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Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

jere.in

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Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#51

Post by 5555624 »

bretthopper wrote: post #16
swanson wrote: post #10

Some tips for "hacking" fantasy football... * Don't draft a kicker before the 16th round There is very little difference between the #1 and the #10 kicker and predicting future performance from past performance is a crapshot. Plus if you draft a kicker early, you will be exposed as a fraud :) Every year there are no-name players that have breakout seasons, so use your late round picks trying to hit the lottery. * Try…

This is all good except the part about not talking shit. Talking shit makes fantasy sports even better. There is, however, one rule to this: only do it in leagues with your friends. Yes, you're an asshole if you're in a league with 11 other random internet people. With your friends it's just fun.

The whole point of our league is to talk shit boost morale at work. The league winner gets to display the tacky trophy we put together six years ago.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#52

Post by bksenior »

roldie wrote: post #28
swanson wrote: post #10

Some tips for "hacking" fantasy football... * Don't draft a kicker before the 16th round There is very little difference between the #1 and the #10 kicker and predicting future performance from past performance is a crapshot. Plus if you draft a kicker early, you will be exposed as a fraud :) Every year there are no-name players that have breakout seasons, so use your late round picks trying to hit the lottery. * Try…

This is the first year that I've tried Value Based Drafting. It's also the worst team I've had in years. I struggle to get 90 points in a standard league. Part of it is because Spiller has been a big bust this year, but in general, this team relies on a lot of potential instead of safe bets. Bad luck for me, as few of my guys have shown that potential. :/ Just saying that YMMV. It's fantasy football, nothing is guara…

I bet you drafted MJD. What a bum he has been.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#53

Post by ggreer »

heyheyhey wrote: post #44
ggreer wrote: post #40

Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you eve…

> Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? Hell why stop at sports? Let's just ignore current events that will be forgotten in a week!

I agree. It's amazing how productive you can be when you eliminate distractions: http://abughrai.be/pics/github_streak.png

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#54

Post by skannamalai »

ggreer wrote: post #40

Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you eve…

Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, and Muhammad Ali might take exception with your "won't matter in a week" assertion.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#55

Post by VLM »

enjo wrote: post #14
VLM wrote: post #12

So the TLDR is if you invest a lot of effort, you could win a game that doesn't matter, that you don't care about, all to impress people you don't care about? Its a good article in that if you've already decided to do something like it, FF is a sort of interesting, unusual choice. One minor failing of the article is failing to deal with the issue of FF being extremely slow paced. Like playing pac man by submitting pu…

You're forgetting the part were you have fun doing it.

However, the article specified hating football as a prerequisite?

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#56

Post by keithxm23 »

Segmentation wrote: post #24
swanson wrote: post #10

Some tips for "hacking" fantasy football... * Don't draft a kicker before the 16th round There is very little difference between the #1 and the #10 kicker and predicting future performance from past performance is a crapshot. Plus if you draft a kicker early, you will be exposed as a fraud :) Every year there are no-name players that have breakout seasons, so use your late round picks trying to hit the lottery. * Try…

How about actual hacking? Can a programmer write a script to automate or enhance their Fantasy Football? Like algorithmic stock trading.

There's a brilliant technical paper written on this subject: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340382/

The authors' (completely algorithmically managed) team managed to get a rank of ~25000 when competing against 2.5Million human players. Pretty damn good if you ask me. This paper is about Fantasy Soccer though. However the same rules apply to Fantasy Football too.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#57

Post by VLM »

ggreer wrote: post #40

Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you eve…

Aside from some topic selection issues, you might want to consider passive vs active topics. Can't do any activity while awake that's more passive than watching TV, almost anything else is more active.

I'm not too interested that a coworker watched someone else exercise on TV. On the other hand, start talking about experiences on local medium distance hiking trails, and I start listening...

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#58

Post by loso »

I have actually gone the opposite when it comes to Fantasy Football. I am a huge football and basketball fan. I am also a very competitive person. So when I played Fantasy sports I found myself too often rooting against my team when it came to getting fantasy points. It started to kill all the fun from watching the game.

So last year I stepped back and didn't play FFB. First season I was able to enjoy without the extra stress of competing in 5 years. This year I didn't play and once again I am enjoying the game more. So I don't think I am going back. I will save my competitive juices for either the basketball court or playing a game online.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#59

Post by xymostech »

VLM wrote: post #55
enjo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting the part were you have fun doing it.

However, the article specified hating football as a prerequisite?

Presumably the fun part comes from the Final Fantasy aspects of it, and not from the football aspects of it. Min-maxing can be very fun by itself, regardless of the subject at hand.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#60

Post by _93kq »

This is my first year of Fantasy Football.

My family did a league this year...to be honest I've always felt left out whenever Football season came around, I just couldn't get into it because I didn't have "My team" like everyone else in my family.

I think it's brought me closer to my family, since I always felt like an outsider whenever I did watch a football game, I had no clue who the good players were and what teams were doing.

Now not only do I enjoy watching the games but I went from an 0-3 record to 4-3 (soon to be 5-3, fingers crossed, 2nd place).

It definitely makes the games more interesting to watch and has a healthy side effect of building better relationships with those you care about.

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