From Poker to DFS Part Two
NFL Week One, 2014

Ever since I made my first DFS lineup in March of 2014 I knew there was something special to DFS. It was like online poker, just different. I felt like I felt the first time I played poker – I am not good at this game yet, but I can make money playing this game if I get good at it, and boy – those opponents of mine, who have played for much longer than I have, don’t seem to be very good at this game either. I knew that I needed to devote some time to DFS to learn things, just like I had to work my butt off to win at poker, and I feel like I am still in that process of learning. I mean I have to be. I played my first hand of online poker in 1999 at PlanetPoker.com, and my game constantly evolved until Black Friday hit in 2011. I am still a rookie at DFS, but so is everybody else.

I didn’t take things too seriously until last fall. I did experience my first tournament wins over the summer, one in golf while I rafted all weekend, and another in baseball when I made a quick lineup to give me reason to listen to a baseball game on my drive to the poker room. I stacked the Indians, they went off for seven runs in the first inning, and I won GPPs. It was fun, but I still felt like a rookie gambler gambling on things. I spent two weeks in the Grand Canyon this time last year, coming out of The Ditch on August 30th, 2014. It was a week before football season started and I didn’t really care. I was offered a gig writing about NFL DFS for the Tribune Media Services and declined because I didn’t know enough about NFL or DFS and didn’t care to learn. I should have accepted though, because by the end of that week I felt like a football expert.

The funny thing about football is that everybody is an expert because you can’t predict shit. Consider how many times football players do things compared to every other athlete. Baseball players play 162 games and get 500 at bats a season. Basketball players touch the ball lots in every game and play 82 games, as do hockey players, and they touch the puck lots. We have tons of data on those guys, so we can feel relatively confident in the statistical significance of data yielded from those sports. Reggie Bush, the guy who played running back at my alma mater USC, has carried the ball 1,266 times in his entire professional career. We know the guy is good at football, but we really don’t know how good he actually is because we don’t have enough data on him, and the data we do have is so variable thanks to age, offensive linemen, and defensive matchups. Last year LeBron James attempted 1279 field goals, more shots in one season for Bron Bron than carries for Bush in 9 professional seasons.

So we can’t predict football. But more people gamble on football than any other sport, I am a professional gambler without anything to do but research football players, and they have jobs. I spent the entire week before week one of last year’s NFL season researching NFL players, and I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on what was going on. Take a quarterback expected to throw for a bunch of yards for your cash games, surround him with a balanced lineup of other guys expected to touch the ball a bunch, and then go forth and profit. If you’re playing tournaments, stack your roster with guys on the same team. Quarterbacks with wide receivers, for example. Then when that QB throws a touchdown to another guy on your team, you score twice, maximizing your upside. Laugh at all the fools taking guys from their favorite teams without much thought, they’re the ones we profit from.
I would have taken things way more seriously if I knew that I was going to have $6k in play that first NFL week.

I never saw it coming, I just had my cash lineup and my GPP lineup and I entered a few hundred dollars worth of contests, but then everything overlaid. I was up early Sunday morning tinkering and listening to late news, wondering when people were going to enter all the contests, and they didn’t. With seconds to go before lock my exposure skyrocketed from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. It was free money Sunday as DraftKings and FanDuel grossly overestimated how much action they would get that first week. Suddenly my cash game lineup went from $300 in play to $5k in play, and I had a lot of interest in Peyton Manning throwing some touchdowns Sunday night.

The feeling I felt after lineups locked at 1pm DFS time was one of fear. I was in for a lot of money and it was all out of my hands. I felt a bit of buyer’s remorse, like I made a mistake, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. Fire $5k on a poker tournament, no problem, but it took me 5 years of playing poker professionally to play a $5k buy-in poker tournament. Now I had $5k in DFS action on football, and I felt like I was being degenerate because September 2014 marked the 6th month of me playing DFS leisurely.

I only had a handful of guys playing in the first round of games, and they didn’t do well. I had some guys in the 2nd round of games, and they didn’t do well either. I did have Peyton Manning and Julius Thomas playing in the Sunday Night game, and I wasn’t able to pay attention to that game because I was launching a 2 day rafting trip on Monday, and Sunday night was the time to get ready for that. I felt like I was fixin’ to lose $5k and had accepted that throughout the Sunday, and then I disappeared into the wilderness. I emerged on Tuesday and learned that Peyton threw three touchdowns to Julius Thomas that night, scoring enough points between the two of them to propel my cash game lineup to victory.

I think I wouldn’t have gone down the DFS road that I have if I lost all that money that weekend. It certainly would have soured me a bit on things. I suppose that is the lesson here as we head into week one this year. I don’t know if this year will be like last year, but I do know it will be bigger. I imagine the sites learned from their overlay last year, but the sites have already announced their flagship contests for NFL week one and they are much bigger than last year. DraftKings has announced a tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $10,000,000 and a buy-in of $20… that’s 500,000 unique lineups just to meet the guarantee. Amazing.

DFS is just like poker. Remember when you discovered poker, remember how much work it took to get good, and that’s what you have to do here in DFS. The good news is that time has been turned back so that everybody else is bad at DFS too now, because experts like me just learned how to play DFS too.

Enjoy the ride this fall, don’t hurt yourself, and have fun. NFL DFS is poker. Poker is a game of people, so is DFS.

Devo