Eyewitness Accounts: J... (07/30)
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July 30, 2015 Fantasy RoundersAlligator Blood
I finally ran out of alligator blood. After more than a month spent playing on the fumes of my initial $500 investment, occasionally peaking over the $100 threshold, my bankroll on DraftKings went to zero on Tuesday. The slow death was reminiscent of my poker playing days, in which I gained a reputation for hanging around with a short stack as I refused to go quietly into the night. The strategy would occasionally result in a reversal of fortune and yet I would often sink slowly into the abyss of the inevitable, but I realized that I enjoyed the challenges presented by that scenario and had somewhat accidentally tailored my game towards a conservative style of play that encouraged such an outcome. Needless to say, an eventual demise wasn't a surprise, and that lesson is especially pertinent in light of my empty account on DraftKings.
As a writer of DFS there is an additional layer of ego that's attached to my performance, beyond the expectation that I will succeed on the simple premise that the game is baseball-related. I realized that the expectation was also fueled by my own lack of appreciation of the natural ebb-and-flow of the DFS game, especially as it applies to baseball. It made me think back to Vegas and playing cards, how a true assessment wasn't realistic until I had accrued a meaningful sample size (I once spent a month in Vegas on a card trip), and even that determination failed to appreciate the dynamic nature of a game that I am still learning.
The DFS game is a relatively new endeavor, and I had mistaken a general obsession with baseball and solid success playing season-long fantasy into thinking that I would overcome the rake and immediately be a profitable player, but the red pill of reality is that any attribution for success or failure at DFS was short-sighted and failed to reflect the nature of the game.
As one may have guessed from the title of this column, I see a lot of parallels between the game of poker (especially the online version) and DFS. It's as if someone took two of my favorite things in this world and smashed them together. I talk about this often with my buddy, Sammy Reid – you probably know him as “Whirling Dervish”, a.k.a. the guy who has been kicking our butts with five victories in the BP private league (see sidebar) - and it has been part of the discussion on Baseballholics Anonymous, the weekly podcast that I co-host with Sammy (check out Episode 25). Sammy is also a former professional poker player who plied his trade online, so we often discuss aspects that have nothing to do with baseball but are perfectly relevant in DFS, from bankroll management to investment strategies and profit optimization. Our discussions have fueled many of my Thursday journal entries here at BP. Particularly now that DraftKings is partnered with MLB (among others) I see DFS as the legal replacement for playing cards from your computer chair (unless you live in Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, or Washington). It's a freedom that I relish, as much for the entertainment of constructing lineups (baseball sudoku, in a way) as the opportunity to stoke the competitive fires.
A player has to be about 11 percent better than average in order to survive the rake. This factor, combined with the variation that is baked into the game of baseball on a day-to-day basis, opens up the coffers of potential outcomes – and those are just game-related aspects. There are so many variables to consider that it can feel overwhelming, and we can spend hours constructing the best possible lineup “on paper” only to watch Curt Casali hit two bombs off of David Price to sink your battleship; but it's that level of variation that makes DFS so much fun. It's what makes this game so great and so frustrating at the same time, and DFS takes the long-term view that pays dividends in seasonal leagues and flips it for a short-term reward system, and we are lucky to live in a place where that option is at our fingertips.
“You can't lose what you don't put in the middle... but you can't win much either”
I bought in for another $500 today, just as I would on a new day in Vegas. There's two months left in the season and I have a lot to learn, so I can't wait for class to begin. See you at the tables!
Doug Thorburn is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @doug_thorburn
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The Stash List: 15th Edition, 2015
I genuinely appreciate your transparency. This game is really, really hard. Variance and the industry-wide double digit rake don't do us any favors either. Keep at it, Doug. I too, am learning. I tell my wife almost daily that "all it takes is one." Just keep grinding long enough for that 1 huge win that'll negate all of your losses.
Best of luck with the next $500.
Thanks Yancy! The game is humbling but I can't get enough, and you're exactly right that one big win can erase months of futility. I may not have three stacks of high society at my disposal, but I enjoy the grind way too much to get discouraged.
Shuffle up and deal!