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Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

jere.in

21–30 of 68 posts

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#21
For this post, I'm going to make a couple of simple, reasonable assumptions. 1) there exists only two types of people in this world: jocks and nerds 2) you're the latter

Assumption 1) is not reasonable, these two groups are not mutually exclusive. I am definitely in both groups, although I might use different terminology.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#22

For this post, I'm going to make a couple of simple, reasonable assumptions. 1) there exists only two types of people in this world: jocks and nerds 2) you're the latter Assumption 1) is not reasonable, these two groups are not mutually exclusive. I am definitely in both groups, although I might use different terminology.

Hmm... really thought that part was oozing with sarcasm.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#23

For this post, I'm going to make a couple of simple, reasonable assumptions. 1) there exists only two types of people in this world: jocks and nerds 2) you're the latter Assumption 1) is not reasonable, these two groups are not mutually exclusive. I am definitely in both groups, although I might use different terminology.

Jock is not a synonym for athletic.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#24
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.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#26
This is a great article, and I was considering starting Fantasy Football this season for the same effect. I will make one finer-grained distinction, however, that the ability to shoot the shit about football is a useful one depending on what you're trying to do with your life.

The trade-off is that everything takes time and attention. Lots of different priorities compete for our attention, and while registering in your office's fantasy league might be a small time investment, it might be a disproportionately larger attention investment. You will start noticing games, players, conversations about football, etc., with much more frequency than you previously had.

In my personal life, I've sat through many sporting events and conversations with the attention of a dullard with ADD. I generally tune out all sports-related things and devote my extra attention at these events to thinking about other things which are more interesting to me, or ruminating on a problem I am trying to solve. These are potentially useful things I would give up if I am more actively focused on sports-related things as a by-product of simply choosing some big names in a Fantasy draft.

At the end of the day, I still find it worth the trade-off, but only because I am optimizing for a certain level of "ubituitous social lubrication" at the expense of, say, skipping the office happy hour and watching a Coursera course on machine learning (a contrived example, but you get my point). You may not want to make this trade-off if you are not trying to be a "general people-person", or if you can obtain this same social lubrication through other avenues (IE, politics).

tldr; This article is very important for startup founders, perhaps not so much for systems engineers / data scientists.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#27

For this post, I'm going to make a couple of simple, reasonable assumptions. 1) there exists only two types of people in this world: jocks and nerds 2) you're the latter Assumption 1) is not reasonable, these two groups are not mutually exclusive. I am definitely in both groups, although I might use different terminology.

By posting your concern on HN, you self-selected the latter group.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#28
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 guaranteed.

I actually like the idea behind Value Based Drafting, and will probably still use it the next few years, though, not for my primary league anymore.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#29
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.

The biggest aspect of Fantasy Football is the draft - where you select your players before the start of the season. So the area where you could apply some actual hacking is the projection/simulation of player performance to come up with your own rankings. Hopefully, this could allow you to pick undervalued players - so similar to predicting stocks. Basically you can treat it as a statistical modeling exercise and go from there.

There is no realtime aspect to fantasy sports, you are usually setting a roster weekly, waiting for the games to be played for the week, and then seeing the results. So something like high frequency trading doesn't really apply.

Re: Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

#30
Another fun angle to look at fantasy football is to apply financial concepts to it.

For example, I have Tony Romo and Dez Bryant on my team, who are the QB and WR for the Cowboys and if one puts up a bunch of points, the other will as well, which means I take on a lot of variance for an expected high return. Or I could take both Jimmy Graham and Pierre Thomas, who play TE and RB for the Saints; since the Saints have a fixed (well, sorta) amount of offensive opportunities, you're giving up a certain amount of possible return in order to have a guarantee that, between those two players, you'll have a decent number of points -- even though every rep Graham gets is a potential rep taken away from Thomas and vice-versa.

(The way this differs from traditional financial planning is that success is unary; you win or you don't. So you get a great balance of trying to only take on as much risk as you need to win.)

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