Writers often try to talk DFS players down from risking more than they are comfortable losing.
However, if you’re playing for more than you can afford to lose, you’re unlikely to last long enough to even dream of reading an article about DFS bankroll management. You aren’t that dumb – and you pray daily that your opponents are – but they’re not. Which is why you need to come at this task of bankroll building in a different way.
I’m a risk-averse fantasy player, especially in traditional play. Rarely do I go out on a limb on an injured player in drafts or take a high-upside rookie. In fantasy baseball, this means I don’t end up with guys like Troy Tulowitzki and Kris Bryant.
But there are plenty of risk-takers in traditional play that do very well for themselves, especially among the fantasy experts. Playing in daily fantasy has similar boundaries: Are you a big risk-taker, a medium risk-taker or are you risk-averse?
Fortunately, your win percentages in daily fantasy play will tell you how your risks are paying off. Risk aversion can be moved up or down a sliding scale if you start with this discussion on DFS bankroll management.
Risk-Averse DFS Bankroll Strategy
If you’re like me and have a conservative approach, you’re playing in mostly 50/50 games and Head-to-Head matchups because it allows for the greatest chance of winning.
The daily fantasy landscape has changed a bit over the years, with more and more people flooding into the major DFS sites. The days of everyone trying to figure things out is a few years behind us, and we now have gameplans on how to properly attack DFS.
I liken this time period to the late ‘90s, when people began to realize quarterbacks weren’t as important in traditional fantasy football play as running backs and wide receivers. People are starting to understand DFS, and that means it’s tougher to win tournaments, even for experienced players.
I apply the 10-percent rule every day in daily fantasy baseball – risking 10 percent of my bankroll on a given day. Why 10 percent? Because compared to other sports, like football, there are many more variables to deal with in daily baseball.
For instance, if you played every day of the baseball regular season, you would end up betting on 178 different days, compared to just 18 days during the NFL regular season (including Thanksgiving Day). In order to last six months, you need to show patience and build your bankroll so you can still play in August and September.
(And that’s not counting the “early” and “late” games you could play that would come close to tripling the amount of DFS events you could take part in on one site every day for baseball.)
Of that 10 percent that you risk every day, what’s the risk-averse breakdown for 50/50 cash games and GPP tournaments?
The smartest route (according to this risk-averse player) is to try the 70/30 method. By betting 70 percent of your money on 50/50 games (and Head-to-Head), you’re giving yourself the best chance of coming out even on any given day. (For now, we’re discarding talk of other games, like triple-ups, only because they change the numbers even more.)
Obviously, you’re also dependent on your skill of filling out winning DFS lineups, but those strategy tips are for different articles. Plus, if you’re wondering about DFS bankroll management, you’re likely already a good lineup picker because you’ve lasted.
Getting That DFS Bankroll Rolling
For argument’s sake, let’s say you have $500 in your account (depositing during reload bonus weeks, of course), then the breakdown would work like this: 10 percent ($50) played daily, with 70 percent ($35) going toward 50/50 and H2H cash games, with the other 30 percent ($15) going into GPP tournaments. (If you’re also intent on using Triple-Ups, then make the money splits somewhere around 65 percent toward 50/50s; 10 percent toward Triple-Ups; and 25 percent toward GPPs.)
If you win 60 percent of the time in your 50/50 games, which is not only doable but necessary, then your $35 will win back, on average, $42 each day. That extra $7 each day goes toward your DFS tournament play, so you’ll need to win a daily average of $8 in your tournament play just to break even, which is doable over the course of a week (winning $56 in seven days).
If you’re betting $35 in 50/50s and $15 in GPPs, and you’re winning 60-percent of your 50/50s, you’ll need to land in the money for tournaments about 10 percent of the time. Obviously, the amount you win in GPPs greatly outweighs what you could win in 50/50s, and that’s where you can potentially gain significant bankroll momentum.
As your bankroll continues to grow, so does your daily amount played. If you grow your bankroll by 20 percent in April, going from $500 in your account to $600, now you’re betting $60 a day (10 percent), with $42 a day going toward 50/50s and $18 going into GPP tournaments. If you build that by 20 percent in the month of April, then it becomes $720 total, with $72 bet per day.
There are still dozens of variables that affect all of this, including your ability to pick winners, the diversity of your lineups, possible overlays in GPPs, the size of the tournaments you enter, etc. This is also dependent on playing all of our games on one website. If you play on several websites, you’ll have to do separate versions of the above strategy for each site.
Tracking Ain’t Just For Old VCRs
I understand that mentioning VCRs just dated me a bit, but let’s move on …
You have to track your DFS play each day in order to really maximize every dollar. Create a spreadsheet that lists the date, your starting bankroll, how much you’re betting, in which types of games you’ve entered, wins, losses, money won and a final column that shows your balance for the day.
This will give you a great idea of how well you’re doing in 50/50s or in GPPs over the course of a month or so, and then you can adjust your gameplay accordingly. If you find you’re really crushing it in 50/50s, then bump the numbers up to a 60/40 split, which a lot of less risk-averse DFS players already use.
You can also use your new spreadsheet to break down how you’re doing on each site if you are playing on several sites at once. You might find, after a month or so, that you’re much better on a particular site than you are at some of the others. That usually means you’re judging the values between player ability and price better at this site for this particular sport. In the end, you could find you are much better at one sport on one DFS site and better at a different sport on another.
If you go the 60/40 route, then with that same $500 initial bankroll and the 10-percent rule of money in play each day, you’d spend just $30 on 50/50 games and $20 in GPP tournaments.
Some other tips that would help you build your risk-averse bankroll:
- Play in several different smaller games rather than one big one. By splitting up your $35 in 50/50 games, you could do seven $5 games, with the same or varied lineups and spread your risk out evenly. With more games entered comes less variance, so if you researched great lineups, they have a better chance of winning among more lineups that are entered, as opposed to just one.
- Play in single-entry games, which helps battle the DFS sharks you hope to someday become.
- Deposit the most you’re able to when a site gives out “reload bonuses,” as this will certainly help your money spent compared to games entered.
- In the end, the risk-averse player is hoping to use his 50/50 winnings to bankroll his GPP tournament play. If you do that 100 days in a baseball season, the odds that you’ll crush at least one or two DFS tournaments along the way are pretty good. And that’s how you use risk aversion to your benefit!