You don’t know anything about sports? That’s fine. I do, and still felt outmatched when considering jumping into the DFS world. I bet you are good at analyzing data and applying that data to a gambling environment though. Me too. That’s exactly what got me into DFS.

It took me about a year after Black Friday to discover Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS). A part of me was turned off by the fact that the same law that deemed online poker illegal also paved the way for people to gamble on fantasy sports, defining the game as one of skill. They were absolutely correct that fantasy sports are a game of skill, and the Department of Justice corrected themselves later that year and clarified that they were actually cool with poker. Either way they left the decision up to the states, and for some reason at this point 3 states are okay with online poker, but only allow people to play against other people in their state. Daily Fantasy Sports are okay in 45 states and we can play against people in any state and Canada. I don’t like it either but it is the way it is. If I, as an American, want to gamble online, then DFS is my best option at this time.

My first real conversation about DFS came with Al Zeidenfeld at a poker table in Los Angeles. He told me all about how it’s just like online poker, poker players will be really good at it because it is just analysis of data with money involved, and I don’t need to know much about a sport to compete in DFS. It all sounded very fun and interesting to me, but the money didn’t excite me at all. Al said he was up about $30k on baseball halfway through the season and his biggest edge came from weather. Al was already one of the best at this point, so I really didn’t see much of a ceiling that was enough to get me to spend less time playing live poker so I could learn how to play fantasy sports online.

Fast forward a couple of years and the scene of poker has changed even more. At this point I had sold my house in Vegas and pretty much given up on Vegas for poker outside of the WSOP. I found the games in Vegas had become much more difficult than various regional poker games around the country like Minnesota, Washington, Arizona, New England, Florida, and I chose Colorado. There was no reason to live in Vegas anymore when poker was softer in more optimal places to live. I felt like poker was on the decline and I really started scrambling for a plan B, considering things like opening a pawn shop or buying a rafting company. Then in March of 2014, my friend Thomas Fuller invited me to his place to check out DFS before we went to a hockey game together. He seemed really excited about it and DFS was still something I wanted to check out, and I’m glad I did.

It didn’t take long for me to get hooked. Tom showed me his spreadsheet and talked about how all they do is turn the guys into math problems. I was looking at basketball, something I know nothing about, but they had turned basketball into numbers, which I am pretty good with. He said he had only seen one game all season. He said they have so much data on these guys that they can accurately predict how many fantasy points per minute these guys will score. Then if you predict their minutes the best, you win all the money. I like winning money, and I know some things about pari mutuel wagering. If you can beat your opposition at a rate greater than the house cut then you can be profitable at pari mutuel betting. The rakes on DFS were identical to online poker so I knew they may be beatable, but how do you beat your opposition for a significant return on investment in fantasy sports? I assumed that people ended up with the same lineup all the time if the plays were so mathematical. Turns out that there is a skill in assigning value to players and turns out that people are bad at gambling and math, especially when the thing they’re gambling on is a relatively new thing.

I decided to give it a go. Turns out the NBA in March is not the time to learn how to play DFS. NBA is a very tough game to win at unless you know what you are doing. It has the most significant sample sizes of data and the most events per game making it the easiest to accurately predict. So when you’re wrong at NBA, it is much more difficult for your inferior play to outperform the optimal play. I lost that March, but I knew there was something here. The money was now significant enough to have my attention. The 2014 NFL season and rumors of a boom were on the horizon. The skill gaps seemed very real to me and the rake seemed beatable. And like Al Smizzle said, if you think NBA DFS is fun, wait until you play a game you actually love and understand like baseball.

Boy was he right. I understand baseball, having played it competitively through high school and being a lifelong fan. My freshman year co-MVP went on to play for the Mariners, I ruined my arm a couple of years later and had to get a full time job at 16 because my dad took off and left my mom unemployed. I knew that baseball was a game of math as well, just with a lot more variance. Most teams in professional baseball can beat anybody once in a while, and the best hitter in the game will go 0 for 4 on a semi-regular basis. How that manifested itself in MLB DFS was that I saw people make inferior plays quite often. People were less concerned with the math in baseball as they were in basketball. In basketball you just simply lose if you ignore math, but in baseball your sub-optimal team will win much more often. Players can make mistakes in baseball and blame losses on bad luck. By the end of the season I noticed that my scores fluctuated more in baseball, but my win rates were higher than basketball.

Nobody knew how much growth the NFL season in 2014 would bring, but we were all excited for the ride.