End of the Recaps

When I started these recaps it was an experiment in blogging. I thought all the analysis on DFS and the Milly Maker was too focused on a single person’s winning lineup. Things like the best possible lineup and how a person creates lineups in a single week or throughout the course of a NFL season are much more important to look at.

Sadly I’ve come to the decision that I can know longer do these recaps. I’ve always wanted to make money in sports betting and DFS by actually being a contestant myself. I’ve thought of starting up actual paid services like a DraftKings lineup analysis tool and creating rich data in the form of proprietary player rankings with automated insights that help you understand your trends, successes, and areas to improve. But I feel I could never justify creating this service and selling it to people to use. It would erode my edge and be a huge conflict of interest for me.

I don’t necessarily disdain those who make money on educational content like al_smizzle, bales, or awesemo. Depending on your view of DFS meta it can make sense, or just your stance on making money. That type of thing is not for me (especially as someone who hasn’t won a Milly Maker or anything like that). And I totally believe creating content makes you sharper.

I saw some interesting discussion from Travis Pettey on twitter about paid sites and Awesemo. SamsonDFSTruth and Pettey go back and forth for a bit too. Although I like Samson and think he’s good for DFS to an extent, he can be overly critical at times.

Why I Started the Recaps and More on Why I’m Stopping

You might be wondering why I did the recaps in the first place if I didn’t want to erode my edge. Frankly put, I started because I started these as a noob and over time many readers and commenters helped me get better at DFS.

Me deciding to stop the recaps does coincide with my DFS contestant ratings being developed. DFS is hard! It is possible to make money in huge GPP’s but the amount of effort needed is high. I haven’t necessarily given up on DFS but I’m taking a different approach than entering 20 lineups in the same contest each week. I’m also switching gears a bit and focusing on investing. I think much of the same analysis I’ve worked on here is applicable to that arena — and has better long-term prospects for me and my financial goals in life.

As I developed my ratings one thing I looked at was the expected max score a player should have. Clearly entering more lineups helps but how much? Assuming a bell curve using the contest mean and variance I generated charts like this.

A bell curve is not the right distribution since creating lineups is sampling without replacement among other things. However this is a reasonable upper bound on expected performance in a GPP where top prize is most important). In reality you would want to change the mean and variance as the number of lineups in increases (the exact way to change would depend on the players strategy).

Creating ratings is hard because you must assume you can accurately identify the strategy used by a player and then evaluate them on that. And with such insane “pops” when you win makes many strategies potentially viable but they may only work 1 time out of 100! The below ratings assume players use strategies that should work each week. It does not provide extra benefits for contrarian strategies that may work only once. Below I show results from 2018-2019 thru Week 3 and only include those with over 14 contests entered and a median number of entries of 149 or 150.

Rating is based on max points of contestant in week divided by max points in winning lineup. It does not do a great job accounting for players who changed their number of max entries over time like Nickelback4Lyfe (or those who use more contrarian strategies). The actual ratings don’t make sense to compare players in terms of skill level due to the number of lineup dependence on expected maxes. Think of them more as a crude measure of likelihood to place first in the Milly Maker taking into account number of lineups.

You’ll notice quite a few familiar names in the top 10. And Awesemo’s rating is much, much lower than his Rotogrinder’s Ranking. When these things happen you have to think why? Is it a contrarian strategy, is the Milly Maker not his best contest but more of a publicity thing? These things are difficult to determine.

What’s Next?

I may still post the occasional NFL or NBA related analysis on this blog. I still fully intend to create a Learn Python through Sports Analytics course. But I am going to focus more on investing. I like the rich textual data in the form of SEC filings and books. I hope to analyze investment managers and companies. George Soros is the most intriguing to me because of his close relationship with his mentor, philosopher Karl Popper — whose views on the scientific method make so much sense.

I find it fascinating how successful people in DFS and investing have a philosophical bent. Here’s something I tweeted to Jonathan Bales of Fantasy Labs a while back.

More Nietzsche and Taleb than Soros, but yes, this is accurate (and cool)

— Jonathan Bales (@BalesFootball) July 6, 2017

And just now I checked chess_is_ok’s twitter and he’s reading Meditations and tweets about Taleb and Keynes on the regular.

For now I’m switching my gears mostly into investing and sports betting.

Thanks for Reading

Thank you to everyone who read these and has commented. I appreciate the support and hope I helped you with your lineups as well as providing an entertaining recap. Best of luck in the future!