2015.02.11 FANTASY GENESIS

 My first inclination to fantasy sports occurred in the late 1980s with baseball. Back then you would choose one of around eight or so players in a group with several group.  There were ways of making changes mid-season even though there was no internet, and back then snail mail was used a lot more as it was here.  You were usually aloud so many changes for free and additional moves would cost money and I only took the free ones.   I was a big fan of baseball then as just a young child and maybe the Jays success had something to do with it. Living close to Toronto, they are my local team  were winning every year until 1994.  In the eighties I played baseball all the time in the summer and play hockey in the winter.  I got to know many players during this era for both baseball and hockey.<br><br>In the Mid 1990s and now a young adult of around twenty years young, I was invited to a live Fantasy hockey draft which was my first. I cheer for the Montreal Canadiens and living in Canada it is almost religion to play and follow hockey.  I guess it was because the Leafs were so bad in the eighties that I decided to loath the Leafs and Montreal was winning.  Montreal had recently traded my icon in Patrick Roy and there wasn't any players on my Habs I liked.  I suppose it made it easy to learn to throw favorite biases aside and go for best value.  I prepared hard for this NHL live draft by buying two fantasy magazines and then using a spreadsheet to print off rankings for the live draft.  Try to figure out players on the rise and decline, how to mix your positions and so forth.  I clearly was many steps ahead of other people and almost everyone older than me.  I won that pool and finished second the next year.  The year after that I was not invited to the next draft. As I got older and other methods of sport gambling opened up, it was the NFL that ended up being the game that I loved the most and could follow very well. I played a bunch of Madden franchises on a video game platform and am confident today I can talk advanced game theory and play calling with the best of them in the NFL. I started playing the fantasy drafts in 2005 and have not looked back as I have participated each year since. Being so good at drafting, picking the right guys off waivers and doing good with my sit/start or projections I did very well every season.

Many years ago I seen fantasy leagues with buy-in fees, but after seeing rake that was close to 50%, I stayed with the free leagues on Yahoo and did very well with them usually dominating via waiver wire and being good at Sit/Starts.  I understand rake is needed for these companies to exist, but the rake has to also be low enough where players at least have a chance of grinding out profits and at 50% that is not the case.  In the 2013 NFL season I heard about daily fantasy and didn't try it and didn't even knew how it worked.  Originally I boycotted this because fantasy is not supposed to be just for one day,

 The Summer of 2014 I was now interested in playing that I created an account with DraftKings and FanDuel. Weeks later, I made a deposit of $42 into draftkings when the season started. I'd play single lineups for around $2.00 and didn't do that well. There is luck involved, but as a player your job is to put yourself in the best chance to have luck on your side. It was early in the NHL season where I did very well and built my bankroll to over $80 and then started playing multiple NFL lineups and success was immediate that lasted all the way to the conference championship games. Hockey got very unlucky and turned to negative ROI for the year, but because NFL was winning I was able to continue to build the bankroll into triple digit values. Mid way through the season I put a deposit of $50 into Fanduel and every lineup I played there lost. I didn't like playing there because it was harder for me to put a lineup in that I would really like which I could easily do on Draftkings and on FanDuel I couldn't make late game changes. Thursday night NFL comes, you put your lineup in and find out on Friday, I can't change my lineup.  I am always making changes to my lineups over the weekend as new information comes in.  This makes late game changes mandatory or I can't play on Thursday.  I emailed FanDuel asking how I edit players or why they have a rule that I can not edit my roster and I got no reply back. With $27 left in my bankroll and about eight straight losing lineups I decided to bet it all on one big lineup and it was unlucky on that site.  Later on another blog i'll discuss bankroll management to explain situations to go all-in with your bankroll, but in this case it was frustration on the site.  I have no reason to play again on FanDuel again as Draftkings has me covered for very large field games.

Many sports I don't know I would fool around and play games for just a twenty-five cents.  I learned after one soccer card to not play that again when my stud player didn't even start and the site didn't have a Q, D or O tag on, UFC is something I am not good at and NCAA hoops or football I tried and have already given up on.  A few weeks into the start of the 2014-15 NBA season, I decided to play for 25 cents and hardly knew anyone who played in this league. All I did was find as many minimum price guys or close to min that could get enough points. On draftkings the min cost for a player is 3,000 and the top players cost over 10k.  The top guys netted you between 40-50 point averages.   I figured then by getting only around twenty points each from three min priced players could end up in success because top players were easy to pick.  I was actually winning at this, so I upped the stakes and played the $2-$5 games the rest of the way and have endured tiny profits in this sport. It became harder to find cheap players as the season rolled, but newer knowledge would start to give me more strategies to use and I kept on chugging a small ROI (Return on Investment.) The rest of this season is all for learning in the hopes I will dominate the start of the 2015-16 season as new learning experiences occur.  I figure that when the next season comes I will do a lot better.  I've watched about six or seven games this year and I am getting the hang of being able to predict how the course of a game is done from a roster point of view.