Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

online.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#21

Post by comrh »

swanson wrote: post #3

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…

I've said the same thing about the early days of online poker to people putting money in those sites. Have fun and all but watch out for the regulatory hammer.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#22

Post by duwease »

fleaflicker wrote: post #7

I have never understood why daily games are legal. The outcomes can be determined by random events like injuries or the weather. How is this not gambling?

It's legal because no major industry has turned their lobbying efforts on outlawing it yet. There's no clear philosophical line between gambling and, say, investing.. there's just (decreasingly) moral crusaders and (increasingly) interests who profit from keeping things illegal outside of their personal holdings.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#23

Post by kylebrown »

downandout wrote: post #18
ericdykstra wrote: post #16

I have a lot of knowledge of advanced baseball statistic analysis, and played about $100 per day this year during the season, making a profit of ~$2000. This is my third straight winning season, but the first where I actually wrote code that spat out lineups. I spent no money on data, everything you need is available for free. If anyone has advanced knowledge of other sports and wants to collaborate, send me an email…

Interesting...I tried doing machine learning for daily fantasy baseball and it just didn't work. I wrote a scraper that put Fanduel results and contest payout structures into a database, then backtested against thousands of contests to see where I would have wound up had I played in those contests using projections from the machine learning algorithm. I figured I would eventually make the algorithm profitable. Unfort…

I'm actually surprised you didn't overfit the data until the backtests showed you had a profitable algorithm. I bet most people would've done that.. I'm curious, what kind of algo were you training?

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#24

Post by downandout »

kylebrown wrote: post #23
downandout wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting...I tried doing machine learning for daily fantasy baseball and it just didn't work. I wrote a scraper that put Fanduel results and contest payout structures into a database, then backtested against thousands of contests to see where I would have wound up had I played in those contests using projections from the machine learning algorithm. I figured I would eventually make the algorithm profitable. Unfort…

I'm actually surprised you didn't overfit the data until the backtests showed you had a profitable algorithm. I bet most people would've done that.. I'm curious, what kind of algo were you training?

With Weka, I was able to test a wide variety of algos. When every Weka algo failed, I tried Google's prediction API with a wide variety of combinations of data and that failed as well. I thought for sure that one of them would work. Unfortunately, not a single one got me profitable over the long term. I could actually win slightly more than 50% of the time on 50/50 and "Double Up" contests, but that doesn't beat the rake.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#25

Post by JamesSwift »

swanson wrote: post #3

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…

I was thinking about this the other day and I decided that fantasy football is the most significant contributing factor in the crazy market share the NFL currently enjoys compared to the other major sports. If not for fantasy football, I don't think the NFL would be as overwhelmingly popular compared to the other sports as it is today. Because of fantasy football, nearly every game on television is watchable, because nearly every game has implications to the fantasy-viewer.

Of course, a lot of what makes fantasy football compelling to play is derived in part from what makes football compelling as a fan. 16 game seasons mean every game means something. One game a week, all on Sunday (until this dumb Thursday night football BS started), means there is a low overhead to team management. Multiple skill positions and multiple (interesting) ways to score (fantasy) points allows for varying strategies. Add all of those together and you end up with a game that is accessible to the masses, yet engaging and deep enough for those that choose to compete.

This is what ultimately holds back the other major fantasy leagues (NHL, NBA, MLB). Daily fantasy sports are a huge win for gaining back some of that market share, so it will be interesting how that affects actual viewership numbers in the future. Personally, I think the NBA is going to gain back some of the ground it has lost since the 90s.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#26

Post by kylebrown »

comrh wrote: post #21
swanson wrote: post #3

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…

I've said the same thing about the early days of online poker to people putting money in those sites. Have fun and all but watch out for the regulatory hammer.

The online poker sites operated offshore, through high-risk credit card processors.

Fantasy sports markets, otoh, have Yahoo and CBS as operators (both take ~30% rake). FanDuel is processing a few hundred million through PayPal. Presumably, these companies are all paying taxes, so this time everybody's in on it.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#27

Post by JamesSwift »

ericdykstra wrote: post #16

I have a lot of knowledge of advanced baseball statistic analysis, and played about $100 per day this year during the season, making a profit of ~$2000. This is my third straight winning season, but the first where I actually wrote code that spat out lineups. I spent no money on data, everything you need is available for free. If anyone has advanced knowledge of other sports and wants to collaborate, send me an email…

Is there a reason you seem to favor head-to-head over, say, a 50/50 structure?

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#28

Post by JamesSwift »

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…

The services are out there, and they ain't cheap.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#29

Post by rebel »

I've always wondered, do you need a licensing deal to use individual player stats etc. to run a site like this? If not, it seems like the barrier to entry would be quite low and you wouldn't even really need the network effects that poker requires.

Re: A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula

#30

Post by ericdykstra »

JamesSwift wrote: post #27
ericdykstra wrote: post #16

I have a lot of knowledge of advanced baseball statistic analysis, and played about $100 per day this year during the season, making a profit of ~$2000. This is my third straight winning season, but the first where I actually wrote code that spat out lineups. I spent no money on data, everything you need is available for free. If anyone has advanced knowledge of other sports and wants to collaborate, send me an email…

Is there a reason you seem to favor head-to-head over, say, a 50/50 structure?

I tried to spread it around. My general strategy during the last month was: $40 in head-to-head (5 each of $1, $2, $5) $50 in double-ups (5 each of $5) $10-20 in big tournaments (usually just the $2 tournament with 10,000 players)

I put my best overall lineups in the head-to-head and double-up format, trying to limit too much exposure to one team unless it was an obviously superior play to do so, and 5-10 different lineups for the tournament structure, where I went with higher variance plays.

Post reply on HN