Tracking Your Bankroll History
Welcome to my third lesson on bankroll management here for RotoAcademy! So far, we have discussed how to define your bankroll and how to incorporate your bankroll with game selection process. Once you have done this, there is yet another key element – tracking the progress of your bankroll and monitoring your game results. When you are still dealing with a small sample size, this isn’t overly difficult. However, when you start to add differing game types, multiple sites, and other factors, some automation is definitely in store. There are two methods I use to track my results, and I will discuss them both in this lesson.
Bankroll Tracking Method No. 1: Microsoft Excel
The starting point for any bankroll tracking mechanism will likely be Microsoft Excel (or an equivalent product). The best use for a Microsoft Excel-based tracker is to track your results on a site-by-site basis. It’s also a good method to keep tabs on your results for tax purposes. At the end of the year, having your results in Excel on a site-by-site basis will allow you to match up your calculations with the 1099 forms you receive from the sites come tax time (if you are fortunate enough to end the year with a profit). Below is a screen grab from the Excel-based tracker that I personally created for myself:
As you can see, I use this to track my results by site and my overall profit or loss for the year. I update this every couple of weeks to make sure I stay up to date with my results, and I will also update it any time I make a deposit or withdrawal from a site. If you experiment with several sites, this is a great way to tell where you are doing well and where you are struggling. This is especially true as you start to notice trends over time. If you find yourself succeeding on Fantasy Aces but struggling on DraftKings, shift more of your action to Fantasy Aces. A lot of players feel like they need to “try and get better” on the sites where they are struggling, but that is not necessarily true. Don’t be afraid to play more on sites where you are winning and cut back action on sites where you are losing. There is something to be said for having a better grasp of the salary structure and game theory on certain sites more than others.
In addition to the sheet shown above, I would also recommend using a “drill-down” tab that details your activity on each site. This doesn’t have to be overly specific and list every single game that you play, but it can be used to get a level of detail that you can’t see in your overall results. For example, you can create a tab for each site/sport and list your results by day or week, depending on how often you play and what sports you play. For football purposes, I like to put in my results for each week. I create a row that shows the week number and site in the first column, with results in the subsequent columns. You can populate those columns with “amount risked,” “amount won,” “return on investment,” or other data that you find relevant to your play. The good thing about using Excel is that you can customize your spreadsheet to your heart’s content. However, it does become difficult to track results on a game-by-game basis, especially if you are a high volume player. That’s where tracking method #2 comes in.
Bankroll Tracking Method No. 2: Rotogrinders Bankroll Tracker
After initially launching a bankroll tracker a couple years ago, Rotogrinders has improved and updated their tool in 2015. Supplementing your Excel spreadsheet data with the use of this tracker is the best way to understand the total picture of your daily fantasy sports play. Let’s discuss how to use this tool to our advantage.
I won’t dissect the instructions for use of the tracker, as “the site does a good job of breaking that down”:https://rotogrinders.com/threads/bankroll-tracker-updates-788068. You can “use it for free”:https://rotogrinders.com/bankroll-tracker to assist you in your bankroll auditing.
Before you read further, take a sample of your daily fantasy data and upload it into the bankroll tracker. That will help as we go along with this lesson. Once you have done that, feel free to continue on. The following is a sample from some of my historic data from September and October of 2013.
The top of the bankroll tracker contains several filters that you can use once you have your CSV data files uploaded. For example, you can filter by sport or date range. This allows you to drill-down to any level of detail you want. If you want your NFL results from December of 2014, you can filter for that sport and month. The possibilities are endless simply as a result of the filters at the top of the tracker.
Below the filters are charts that detail your results. In the above example, I managed $935.80 of profit over the time period shown. This came out to a 2.74 percent ROI on my $34,191 of buy-ins. The charts at the bottom show your distribution by game type. It’s a good way to monitor if you are trying to follow a specific distribution (for example, the 80/10/10 rule that I discussed in Lesson #2). As you can see, 66.70 percent of my contests over this span were head-to-head games.
The summary tab is a great place to start, but where the bankroll tracker really shines is in the subsequent tabs. If you click on the “detailed” tab, you can get specific data by game type. It will show your average buy-in, total buy-ins, total winnings, profit or loss, and return on investment for each game type. This allows you to see what types of games you excel in, and which types of games that you struggle with. It is a great idea to use this tab to adjust your game distribution. If you were originally following the rule of 80 percent head-to-head games, 10 percent tournaments, and 10 percent leagues, but you find that you have the highest ROI in your tournament games, feel free to adjust your distribution accordingly.
Finally, my favorite part of the bankroll tracker is the “H2H Results” tab. This tab shows detailed results for all your head-to-head contests — sorted by opponent! The tool will provide your wins, losses, average entry, and return on investment against each individual opponent. It’s a great way to figure out what players you have an edge over and what players you might want to avoid, especially as your sample sizes get larger.
In conclusion, don’t take this lesson lightly. Knowledge is power in daily fantasy sports, and using detailed methods to track what is going on with your bankroll is definitely part of that knowledge. Play around with Microsoft Excel and the Rotogrinders bankroll tracker, and find out what methods work best for you. Figure out your best game types. Figure out what opponents to avoid in your head-to-head games. Figure out what sites you do best on. Once you do those things, you will be a better player in the long run. Good luck!