This really doesn't even do the exhibit justice but it was the most impressive I saw at the broad. Don't remember the artist but it was a Japanese guy (at The Broad)
Recently FanDuel has become a sponsor of Cross Counter and Excellent Adventures so I thought I would take the opportunity to learn how to play fantasy sportsball. If you’ve been wondering what the fuss is all about, you can learn from my mistakes and maybe make some money yourself. Go to FanDuel and use coupon code CROSSCOUNTER and FanDuel will match your first deposit up to $200 so you get $400 total to play with!
Ok so I’m just going to sum up day 2 by saying that I lost everything I made on day 1 due to being pressed for time and not having dedicated enough time. I got bodied on some careless picks due to feeling overconfident that I could make some fast picks. Also, I blindly followed a few recommendations that didn’t turn out very well.
Ouch! Read on for some valuable lessons...
1. If I’m not confident in my picks and haven’t done enough research, it’s fine to sit it out
2. There is no undo button on some contests when you’re minutes away from the game starting. Accidentally entered a $25 game because I was in such a hurry with only 45 people in it total and then I couldn’t back out. GDI.
Day 3
So after my disappointing losses yesterday, I decided to take a different approach today. In an effort to build a system that I can refine and tweak over time, I decided to use Process St. and build a checklist for doing daily fantasy basketball. So far it looks like this:
The most notable change is that I’m listening to RotoGrinders daily podcast in order to get an expert’s picks and learn from his strategies and mindset (pretty similar to the approach you need in order to get good at anything, including fighting games).
I listened to the podcast and then wrote notes on players in Evernote so that I could use that after when building the lineup.
As I’ve heard from other people, using Las Vegas betting lines as a starting point is something that was echoed by the podcast. The idea is that the Vegas computers crunch all the numbers and have a pretty good idea of which games are likely to have the highest scoring potential.
The reason why this is important is because although players can score fantasy points through rebounds and steals, the majority of your overall points are likely to come from guys that actually score points.
With slates containing usually between 5-9 games, you don’t want to waste your resources on games or teams that are unlikely to produce high scoring games.
Today’s high-scoring pick is Oklahoma vs. Chicago and you’ll notice that on FanDuel, the games are listed in the same order that Vegas lists them.
After listening to the picks, it seemed clear that Westbrook and Durant are the two players likely to score the most fantasy points (FP) so those are the two guys you want to try to get on your team.
Unfortunately, since they have such a high FP rank, their salaries are high so the challenge becomes to try and get both of them in.
After going through my notes and listening to the podcast writing notes, this is my lineup and the guy who is currently #1 in one of my leagues for the early slate:
If you’re new to fantasy, you might wonder why three of the guys don’t have scores. This is because their games start at 9 and 10:30PM ET and they haven’t started yet.
In addition to listening to the podcast, I also looked at RotoGrinders’ daily first look post.
It has an interesting Defense vs. Position Rankings matrix which shows you which teams have the worst match defensively. The lower the number, the stronger they are in that position relative to the other teams in the league.
This is useful in trying to identify bad matchups on paper. Looks like Denver will likely have a tough time scoring against Utah tonight and the Vegas lines confirm that prediction.
Late Night Slate vs. Early
Looking back at my lineup now compared to other guys in my leagues, I can see that one of the strategies that one guy used is to not even put in any guys that are in the “late slate” which has two games that start at 7:30PM ET. These last two games were also the two games that Vegas lines ranked as low scorers.
One of the issues I’ve been struggling with is trying to narrow down the sheer amount of players. Since I don’t care about sportsball unless I have money riding on its outcome, I don’t know a lot of the players. Hell I haven’t even watched very much since starting to play DFS.
I can see based on this guy’s strategy that maybe it might be best not to even worry about the late slate games and just focus on the two games that are likely to be high scorers, in this case Oklahoma vs. Chicago and Minnesota vs. Miami. This guy has only two players from Charlotte vs. Dallas and none from the late slate.
After I got my picks together I decided to put together another team for the late slate. I find the late slate easier because there are only teams total to choose from so it seems much more manageable to pick a strong team.
At this point I went back and listened to the RotoGrinders podcast for the host’s take on the last two games of the slate. So we’ll see how this goes.
50/50s and Tournaments
I also wanted to make sure that I develop a strategy for what games seem most straightforward to win in. This time around, I stuck to $2, $5, and $10 50/50s and double ups.
A Double Up is where you double your money if you place in the top 45%. So it’s slightly harder than the 50/50s where you only need to be in top 50%. The difference is small, but important.
Oftentimes the Double Ups are guaranteed so even if not enough people enter, FanDuel still pays out. The 50/50s are not guaranteed so if not enough people enter, the league is canceled and everyone is refunded.
I joined a handful of Double Ups and 50/50s at various price points to spread my risk around a bit. There are some contests where you can do multiple entries but with my strategy of sticking with one team, there’s no reason to do multiple entries because it incurs extra risk.
Satellite & Big Money Tournaments
Today I also entered a $2 satellite tournament where out of 71 players, top 5 get seats to Sunday’s NFL Sunday Million which has $1m in payouts. I entered not because I feel like I have a shot at winning, but so that I can look at the Top 5 winners’ teams and see what I can learn from their picks.
I also entered a $2 late night slate with a $10k guarantee. This one has 5746 in it and top 950 get paid. This is also one where you can enter multiple times so I entered twice with the same lineup just to see how it went. In retrospect, I should have picked a somewhat different team for my second entry, woops!
I’m not sure what the max number of entries for this one was but out of 5700+ players, I’m sure whoever gets in the top 1% will have lineups worth looking at so I’m hoping to take a look at their entries to see what I can learn from them after all is said and done.
Summary
To wrap it all up, this is what I’ve learned in the past few days:
1. No need to enter if I haven’t done the research.
2. No need to overextend if I’m not fully confident (I still probably did that today)
3. In terms of team building, it’s probably time to start using one of the lineup creators on RotoGrinders or Fantasy Pros so I could have found an easier way to get Durant and Westbrook on the same team.
4. Just because you’re in an early slate doesn’t mean that you have to focus at all on the teams in the late night slate. Some guys ignore the later games completely and focus on the games that are likely to be high scorers. For where I’m at, it may be easier to separate early and late slates almost completely in order to have less players to sort through since I don’t know who most of these guys are anyway.
Thanks for reading!
Go to FanDuel and use coupon code CROSSCOUNTER and FanDuel will match your first deposit up to $200 so you get $400 total to play with!
My Descent into Fantasy Sports Madness w/Fan Duel: Day 1 - Beginner’s Luck?
As some of you guys may have heard, recently Fan Duel began sponsoring Excellent Adventures. Although I used to be into sports as a kid (both playing and watching), I definitely have fell out of it over the years due to lack of interest. IMO, spectator sports are boring if you have no real outcome or stakes on the line. That’s why when we were approached by Fan Duel, I was immediately interested.
You see, if I can win money on the outcome of the game with no headaches and it’s not solely dependent on the score, I’m all about it. I didn’t know anything about fantasy sports up until recently, but since they are sponsoring the show, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I can in as little time as possible and I’m sharing what I’ve learned with you so that if you were interested, but not sure where to get started, I could lend a helping hand.
If you do decide to give it a shot, please follow this link or use coupon code: CROSSCOUNTER and Fan Duel will match your first deposit up to $200.
Fair warning: I’m not a fantasy sports expert by any means and don’t even follow sports so if things don’t work out for you, don’t blame me!
Phase I: Deposits & Bonuses
I decided that in order to learn as much as I could as quickly as possible, I should try to dive in head first. I deposited $200 because Fan Duel matches your first deposit up to $200 so I would have $400 total to play with. The bonus doesn’t actually work the way I thought it did, with the bonus being released over time at a rate of 4% of the entry fee of the contest you enter. I used to play a fair amount (read: A LOT) of online blackjack back in the early 2000s and in those days, you’d have to wager 20-30x your deposit bonus in order to cash out. So at $5 a hand, you’d have to play about 800-1200 hands of blackjack in order to cash out your bonus.
With Fan Duel, you’d get $1 of your bonus for a $25 contest you entered. Somehow it doesn’t have the same ring, but I’m sure it works out about the same in the end. If you lost every single contest, you’d have lost $400 worth instead of $200, so worst case scenario, you’re still getting to learn how to play for half price. You definitely don’t need to deposit anywhere near $200 because you can practice on free games and you can enter contests for as little as $1. So don’t think that you need a big bankroll to get started because you don’t.
Since I wanted to learn quickly and effectively, I figured that if I budgeted $100 per week, I’d get a fair amount of experience in a month and could decide whether or not it was fun and worth it or whether I was awful and should do something else instead.
Luckily, things didn’t go as bad as expected.
Phase II: Different Types of Sportsball
Next step was to figure out which contests to enter.
After you make an account and your first deposit, you can either go straight to the Lobby which has a listing of thousands of contests across NFL, NBA, college football, and NHL games.
I jokingly refer to pro sports as sportsball (no idea where I first heard it, but it makes me laugh every time I hear it) because up until recently, it was all the same to me. Sports. Ball. Who cares.
But hey, now maybe I can make some money on sportsball, so it’s time to make a decision on which sportsball game to pick!
Since I don’t follow sportsball of any kind, I don’t have a favorite team or favorite players (Michael Jordan retired, right? Didn’t Los Angeles used to have a football team??) and thus didn't really care if I’m playing fantasy baseball, basketball, football, or hockey. What I’m really waiting for is fantasy pro wrestling and fantasy fighting games, of course.
It was Monday night though, and apparently some people don’t watch Monday Night Raw, they watch Monday Night Football instead.
Fan Duel provided a helpful link that sent me to a page for Rookie Contests where I could compete in one of four 50/50 leagues for anywhere between $2 and $25.
Phase III: Types of Contests/Leagues
Ok so I know I said that I wanted to learn quickly, but I still joined the $2 Rookie 50/50 League because at this point I still had no idea what I was doing.
After some clicking around, I learned that a 50/50 league is one where if your team ranks in the top half of the total league entrants, you win. That means that I could finish 50th out of 100 and still win! I like those odds!
At this point, I still had no idea exactly what I was supposed to do but the user interface of Fan Duel made it clear that it was now time to assemble the greatest pro sportsball team ever assembled with the hope that I would nearly double up my 2 buck investment to $1.80.
After more clicking, I saw that you could also do Head to Head (H2H aka one-on-one), Tournaments where you can win seats at bigger games or a top percentage get paid, and Leagues of up to 100 players. But all of that sounds too scary for now, lemme just put together a team and see how this two bucks goes.
Phase IV: Fantasy Sportsball Team Construction
I began to look at the QB position first (that’s quarterback, for the uninitiated; the guy who throws the ball) and just picked the guy who seemed to have the most FPPG (whatever that is) and had played the most games (I’m pretty sure you don’t want a guy who hasn’t played that many games because he’s probably not that good or got hurt).
Then I threw in some RBs (running backs) and WRs (wide receivers, not sure why you need three and definitely not sure if that’s how it is on an actual football team lol) with the same non-logic and then came in over budget when all was said and done.
I thought this was fantasy football? In whose fantasy is my budget limited?
Fan Duel’s apparently, but that’s just the way daily fantasy sports works. You have a budget of $60,000 for your team and must create a full line-up within that budget. Hm, ok. Budgets and math are definitely not my strong suit but I’ve come this far so I won’t let a few overpaid players stop me from getting this $1.80!
So I swapped in and out a few players (don’t ask me who) and then pulled the trigger because the game was about to start in 5 minutes. You can enter contests and adjust your team up until nearly the last minute in fantasy sports, so if someone gets injured earlier in the day and they remove him from the starting lineup, you can too so you don’t have a dead spot on your roster earning no points.
I still don’t know exactly how everything is scored or what all the abbreviations stand for (I’m pretty sure I’d be better at fantasy baseball because that’s the sport I know the best), but it’s okay, I’m about to watch Monday Night Raw Football for the first time in my adult life!
Confession time: I watched the opening kickoff and then went back to Fan Duel because I realized that if I wanted to learn as quickly as possible, it would be ineffective to have to wait until the next day to enter a contest, so maybe I should see if there was anything else.
Phase V: Contests/Leagues/Tournament Hunt
I noticed that my Rookie 50/50 League only had 33 players and it said I was winning. That must mean that even though less than 100 players entered, Top 50 was still getting paid out!!! Oh man, my two bucks is secure and I’m already a winner on Fan Duel! I like the way this is going!
I figured that one strategy for making money with fantasy sports must be to find all these games where there aren’t that many people entered and then just hope Fan Duel doesn’t notice and keeps paying out top 50 anyways. So I found a bunch of NBA contests to enter and entered them, only to find out later that that wasn’t the case because the contests weren’t marked as Guaranteed.
Guaranteed Contests pay out the specified amount and are the contests that Fan Duel itself sets up. Individual players can create their own Contests but if the contest doesn’t have enough players before the game starts, the contest is cancelled and everyone gets their money back.
Damn, I thought I found a loophole in the system. Oh well, back to NBA.
Apparently the NBA doesn’t like to go heads up with Monday Night Raw or Monday Night Football because there were only two games scheduled. Lucky for me, both were on the west coast, so I had a few hours between my last minute NFL picks and the deadline to enter the NBA contests to actually do some research.
Phase VI: Interwebs Research
As I’ve mentioned, my goal with this entire project was to learn the ins and outs of fantasy sports as quickly as possible in order to reach proficiency or quit as soon as possible.
Learning fantasy sports proved no different than learning anything else on the internet. Just googling fantasy basketball resulted in lots of results. However, looking at big sites like ESPN and Yahoo’s fantasy sections seemed ineffective and un-targeted. I was pretty sure that I had heard of fantasy sports gurus on the internet so I started to do some digging.
First I found Fantasy Pros’ “Who Should I Draft?” Tool which made it easy to compare one player to another. I think this is an instance where I got lucky that there were only two games (four teams total) playing that night so I didn’t have to sort through as many players as when there are 7+ games on (such as tonight). But basically I compared the Point Guards, SFs (short forwards, as I learned today lol), and the rest of the positions to come up with the following roster of killers.
The “Who Should I Draft?” Tool compares players of the same position together based on picks from fantasy experts. If a lot of fantasy experts recommended one player significantly over another, I’d trust the wisdom of the crowds. This made it pretty easy because most of the players were clear picks over other players.
I lied, I have heard the names Stephen Curry and Blake Griffin before and so that kinda helped my confidence that these guys were indeed solid players. With ownership percentages over 80%, meaning that over 80% of the players in the league also had these players on their team, at least I wouldn’t be alone if these guys did really poorly that night.
Eventually I filled up the roster but was over budget and the clock was ticking. I had less than 10 minutes to solidify the roster, so I did what I had to do and removed a few players whose names I cannot remember and swapped in good ol’ Vince Carter for a measly $3,500. I figured it was a fair compromise for having Blake Griffin, Harrison Barnes, AND Stephen Curry on the same team (and damn they weren’t cheap either).
This was the one area where I went glaringly wrong. Due to my ignorance of pro basketball, I had no idea that Vince Carter was a 38 year old veteran who hadn’t even played this season until last night. I definitely should have looked at his ownership percentage, which was staggeringly low at 13%, and will remember this one going forward. Looking at you, Vince. :P
Phase VII: The Hunt for Moar Contests
In the spirit of trying to learn as quickly as possible, I searched Fan Duel for more contests that I could enter for a reasonable amount, with varying rules.
Some of the contests didn’t fill up and thus were canceled such as a $5 10-player league and a $2 68-player 50/50 tournament. Seems as though for such low dollar amounts, you might need to do H2H which I was too intimidated to try.
I ended up in a $5, $25, $1, and $20 contests and won all of them! I stuck with the same team because I didn’t have the brain cycles left at that point to pick multiple teams, though I read later that that’s a viable strategy.
The $5 contest was the $500 NBA Mini Layup where Top 20 out of 114 got paid. I placed 19th with my team and turned that $5 into $12.50 (barely)! Granted, this was definitely a stroke of beginner’s luck because the Clippers vs. Suns game actually came down pretty close to the wire in the last 30 seconds of the game. Had a few things changed in the last few moments, either of the guys below me could have placed higher (I got 19th by 0.1 point) and I could have easily been out of the money.
The $25 was a $500 NBA Double Up where I placed 5th out of 22. Top 10 doubled their $25 and won $50 total.
The $1 contest was a 10-Player League where Top 3 win. I got 2nd with 243.60 points. 1st Place won $4.50 with 253.20 points and 3rd place won $1.80 with 227.70 points. I compared my lineup to the guy who won (ptoe99) to see who he picked and had I put in probably anyone but Old Man Vince Carter, I may have been able to win since I lost by less than 10 points, but I’m not complaining. I still did pretty well on these picks for literally not knowing anything and just following the advice of the experts on Fantasy Pros.
Finally, the $10 contest was a $3K BIG $10 Double Up (Top 150 Win, Late Night). 340 players total, top 150 get paid, so a little less than the top 50% win (44.1% to be exact). I placed 63rd so I was well within the money on this one.
On this one I noticed that the top 5 spots were all the same guy, dave5612.
This was when I learned that in some contests, you are limited to one entry, but on others you can buy multiple entries, allowing you to possible take up more slots if you win, pushing other people down further. This is an interesting strategy that maybe I can utilize later on down the road. This guy obviously didn’t make the same mistake as I did with Vince Carter and smartly put Draymond Green in as PF. Looking at his profile, he has quite a lot of wins in all sports and has been playing for three years so he definitely knows what he’s doing.
Total: Won 4 out of 4 NBA contests, winning a total of $85.20.
The NFL contest included Thursday’s game which I didn’t realize and in that one, I’m 30th out of 34, but I’m pretty sure I still will win just for playing due to the lack of entrants.
Phase VIII: The Hunt for Moar Data
As you can imagine, I was pretty excited for my wins, especially having not even watched more than a few minutes of either of the three games I’d entered contests for. One thing I really found interesting was the real-time updates on the site as well as the app. I spent a few minutes watching a game on TV with the app open on my phone and felt great when I’d see my ranking rise.
After all was said and done, I decided to look for fantasy subreddits on reddit and found r/fantasyfootball, r/fantasybball, and finally r/dfsports (DFS is short for daily fantasy sports). I like basketball more than football and since the season just started, it seems like a good time to get into it, since I don’t have an entire season to catch up on as I would with football.
While searching Top Rated r/dfsports posts, I came across a post entitled [NBA] Finding value in your daily lineups. PERFECT! This is exactly what I was looking for.
I was familiar with the term “value” as it’s used in Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering to describe cards that are relatively low cost for their utility and effectiveness and this post contained a formula that one can use to determine how many points a player needs to generate in order for his salary to be worth it. Once I had this formula, I started to compare the value of my team to the value of teams that won in the contests I entered.
I found that I wasn’t that far off in terms of my picks (aka the picks of the experts on Fantasy Pros) and that most players came in under the needed point value. But this was consistent even amongst the winning teams, so I guess it’s just the way it works or all of these guys were having an off day in these particular games, it’s too early for me to tell.
After digging around the subreddit further, I found Roto Grinders which seems to be the Shoryuken or EventHubs of DFS. NICE!
Here I read a bunch of articles on the differences between the game types as well as how to get started and the differences between DFS and league fantasy sports. There are also paid courses for beginners which is a nice option as well as a membership component of the site which I’ll likely invest in due to having won a few bucks on day 1. There are also lots of tools available that can help you create a roster, making it easier and less cumbersome for a new player like me who would otherwise be starting from scratch.
Wrapping it all Up
Well if you made it this far, thanks for reading! I feel like I learned a lot on my first day and had a lot of fun and won a few bucks in the process. Not bad for a first try and I’m sure there will be some valleys to compensate for these peaks, but overall I think I did pretty good for a first try and am looking forward to learning more about DFS and the potential profits that may come along with it.
I think going forward I’m going to continue trying to enter contests between $1 and $25. I think I’ll probably stay away from those that only pay out the Top 20% or better until I get more confident with my picks. But the 50/50s and double ups seem pretty manageable. I don’t know if I’ll end up spending more or less time on this as time goes on as I’m not sure if investing hours and hours if I only have a few bucks on each contest is worth it. However, if I can build a decently consistent system, there’s really no reason I couldn’t steadily just keep letting my profits ride.
Obviously, I won’t win every time and I’m sure there will be some tough losses, but it seems like with a combination of strong picks and disciplined bankroll management, you could probably make decent side hustle income from this which is great!
The next steps are likely going to be to read everything I can on Roto Grinders as well as try out their subscription service. After that, I’ll probably try Head 2 Head games as from what I read, these are the safest way to do multiple entries so you could do lots of $1-2 H2H games with the same teams and with strong picks, you should come out ahead in the long run.
If you want to give fantasy sportsball a try, check out Fan Duel and use promo code CROSSCOUNTER and they’ll match your first deposit up to $200.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to send me any links I should read or post comments/questions you might have.
Biker bowser with a couple of princesses. Happy Halloween everyone! If you're going out tonight, leave the driving to someone else. Use coupon code ubercrosscounter on uber or RYAN3251 on lyft to save $20 on your first ride.
Thank God it's #deadlifts day! Added a measly 5lb from last week and felt like quitting on the third set of 5. Maybe it wasn't pretty but i got it done. My goal is to hit 405 for 5 reps but I'm not sure when I'll be able to reach that number. But the first step is one rep. 💪👍. Learning to lift over the past 18 months has taught me that nearly everything in life is a battle within versus yourself, not you versus someone else as I previously thought. So now it's me vs. Old me. New me should have this one 10-0. (at Barbell Brigade)
Finally feel like I'm getting the hang of #frontsquats. Did 3x8 after deadlifts today. Feels more natural to go ass to grass than on back squats which I've been doing low bar for a while. Started with just the empty bar nearly 3 months ago and added 5lb every week in order to work on form through repetition. This week was tough and I'll prolly plateau soon but now I look forward to an exercise I previously was intimidated by. (at Barbell Brigade)
@801gustavo came to terrorize me and @mrmikeross on our lackluster street fighter performance. Check out the full set of new excellent adventures at http://ExcellentAdventures.tv before they hit YouTube!
Got all the way up to #49 in sfv beta today. Didn't really pay attention to points at all for the first few days until tonight when I really started getting matches. Played mostly r. mika and Rashid. The power of pro wrestling and the wind is definitely worth it. You can watch some of the rebroadcast at http://twitch.tv/crosscountertv till i wake up and start grinding again. Ggs everyone, I learned a lot hope you guys did too. Thanks for watching.
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