Learn (ReLearning) Fantasy Sports

I have been playing fantasy sports (mainly football) since the 1990's, back then the game wasn't as tough as it is today, or should I say, I perceived the game as very easy, when in fact it was not.

Fast forward to 2007, and I have played a lot of fantasy sports, doing considerably poorly and entering my 3rd year of fantasy baseball, in which I have 2 7th place finishes out of 8 teams.................this is when a watershed moment occurred in my fantasy sports career................it was actually the combination of 2 separate conjoining ideas that spawned the epiphany.......1) Moneyball Michael Lewis' excellent book got me thinking like a true GM, it was the first time (since I first read the book Fortune's Formula) that I had heard the word Arbitrage...........(arbitrage is basically securing a profit based on market ineffeciencies)........2) I had gotten deeper into poker and started to study gambling a little more diligently, the term +EV had recently popped up into my thick skull and I could not rid myself of it................the combination of the two got me thinking that Fantasy Sports are just gambling, with +EV situations (ie, opportunities to draft better, and win money in leagues)...........I realized that in fantasy sports (which is different from actual sports) drafts are the majority of the league...............sure, very occassionally, a team makes a great trade or pick up that propels them to a championship, but most times, the championship is won on Day 1, the draft. The funny thing about this most obvious idea is that almost nobody subscribes to it.......................even today, all the mags you read and ESPN (which sux by the way, but we'll get to that later) and the fantasy sites, etc, all tell you it is a long season, makes moves, stay up to date with your team.................all of this has some relevance, but you realistically need to win the league (or at least get into the money paying positions) on draft day..........................

HOW THE FUCK WAS I GOING TO DO THIS?????

Luckily for me, I had played a lot of poker, and I know people based on this fact, people who like to gamble..................plus, the first league I would try this in, I knew the cast of characters, making it easier.......................also, I had some people to bounce ideas off of.............well........not exactly I guess, I didn't really want people to know my ideas indepth, but I wanted to know theirs. See, one important aspect of gambling is that you take advantage of whatever edge an opponent provides you...........I play in a poker league and routinely, most of my opponents play too many hands, so the edge they give me is that they play weaker hands than I do, so when I do play, I can get lots of money in the pot, with a superior hand...................I felt some of the same types of edges would exist in fantasy sports. I, also am of a train of thought that the people winning fantasy leagues (or any game for that matter) are generally NOT LUCKY, they usually have a strategy that is superior to the other players and whether any of the parties realize exactly what that is, is irrelevant, the only point is that these strategies work. I digress.................so, my first plan was to study previous drafts from this league, as well as listen to anything that anyone (who has done this longer than me) had to say about fantasy baseball.............I studied not only the good teams (which I studied more carefully), but I also studied the teams will poor results, that I felt had knowledge of the particular sport (I could've studied myself in football to come up with the same ideas). JP (the person who runs and routinely wins this league) was nice enough to share all of the old drafts and other items with me, as well as act as a sounding board for some general ideas I threw around (some of which I felt might not be right)................see the idea of my study of this particular case was not only to see what the good teams were doing to win (that was the easy part), but to see where teams weaknesses were and how to exploit them................like in poker, or any gambling game, you need to find an edge.............in most poker games, you can find a few soft players who pay you off too much, or you can find players playing a game they are weaker at (trust me, I won many Pot Limit Omaha tourneys playing against clueless No Limit Holdem players).............

SUBJECTIVITY

After my study, I realized that subjectivity was the main culprit for certain people. These people are knowledgable about their sport, but they have selective memory and tend to believe rumors too readily.....................they won't pick a player because they had a bad year in which they were on this persons team (Don't get me started about Fred Taylor, yes, I am a member of Subjectivity city, or at least I was)................I realized that the worst thing you could say in fantasy sports is "I LIKE", because I LIKE is an irrelevant term................just because you like something, doesn't mean it helps.............I LIKE french fries, but they are about the last thing I need with my currently expanding waistline. Even better is I DON'T LIKE..............I don't like him, because he isn't this, or he isn't that, totally disregarding basic principles of fantasy sports. In order to beat others at fantasy sports, I needed to get rid of Subjectivity and move in with his arch rival objectivity

OBJECTIVITY

Once I realized that totally being objective was the right way to go, I could come up with a better understanding...................I had a meeting with my league partner Jon, about 1 month before the season started, our meeting was to discuss our first round draft pick, of which we had a list of about 10 people to consider............we broke down each player diligently, and figured out who would be best for us, given the many mock drafts we had done and given.................(OH, I almost forgot..........the child of objectivity for me, was statistical analysis, I think the Moneyball nerds used a bit of that)................and using my statistical analysis, we came up with a name, that particular year, the name was Chase Utley................that is hardly significant, what was significant was that we discovered something very important that day, something that should drive people to play fantasy sports better, but I am sure does not.....................when playing around with our database schedules, I mistakenly slide the column over the names...................in other words, just a position, a data line (which was an average of several projections) and a relative league value (remember every league is different, rules, amount of players, teams, etc, which is why fantasy magazines are complete garbage, but that is another tangent)............our players were nameless.................I can't remember who said it, but we agreed that the way to win leagues, is to draft without bias of the names and to take advantage of those who look at the names..................between our data analysis and totally blind (well not totally, but basically) name drafting, a system was born, we would take relative value, all throughout the draft and live with the results.....................this did two things for us.................1) It helped us to take advantage of the ever fluid market which is a fantasy draft..........players values are jumping all around throughout the draft, you see really good picks, really bad picks, you see solid values, huge gambles and the like............our ideals would allow us to take advantage of any situation that occurred. 2) We would never get trapped into a particular style, or get pushed out of one..................I have played in leagues with guys who decide, their strategy is to do A, B and C, unfortunately, everyone grabs the A's, the B's end being not as good as you thought, and the C's are so plentiful that the same caliber of player you drafted in the middle rounds, goes at the end as well.............a poor recipe.

I still remember the first draft that we used data analysis and our fluid market style.................not one person in the room (besides an onlooker) thought we had a snowballs chance in hell at putting together a good team..............anyone playing fantasy baseball in 2007 would realize that Sheffield in the 10th, Sabathia in the 12th and Beckett in the 18th are picks that help you win money.................but that is after the draft, at the time, we were grabbing up VALUE.

I'll have more fantasy sports theories and styles in future articles