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A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

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Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#3

Post by swanson »

It's been interesting to see the migration of online poker players over to daily fantasy sports (DFS). It definitely feels like the early days of online poker - tons of new sites popping up, heavy TV advertising, lots of new money coming into the "sport". I just started playing DFS this season and it's pretty addictive. Obviously, I don't think I'll be getting rich off it (the "I turned $5 into $50k" stories are just lottery winners essentially), but it's been fun (and a bit scary...) to get into the world of gambling without having to "know a guy". I've always played fantasy football for "fun" so it's been exciting to have a bit of cash on the line.

Daily fantasy is a whole new beast - it's at the intersection of data science, predictive modeling, quants, poker players, sports guys, Vegas, startups (FanDuel and DraftKings are killing it), bootstrapped entrepreneurs (RotoViz). You can make some serious money, put down $5 to make your Sunday afternoon more exciting, or play around with a new data modeling library on some interesting data.

There's a whole industry built around fantasy sports if you look just past the surface of ESPN Fantasy leagues. There are subscriptions sites offering premium content, people willing to sell you their Baynesian prediction models, ebooks about strategy, weekly video shows talking about the best plays. I read somewhere that fantasy football was actually worth more as industry than the NFL!

PS: If you want to try it out, here's a shameful affiliate link because I'm turning into a gamling degenerate: https://www.fanduel.com/?invitedby=swan3788&cnl=da

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#4

Post by jparker165 »

dynofuz wrote: post #2

I've been thinking about this recently. A developer could do so much better (he's still copying from spreadsheets). Who wants to put this guy out of business with me?

You'll surely be more efficient with handling data, but you don't have digital access to all the data you'd need.

For example, the chance that a player plays at all (if they are in questionable health) is one of the most important signals. But you can't just write a regression from past data on that player/team/coach. An intuitive guess from reading several media reports will be far for accurate. This guy is surely manually entering a "%chance of playing" driver into these models.

But, if you teamed up with a subject matter expert that fed meta-predictions into your model, you'd likely end up with better results.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#5

Post by kylebrown »

dynofuz wrote: post #2

I've been thinking about this recently. A developer could do so much better (he's still copying from spreadsheets). Who wants to put this guy out of business with me?

I had fun trying my hand at generating NBA lineups earlier this year.[1] I'd love to give it another go (my email is in my profile).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272365

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#6

Post by ioddly »

jparker165 wrote: post #4
dynofuz wrote: post #2

I've been thinking about this recently. A developer could do so much better (he's still copying from spreadsheets). Who wants to put this guy out of business with me?

You'll surely be more efficient with handling data, but you don't have digital access to all the data you'd need. For example, the chance that a player plays at all (if they are in questionable health) is one of the most important signals. But you can't just write a regression from past data on that player/team/coach. An intuitive guess from reading several media reports will be far for accurate. This guy is surely m…

> You'll surely be more efficient with handling data, but you don't have digital access to all the data you'd need.

It occurs to me that collating said data in an accessible format for a modest fee would be a pretty good low hanging fruit business idea. I'm sure there must be something like that out there but last time I looked into this, 2-3 years ago, I couldn't even get the NBA schedule in JSON or some other programming-friendly format, let alone things like injuries and lineup changes.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#8

Post by lziz »

dynofuz wrote: post #2

I've been thinking about this recently. A developer could do so much better (he's still copying from spreadsheets). Who wants to put this guy out of business with me?

A developer could do the parsing of the data better, but who's to say his spreadsheets (with I'm assuming graphs, color codes, etc) aren't providing the data visualization that makes the actual decision making clearer.

I don't know about putting him out of business, but I bet I could put myself in business with him.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#9

Post by Nicholas_C »

ioddly wrote: post #6
jparker165 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll surely be more efficient with handling data, but you don't have digital access to all the data you'd need. For example, the chance that a player plays at all (if they are in questionable health) is one of the most important signals. But you can't just write a regression from past data on that player/team/coach. An intuitive guess from reading several media reports will be far for accurate. This guy is surely m…

> You'll surely be more efficient with handling data, but you don't have digital access to all the data you'd need. It occurs to me that collating said data in an accessible format for a modest fee would be a pretty good low hanging fruit business idea. I'm sure there must be something like that out there but last time I looked into this, 2-3 years ago, I couldn't even get the NBA schedule in JSON or some other progr…

Sounds like an interesting project. Where would one even get this data from? Scraping ESPN is always an option (a painful one at that) but I'm not sure they would appreciate that.

Edit: After a quick Google search I found several data providers: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-APIs-with-game-schedules-...

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