Srn828, a sports bettor turned pro DFS player, has spent the last several days answering user questions in the DFT forum. (You can view the full thread here.)
We’ve pulled a few questions below that might be of interest to sports bettors looking to follow a similar path.
Have questions for Srn828? Feel free to post them here.
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What’s the best way to determine if you’re +EV in daily fantasy? In sports betting, measuring closing line value is often considered the best method. What’s the DFS equivalent to measuring CLV?
The best way to determine whether you are +EV in a particular DFS sport at a particular dollar-level is to play it until your sample size is large enough to make an appropriate determination of your edge. For a sport like football, that may take two seasons since the games are once a week, but for a sport like basketball, you can perhaps begin to make some sort of determination after a couple of months of consistent play.
In the shorter term for day-to-day lineup analysis to know whether you got the best of it, a la CLV, pay attention to the ownership percentages in cash games. You want players that are highly owned in your lineup. There is a very good reason those players are highly owned on a given day: that reason is they are incorrectly priced in that given situation. This, of course, if a long-term general rule of thumb.
Do you think a successful sports bettor, someone who derives at least half of their annual income from betting, will find success playing DFS? Or, in simpler terms, do you think being a skillful sports bettor translates in any way to DFS?
Simply put, yes. While there are differences and certainly no guarantees, I expect there would be a strong positive correlation between those that are +EV in the sports market and those that are +EV in the DFS market. It is also no small coincidence that many top DFS players were successful poker players. The skills do correlate.
The similarity between being successful at the sports betting market and DFS is accurately spotting pricing inefficiencies. It is, of course, that much more similar to the proposition market; however, that said, the major difference is the static pricing in DFS. In DFS, the salaries for players are set a day prior in the NBA and almost a week prior in the NFL. Since these player salaries do not change until the contest results, you will see huge inaccuracies due to information that comes out through the course of the week or day.
This is much more the case in a sport like basketball where, during the regular season at least, you will have different players missing games due to nagging injuries or rest. This creates significant opportunities to find pricing inaccuracies and maximize the fantasy points scored per dollar spent.