Imagine you are a blue-chip high school recruit, and every week, you’re receiving more and more correspondence from big-time colleges asking you to come play for them. By playing with them, you’ll have a better chance to win, your talents will get more recognition and you’ll be in line to make millions of dollars if you’re any good.
Just don’t sign with an agent!
Every month or so, it seems like Daily Fantasy Sports players come across either a new DFS website or an older DFS website promising bonuses for depositing money into an account on their site. But we’ve been playing on the same site for a couple years now, and we’ve seen the DFS landscape rise and fall with the number of new sites.
The question arises – is it better to play on multiple DFS sites, taking advantage of bonuses, or is it better to stick with one DFS site and master it?
One DFS Player for All, and All DFS Websites For One
We’ll try to offer arguments for both sides, and come out with a definitive answer at the end.
Pros of Playing on Multiple DFS Websites
There are several reasons we want to play on multiple sites:
Deposit Bonuses: You know what tastes better than apple pie? FREE apple pie.
We find ourselves working to build a bankroll on one site, slowly stacking bricks one on top of another (while losing a few bricks once in a while), and then we see a “Double Your Deposit” bonus if you join another DFS site. Obviously, getting to 200% just by depositing some money is a very good thing.
Unfortunately, the days of the instant cash bonus are pretty much behind us, save for a couple sites. Now, most sites are using “drip” bonuses that pay you a small percentage of bonus cash the more you play their games. Without a doubt, it’s a smarter business move on the website’s part, but that doesn’t make DFS players feel any better.
Now, a deposit bonus means you’re committed to playing over a certain length of time on that site in order to get said bonus. Regardless of time spent, free money is still free money, no matter how long it takes to acquire it.
Minnows? Minn-yes!: The common thought is that the sharks don’t have time to play on smaller sites or DFS sites with smaller tournament prizes. They’re busy doing research, building lineups and entering dozens of 50/50 games and multiple GPP lineups on their DFS site of choice, where they know every opponent.
But in reality, professional DFS players are already familiar with these sites and have either deemed them not worth the hassle (the amount of time to prepare and fill out lineups compared to the expected winnings), or they’ve stayed and have chosen to clean up.
The common DFS player is hoping for the former, obviously, allowing them to compete unabated with other non-professionals.
Friendly Scoring System: You might find that you’re better at determining values for specific types of players on different DFS sites. Perhaps you’re better in Daily Fantasy Baseball systems that use two starting pitchers as opposed to one. Maybe you do better on sites with a wider disparity between the stars and the scrubs?
In Daily Fantasy Football, you might see more success in games that have larger starting lineups, with three wide receivers and two flex players, or perhaps those with two starting quarterbacks.
Outside of DraftKings and FanDuel, there are many other DFS sites with different types of scoring systems. By playing on several of them, you could end up finding one that matches your strategies much better than others.
Cons of Playing on Multiple DFS Websites
To take the college athlete metaphor another step, imagine after you’ve already chosen to play for one college, the other schools are still allowed to keep recruiting you. Heck, you’re even allowed to play for these other colleges while you’re still playing for your original choice. How can that possibly go wrong!?!
Spreading Money/Time Pretty Thinly: With so many lineups to fill out on different sites, you’re wasting time sorting through dollar values, when you should be researching stats and matchups.
Your Brain Might Explode: Do I need to even explain this one? … Oh, I do. OK, well, if you’re playing on several different DFS sites each week, you’ll be juggling many different scoring systems in your head. Sure, a home run and a win are always good things, as are touchdowns and 100-yard rushing games. But does your site deduct points for a hitter that gets caught stealing or a pitcher that allows walks?
On FanDuel, for instance, it’s much more important for a pitcher to get a win (4 pts), with earned runs subtracting just one point each (4 ER + W = 0 pts). But on DraftKings, it’s actually more important to use pitchers that have better command over the game, since an earned run subtracts two points each (4 ER + W = (-2 pts)). That’s not even mentioning the fact that FanDuel has just one pitcher slot and DraftKings has two.
Now, imagine all the different things you’d need to remember if you end up playing regularly on five DFS sites. What about the different styles of games, also? From Salary to Drafts to Pick’ems, you’ll need an extra brain to carry it all.
Lose Out on Freerolls: Many DFS sites offer freerolls with nice payouts to loyal gamers. DraftDay.com, for instance, offers freerolls based on a tiered system. If you have $100 in monthly buy-ins, you’ll be entered into a “bronze” freeroll with $500 in prizes. But if you play $250 in a month, you’ll get in on a $1,000 “Silver” freeroll, and $1,000 monthly buy-ins gets you into a $1,500 “gold” tournament. If you’re spending cash on other sites, you’ll get that initial bonus, but it will be tough to build up on loyalty points.
My Suggested Gameplan for Playing Multiple DFS Sites
Space it out. Play all the DFS sites, but space out how much you play them.
You likely have one favorite DFS site that you play on regularly – keep playing on that one. Then choose another DFS site to try out for a preset period of time – two weeks, three weeks or until your initial deposit runs out. But even if you’re a baller, play the freerolls in order to get a bead on the scoring system and lineup requirements.
Track your play – including which sites, which types of games and even which strategy you might have employed, along with your wins and losses.
Then move on to another site for a few weeks, and do the same thing. After you’ve hit all the new sites you’ve wanted to try out, go back to your spreadsheet and determine which ones were successful enough to keep playing on. Then withdraw your money from the DFS sites you hated, and pour it all into one or two DFS sites.
Obviously, the more you initially deposit into a DFS site, the bigger the bonus is going to be. So it’s difficult to tell someone to deposit the max bonus amount possible on every site. If you can, then do. If you can’t, then deposit the max bonus amount for the first website – the one you already have a good idea you might like the most anyway – and deposit what you can on the other ones as you go. Who knows? Maybe you’ll win enough in those three or four weeks to withdraw and deposit into your next DFS experiment site! … (Not likely, though.)
Either way, you’ll learn a lot in trying out these other DFS sites, but be cautious not to overstretch yourself (and your money). But you’ll want to do it strategically – just like how you fill out your DFS lineups!
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David Gonos is a fantasy sports expert whose work can be found at SI.com, among other sites. He was previously a writer at sites such as CBS Sports and Fox Sports, and he’s been playing fantasy since 1989. Gonos is likely to contribute regular DFS articles to Betting Talk in the future. You can visit him at his website, DavidGonos.com, or follow him on Twitter.