Know the Sport
If you want to make the most of your daily DFS investment, you need to make an effort to know the sport you are playing as well as you can possibly know it. This is true for all DFS approaches, but it is especially true for a single-entry or limited-entry approach. I firmly and enthusiastically believe that when you know each sport as well as you can possibly know it, and you use this knowledge as part of a single-entry approach, you will generate greater per-entry profit over time than you would be able to generate through any other approach.
To put that another way:
On a profit-per-dollars-risked basis, the single-entry approach gives you a higher and more consistent return than any other approach! – and “knowing the sport as well as you can possibly know it” is a huge component in single-entry success.
The question, then, is simple: “How do I get to know each sport as well as I can possibly know it?”
The first thing you need, to be absolutely honest, is the desire to know the sport you are playing as well as you can know it. If you are lazy about knowing the sport – if you “don’t feel like reading articles,” or “don’t feel like keeping up with the sport,” or “don’t really want to put in the consistent work” – you will have a difficult time ever becoming a consistently profitable player. After all: _there are consistently profitable players in DFS_…and in order for these consistently profitable players to exist, there has to be a larger number of players who will be consistently unprofitable over the long run. Because of this reality of the DFS economy, there will always be a handful of DFSers who are willing to outwork others in their effort to “know the sport.” This is an important realization to grab hold of. Unless you are willing to join those who are working to “know the sport as well as they can,” it will be nearly impossible for you to join those same DFSers in the consistent profit they are making.
Once you recognize this and make a commitment to work toward “knowing the sport as well as you can possibly know it,” the next thing you will need is an understanding of what goes into “knowing the sport as well as you can possibly know it.”
Hey – you’re in luck! We’re about to look at exactly that…
5 Ways To Work Toward “Knowing The Sport As Well As You Can Know It”
Watch Games!
Regardless of the DFS sport you are playing, you should be watching games when you can. Obviously, unless you are a professional DFS player, you will not be able to watch as many games as you would like (and honestly, even if you were a professional DFS player, you would not be able to watch as many games as you would like!), but you should make an effort to watch games when you can.
An important note here: “Watching games” does not mean “watching just to sweat your own players”!
When it comes down to it, there is not a lot that can be gained from sweating your DFS contests. When you sit around staring at your phone or staring at the desktop site, waiting for scores to update – or when you tune into a game just to see your hitter’s at bat, or to see your running back’s offensive possession, or to see your golfer’s drive, etc. – you pick up very little valuable information. Typically, that time can be spent in a far more productive manner!
Honestly, watching a sport solely to sweat your own players may be even more counterproductive than not watching that sport at all. When you tune into a game just to see your own player, your perception of that player’s performance will often be skewed by that player’s fantasy production. Biases can be created toward a player – both positively and negatively – depending on what they did during the small sample size of “you watching them on the night you rostered them.” Such skewed information-gathering can often end up being more harmful than helpful! If you find you have a hard time separating your perception of a player from the performance that player had when you “watched them because you had rostered them,” I would encourage you “watch the sport in question” by watching players other than the guys you have on your roster! Tune into a game on which you have no players rostered. Seriously – you’ll tend to learn a lot more this way than you’ll learn from live-sweating the guys on your roster.
RotoWorld
Surely, you know already that RotoWorld is an indispensable resource for up-to-date player news, with RotoWorld regularly updating important information on each fantasy-relevant player. What most DFSers do not actually make the effort to do, however, is read every RotoWorld blurb.
In one of my NFL RotoAcademy courses, I hammered home the importance of reading every single blurb posted for NFL – talking about how reading blurbs about offensive linemen and linebackers and safeties and so on can provide a DFSer with a big edge on the field over time, as the DFSer reading about all players (rather than just reading about the obviously fantasy-relevant players) will gain a much greater understanding of the league as a whole.
What’s a bit more difficult is reading every single blurb in a truly daily sport like basketball or baseball. Nevertheless, I encourage you to read as many RotoWorld blurbs as you can each day in whatever sport you are playing. The more you know about all players across the league, the more you will know about the league as a whole, and the more you will come to know about the sport.
Study Advanced Stats
“What advanced stats should I study?”
As much as I wish I could answer that question here, the truth is, that’s a question that can only be answered in a sport-by-sport manner…and can only be appropriately answered by dedicating an entire course (or more!) to each type of point-scorer in each sport (as in: a course on quarterbacks in NFL, as well as a separate course on running backs and yet another course on pass catchers; or, in baseball, a course on pitchers and a course on hitters…which is precisely why I have written an NFL course on quarterbacks, another one on running backs, and another one on pass catchers, and is why I have written an MLB course on pitchers and a separate one on hitters).
While it wouldn’t be fair to you if I tried to use this space to skim through the advanced stats you should be paying attention to in each course (as doing so would leave you severely lacking in the sort of in-depth knowledge you really ought to be acquiring in this area), suffice it to say: advanced stats are extremely important to study and understand. The more information you gather on predictive, advanced stats, the more capable you will be of applying this knowledge toward accurate predictions of your own.
I’ll also tell you this: I am very proud of my RotoAcademy courses on quarterbacks / running backs / pass catchers / pitchers / hitters, but those courses are by no means the only place you can go to gather knowledge and information in this area. If you’re sick of my writing, or if you need to dedicate your money toward DFS play instead of dedicating it to DFS study for the time being, dig around other places; there are plenty of great resources out there that can help you determine and understand the advanced stats you should be focused on learning.
Read Beat Writers
To be perfectly honest, this is the area in which I fail most often. I am working on it, as I feel the ceiling one can reach is raised when all five of these items are undertaken together.
Beat writers are, of course, the writers who are assigned to covering a particular team throughout the entire season. These writers hang around the team nearly every day – in the locker room, on the road, around practice, etc. Beat writers have lots of great insight to offer. Oftentimes, the smaller tidbits a beat writer will drop in a writeup are too trivial to be mentioned anywhere else, but when you read various beat writers every day, you start picking up enough tidbits that all these small pieces of information begin to build into a much greater understanding of various players and teams than just about anyone else in the country has.
Man! – I need to start doing a better job myself of keeping up with the daily reports of beat writers in each sport I am playing!
Don’t Study “For The Slate”!
This is one of my favorite “secret weapons” in DFS. This ties back to the idea of watching players who are not on your roster. This ties back to reading all RotoWorld blurbs, and to studying the advanced stats of various players, and to reading beat writers as often as you can.
When I “prepare for a DFS slate,” nearly none of my research is “slate-specific.” Instead, I am always using that research time in an effort to get to know each player, each team, and each league as well as I can, so that I am always adding to my accumulated knowledge. If you take this approach – studying “for the sport” instead of studying “for the slate” – you will quickly discover that you are accumulating knowledge you can draw on when, for example, you have time to do nothing more than eyeball a slate before playing. On days when you don’t have time to research all the matchups, it will hardly matter, as you will already have huge chunks of relevant information stored in your head! On days when others’ research fails to turn up an important fact or stat or bit of knowledge, you will gain an edge. The more knowledge you accumulate, the greater this edge becomes!
Don’t study “for the slate.” Study “for the sport.”
Once you’ve done these five things in your efforts to “know the sport as well as you can possibly know it,” you will be ready to turn your attention toward that second vital component: Knowing the competition.