haters gotta eat, too – right?).
For the rest of you who care to know what I meant in making that statement, I meant this:
I took several shots at Qualifiers for the $1 million tourney this year. I took each shot with complete confidence in my approach, and with complete confidence in the likelihood that I would win one of the Qualifiers and earn myself a seat in this year’s $1 million tourney (or… at least, I thought I took each shot with complete confidence; more on that in a bit). And hey, why shouldn’t I be confident? After all – even without being a mass-entry guy (that is: even with usually limiting myself to a single bullet in each tournament or Qualifier I enter), I won two seats to DraftStreet’s $1 million tourney last year, one seat to DraftKings’ $1 million tourney last year (in only two tries), and I would have won a seat to FanDuel’s $1 million tourney last year if not for a two-outs-in-the-top-of-the-ninth-inning home run that knocked me back to second place. You can understand, then, why I went into this season fully expecting to win at least a single seat.
“I should have been in that tournament.”
I felt that way during NFL last year as well, when I actually made PROFIT in Qualifiers throughout the season, without ever winning a seat (if you’ve ever played Qualifiers, you know this is nearly impossible to do, as only the top 5% or so of the field gets paid – making it pretty tough to enter Qualifiers every week of the season, do well enough that you’re making profit… and still never land a first-place finish).
“I should have been in that tournament.”
Now that I’ve repeated that sentence a couple additional times, I’ll expound on what I mean by that (and on how/why this all applies to you, and to your own DFS career).
Considering I have just talked about how well I did in Qualifiers last MLB season and how almost-well I did in Qualifiers in NFL last fall, you probably imagine I had a bunch of close calls this season as well; especially with all of the “I should have been in that tournament” talk, you probably imagine I have at least a couple “no one really cares about them (but I’ll tell them anyway)” stories about how close I came to winning multiple Qualifiers.
But here’s the funny thing: I don’t. I have no stories about “how close I came to winning a Qualifier this summer,” because I never once came close.
I’m going to go a step further here and cross over some of the invisible boundaries most DFS writers have in place for themselves, and tell you this:
I have LOST money on the year this year in MLB DFS. If you’re up even just a single dollar on the season right now, you’re doing better than me.
Right now, the portions of this article that have been written (and that you have read) are sort of like drops of water that have been dropped into a funnel. All of this is leading to the same place – even if it’s sort of all over the place at the moment. Stick with me. We’ll pull this all together. First, though, I need to drop in one final drop:
My wife loves to travel. Like, absolutely LOVES it. If we’re home for more than a couple weeks at a time, she starts to feel like she’s wasting the days away (if that sounds like she’s a spoiled brat, a few notes worth mentioning: 1. My wife grew up in a family that had no extra money to spend, ever; 2. I grew up in a family that had no extra money to spend, ever; 3. any traveling we do is from money we have made ourselves; 4. traveling is one of the ways in which we make money, as my wife is a photographer and makes a lot more money from pictures she takes while traveling than from pictures she takes at home; hopefully that’s enough for people to not be taking shots at my wife in the comments section… even if some of you will still be taking shots in your mind). During the last two and a half months, I have traveled to New England twice (once for five days, once for ten days), to Denver once (for five days), to Austin once (for five days), to New Orleans once (for four days), and to Costa Rica once (for nine days). That means that in a span of 75 days, I have been away from home (38 days) more than I have been home (37 days).
But here’s the thing: Outside of a break for a few days while in Costa Rica two weeks ago, I have played MLB DFS every day during which I have been away from home. And during those days when I have been away, I would peg my cash rate at around 15%.
Can you take a wild guess as to how I have managed to lose money on the season? Yeah – throwing away a good 25 days’ worth of buy-ins is not a great way to beat both the rake and the field over the course of a full season!
As I was tracking the DraftKings $1 million tournament, I thought about this. I thought: “I should be in this tournament.” And then I thought, “Wow, there were so many days this season when I completely threw away the day due to lack of focus. There were so many days when I played simply because I wanted to play – days on which I had no business playing at all.”
But I can’t blame my lack of success in Qualifiers on that alone, can I? I mean… sure, I was away from home for a lot of days, but what about when I was home?
Of course, part of my lack of Qualifier success can be attributed to those losses while away from home, as those losing days tightened up my bankroll too much for me to justify dropping $1k into each Qualifier that came along (which led to me playing Qualifiers sparingly this season). And perhaps another part can be explained by variance; hey, if I only played in a handful of Qs, it would be foolish for me to EXPECT to win one, right?
Sure.
But honestly, that’s letting myself off the hook too easily. Because here’s the thing: Of the Qualifiers I played (and I’m guessing I played in anywhere from ten to 12), I was not even close to winning a single one. I had no sweats on Qualifier nights; I had no close calls; I had no nights where I jumped up early and hoped to hang on; I had no nights where I made a late surge that I hoped I would be lucky enough to ride to the top. Not once did I have more than a start-of-the-night shot at actually winning a Q.
I can look at my overall cash game and tournament numbers from days when I was actually at home and realize I would be enjoying a nice chunk of profit on the year if I had simply faded the slates when I was traveling (if I had faded the slates, that is, when I did not have time to dedicate to research/preparation)… but most of the Qualifiers I played were played when I was home. What is my excuse there?
Here’s where things all begin to come together, and there are two things I want to use all this to illustrate – two things that will hopefully help you in your own DFS career:
1) Focus.
2) Fear.
I’ll start with focus – and I’ll move back to the night of August 15.
While tracking my own DFS roster and the standings in DraftKings’ $1 million tournament that night, I was also – of course – watching baseball. At one point, I had the Rockies game up on my screen, and Nick Hundley banged a single into the outfield. The Rockies’ announcers pointed out that, with that hit, Hundley was now 13 for 28 against his old team on the season.
You guys. Thirteen for 28! That’s a .464 batting average.
Yes, I know – that’s a very small sample size (never mind that it’s still a big enough sample size that Hundley would have to go 0 for his next 14 against the Padres in order to fall below .300 against them on the season!). And I certainly don’t cite this one example as definitive proof that guys often do better with “extra motivation.” But I do point this out as a microcosmic example of what we often see: A guy gets traded to a new team and has a HUGE first game or two; a guy faces the team that traded him the year before and absolutely goes off; a guy plays against the team that let him go and seems to be on a mission to teach that team a lesson.
But here’s what’s strange about that, from an outside perspective: if athletes are able to “take it to the next level” in certain situations… why aren’t they taking it to that level in every situation?
Maybe that’s why guys who are known to “always play with a chip on their shoulder” (guys like Michael Jordan, or Tom Brady – guys who delude themselves into thinking they are still being overlooked or underrated) tend to play at such a high level. Maybe they trick themselves into treating every game the way these other guys treat some games. Maybe there are some guys who are able to treat every single game like the most important game of their life…and maybe the rest of athletes treat most games like “just another game.”
And here’s what I began to realize that night, while pondering all of this: I have been like the “rest of athletes” this MLB season. I’ve “given away days” – and I don’t just mean playing days while traveling, but also playing days at home on which I really just kind of threw a team together. Or playing days on which I finished my team, knew it could be improved, but – because I could not immediately see what I could/should be doing differently – left the team alone. Or just plain going through the motions in my research and team building – just plain failing to focus as fully as I could.
People often talk about how long the MLB season is for professional baseball players – how one of the biggest struggles for these guys is just the daily grind, and the difficulty inherent in getting truly pumped up for, focused on, and excited about 162 games – how it’s not easy to focus fully and play with a high level of intensity every single day.
What if there were an MLB team, however, that was full of players with massive amounts of mental and emotional stamina? What if there were a team full of players who had the ability to treat every single one of their 162 games like a playoff game?
What if? – well, we’ll probably never know.
But who really cares about that. Right? What actually matters is this: What about you? What if YOU had the ability to treat every single MLB slate like the most important slate you will ever play? What if you treated every MLB slate the same way an MLB hitter in Game 7 of the World Series treats every pitch or plate appearance?
What if you actually focused? And what if you faded the slates on which you knew you would not have the time or the mental energy to focus at that high level?
Better yet: what if you were able to do this – were able to attack each slate with a massive amount of focus – and were then able to also do this without any fear?
Which brings us to that second point: fear.
Fear is the main element on which I blame my massive lack of Qualifier success this year.
It all goes together, of course. It started with lack of focus, which tightened up my bankroll. This left me playing Qualifiers with the knowledge that I was playing with money that should, instead, have been allocated to bankroll rebuilding… which led to me being too scared to take risks in some of the spots where I could have taken risks on my rosters… which led to me building mediocre teams on those nights – teams that never really had any shot at taking down a Q.
Focus.
Fear.
Those two elements have combined together to turn what should have been a very profitable MLB season into a slightly-negative MLB season – with a mound of money thrown away on days played with lack of focus, and a second mound of money thrown away on fear-driven Qualifier entries.
The good news? There is still a month and a half remaining in this MLB season. There is still plenty of time for each of us to practice our new quest for all-out focus. There is still time for us to discover what will happen when we treat each day like the most important day of our MLB DFS career, and for us to do so with no fear.
Play with a chip on your shoulder. Focus. Be fearless.
Profit.
Let’s do this together, my friends. Let’s go out there and dominate the last six weeks of the MLB season – starting today: the most important day of your MLB DFS career.