INDUSTRY FORUM

So… I checked out the slate this morning and lo and behold, Yahoo, which as recently as this week has advertisements out there lauding it’s 10 max entry format has a 150 mme gpp.

I’m not against the offering, but can’t understand why they are making this hard pivot while actively advertising that 10 max lineups is the reason to play at Yahoo.

But more importantly, there’s no csv lineup export option. So it’s going to be 150 lineups entered by hand…

I’m not sure what to think of this.

Discuss

Yup. Well said bigez.

Agreed.

I’ll probably play either way, but I’d much prefer 300k and 10 max than 1 million or 2 million and 150 max.

When they add .csv, we’ll be facing 300 lineups from ChipotleGates like we do at DK/FD.

150 max is very bad, IMO, and the .csv change is not one I like, either.

Anybody who does what you describe does not profit, they’re just donating to the prize pool. I wish there were tons of people doing this, but unfortunately the vast majority (if not all) who max csv enter are spending several hours a day on their process. They spend just as much time as those of us who hand build.

Yet to see anyone who is saying they are on board with this 150 max thing.

Continuing that further, I can’t believe any player requested this. This was done without consulting any players.

So, who decided this was a good exactly? I guess the stock holders since Yahoo is technically way bigger than FD/DK (not the fantasy stuff, but Yahoo/Verizon is a zillion dollar publicly traded company). Whoever made this decision is purely interested in the $$$ and not about the “experience”. This was never done as a “players” decision and instead was made by some billionaire living life on a yacht in the Mediterranean that demands more profits and the Yahoo powers that be have no choice but to please the billionaire shadow investors.

It seems pretty unlikely anyone will actually leave Yahoo over this and no one is going to be a one man renegade against this, so I would guess from Yahoo’s point of view this will end up being a success story since all of us nobodies that are chiming in aren’t going anywhere when it’s all said and done and certainly not increasing our entries. If you’re so against it, then don’t play that ONE contest.

So, it all comes down to what will moklovin, Bric, papagates, et. al. and their train of auto generated lineups and other players that have the exact same lineup as them week in and week out do????

Please stick to your core Yahoo, which is 10 entri max, no .csv and fairly structured prize pools.

If it means having a 500,000 baller instead of a million dollar baller, that’s fine. You don’t have to be DK or FD and appeal to the moklovins and bric75s of the world.

With Florida (21.3 million residents) now added…seems like 10 entry max could still fill large field contests

Apparently, I wish it was that simple lol. I guess I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s one contest

How much money do you think they have lost from offering no rake contests that also overlay? The contest you are referring to that the billionaire demanded is making zero profits off of it whether its 150 max or 10 max. He’s just trying to stop losing money off of it. I guess you would rather them keep losing money until the shadow investors tell them to shut it down?

it’s a promotion to draw in new people and clearly, the people they are trying to draw in are mme players, any discussion of them “needing to do it to stop losing money” is silly because the easy solution is to just stop offering it or reducing the GTD prize pool. They could still have that huge contest of last week but run it like poker where only a 250k amount is GTD and it after that for each additional $25 entry to the contest is an additional $25 into the prize pool

I love their 10 entry max and the more I think about this, the more insulting I find it that they are giving the single best contest on the site to players who are antithetical to all their marketing efforts.

They still advertise on the site how wonderful and fair it is that there are a maximum of 10 entries per contest.

As long as they keep this a 1 contest thing I’m fine with it. They can’t keep losing money, I’m okay with it if it helps the company stay out of the red. All the GPPs I play are still 10 max & hopefully it stays that way. They still offered a $3 no rake GPP for week 2 which filled within a couple days.

I think this sentence sums it all up best. I only dabble with Yahoo and personally am not really impacted either way by their decision. It doesn’t change anything for me. As an outsider looking in though, I have seen many people praise Yahoo’s 10 entry max format on these boards. It’s essentially their mantra, their backbone and what it seemed like they were building their foundation on. To go ahead and offer a 150 max contest, maybe on a trial basis, to see what happens, how many people max enter and so on is understandable. To do so, out of the blue, in this weeks flagship contest in all companies DFS flagship sport could easily be seen as insulting to those who have embraced and played there based on what their foundation has been.

All companies want to grow or in this case a division of a company. To do what is best to make them grow. It’s understandable. I have sincere doubts though that this contest will bring in new players. It’s more likely to just keep the same players, while some of those players play more than 10 entries.

With all that said, I am very curious to see how this plays out. If the contest fills, if every known shark in the DFS waters max enters, if sharks who don’t currently play there swim over to enter, and so on. I will say this, if a household DFS name takes down that GPP with 150 entries, I suspect the backlash will be real.

I think the backlash is already real———they had the cookie jar on the bottom shelf, so the little man could get some———now the little man, has almost 0 chance to take down a trny with kind of life changing $

Nope, that’s illegal. Exact size of the prize pool and number of entries has to be set beforehand and can’t be altered.

Love your site, but that should’ve been long ago already planned out and done beforehand.

I’m sure upping this GPP to 150 entries was just thought about in the last few days or so.

this makes so much sense, i never understood why they would cap contests to specific amounts

I max enter on Yahoo since it was only 10 entries. I play more way money on DK. So now that the main tournament is 150 max, I won’t even be throwing in 10 lineups. Add in that they went to 150 before the csv feature is even active is totally ridiculous. Even if I wanted to max enter there’s no way I’m dealing with that. 10 is already a pain in the ass.

this is how i feel as well, when it was 10 max it reasonable to max enter

now if it’s 150 max, that’s a 3k bankroll shot on a single slate in a high variance format, that’s a tall order given that previous to this, you could max enter every gpp for less than that amount

it’s also a very high risk format, even with no rake and heavy overlay, the vast majority of people entering that contest will lose money, barring a high percentage of your lineups getting that min 2x payout, you need to get at least 20th place finish out of 50k just to break even if you max enter (please don’t use this as an instance to highlight other ways to profitability like a slew of top 500 results etc, the point is that despite being massively EV, it’s still something that over a sample size of 1 slate is a huge risk and that’s my point)

i feel bad complaining because it’s a non-rake event, and I absolutely love Yahoo. Daniel is also incredible and really listens to input and will talk to the players.

Without the rake this contest is impossible to just ignore. And then you do the math and realize that the likelihood of hitting yahtzee even if you have the right combos without max entering is close to nil so then it isn’t a question of entering once or even 20 times, it’s entering 0 times or 150 max enter. There is really not much argument for any stance in between.

Maybe it’s jealousy, maybe it’s fear of being overwhelmed by the endbosses of DFS, maybe it’s just being afraid of change. Whatever the reason being insecurity, poverty, etc, it’s just an uncomfortable feeling having this contest up.

The main thing is that coming up on Sunday I’m going to be drawn to this, clicking on it and checking overlay obsessively and trying to determine whether or not to roll the dice and yolo it one time and I originally came to Yahoo because it didn’t have those stress factors.

I had this nice comfortable setting where everything was familiar and now I’m being put into an uncomfortable position between “forfeiting EV” and taking a “3k bankroll risk” and I came to Yahoo specifically because they repeatedly advertise that they’d never do this to me and now they’ve done it – in fact just now while setting my baseball and golf dummies, i saw that banner once again that promised 10x entries or less in all contests.

mind you, I play on Yahoo as “adam” I’m sure many of you who play on Yahoo are familiar with me, I usually max enter everything (except the 10 man pools of death) and do somewhat well and if I’m really feeling the screws on this one, I can’t imagine how most of the yahoo regs feel. Most guys were only doing a single line in the big 10x one as it stood due to brm. Putting in a single line in that spot seems fine, but right now I think it’s just throwing away $25

i feel like a @ss complaining like this, it’s definitely a 1st world problems situation… but if this is the future of yahoo, I’m going to pack up and move to fantasydraft where it’s the same stuff but far lower rake. obviously, if I end up caving and then bink it, I’ll be on top of world and complaining that they never offered it all along but for now at least, I just don’t feel good about playing DFS this week, it’s not going to be fun in the slightest because the entire time I’m going to be sweating a 3k yolo shot or angry over passing up such value

this isn’t meant as a condemnation of Yahoo, I love Yahoo. I truly was indifferent about this contest as well when i first posted but the more i’ve thought about it, the more i fear how uncomfortable a position this contest is putting me in

$3k on a single slate with top heavy payouts is the realm of professionals and the degenerate gamblers those professionals live off of – Yahoo offering this really incentivizes me to go for broke – so much value on offer but it’s going to break most who go for it. This is going to be one of the first weeks in a very long time where no matter the result, it won’t be fun – which is the entire purpose of playing DFS on Yahoo.

If this tourney fills it’s never going away and it’ll all be 150 max. If you want it back to 10 entry then the little guys have to speak with their wallet and sit this one out. I for one am not playing yahoo anymore until/unless it goes back to their original format and makes it fair for me again

I dunno if anyone else noticed, but I went over to Yahoo to see how many people are in the 150 entry contest (7.1K as of now), and I couldn’t help but noticed they reworded the description of it. Before, it openly described the 150 max entries…..now….the only description is “No Fee”. So, Yahoo has pulled that out of the wording. Interesting.

The contest is still 150 max entries, but now it’s a “secret” as you won’t know it unless you look very carefully at the rules when entering. On the positive side, it’s nice they aren’t showing it off, but on the negative side, now many people are going to have no idea of this change as they will NOT notice it unless they look very carefully at the rules (and no one does that as it’s a bunch of small print verbiage).

Interesting….but now incredibly deceptive.

WOW, good pick up NIN!

So do we max it now? Lol.

if you enter it once, though, you’ll easily see it in the lobby.

It will say “1 of 150 entries”

To be fair, for Yahoo doing all the giveaways they did a poor job at making any sort of an announcement. Run a free Florida contest. There’s a huge Florida market that even a lot of hardcore DFS guys are unaware opened up.

I’m curious why you feel this way. I plan on entering 10-20 lineups in it. You can still be +ev playing less than 150, you just have higher variance, right?

Also, cool to know that you’re Adam, I always see towards the top of the leaderboards!

Berkeley, it’s because the payouts are so top heavy that it’s not really worth your time unless you get a top 20 finish out of 50k possible.

Let’s say you decide to take a big risk and highly correlate all your 20 lineups around a single QB narrative. If it fills and you choose a QB that’s just 5% owned then your 10-20 iterations are competing with 2,500 other lineups that chose some variation of that QB stack. That’s a lot.

In a 10 max of the same size, this is far less of a concern, because with only 10 possible options a single person can’t get that many iterations out there. So while there may be the same amount of rival QB stacks, the competition has the same 10 max limit when deciding what secondary players to add to the QB. This is why guys like Sammy Watkins had 2x more ownership on DK gpps than Yahoo because when doing 10 stacks, you’re able to take fewer risks without dumping too much of total investment on a “lol it it could happen” player like Watkins. Now it should be noted that most of the Sammy Watkins totally fail each week so when you only have 10 lines available, you’re engaging in a big risk/reward play.

150 mme vs someone entering 10x means the 150 guys can leverage all the various low owned pivots yet still keep most of their lineups in the safe and familiar territory. If you were on someone like Watkins then you’d still have needed several iterations of him to have any chance of landing upon a combo that’d have led to a 50k gpp contest win and if you roll out 3-4 Watkins lineups each weeks out of your 10 total lines then you’re probably just dead money because 40% of your investment is on a yolo option. When you have 150 lines, you can toss in 5x Sammy lines no problem, it represents a trivial amount of overall risk. In essence, it’s unlevels the playing field because the 150 max lineup guys can leverage all the pivots without investing a disproportionate amount of bankroll to do so.

Let’s say the stack of the week in week 2 is Big Ben and Ryan Switzer. That’s not likely at all, and yet, it could happen. The only people with a reasonable chance at binking that gpp are going to be the 150x guys. Nobody in their right mind who believes in PIT stacks can still invest in Switzer because even just one lineup is 10%. Basically, if there are any big time surprise finishers, the 150 lineup guys are the only ones with a realistic shot at a top 20 finish and most weeks there’s usually a bunch of guys who came out of nowhere to pace the scoring

If payouts were flatter a strong 10-20 lineups would be fine but they aren’t so that 250-500 dollars is much more reasonably put into other formats or squirreled away for later.

This is why I hate this contest so much. It’s just inviting in pros and asking the rest of us to become degenerate gamblers/dead money. There’s a reason why Saahill “retired” after they reduced lineup entries to 150, when he was one of the only ones to do that he had an absurd advantage over everyone else who couldn’t invest 6 figures on a single slate. Once they “leveled” the field to 150 he could no longer exploit being able to take on such many more low ownership pivots without absorbing too much risk. Low ownership players are low owned for a reason, they suck and are expected to fail. That’s how I envision it’s going to be like this this week. We’re opening the contest to MME sharps who excel at this format to compete against a bunch of 10max specialists who will just be eaten alive.