“You’re a very kind man. Very kind. Thank you. Very kind.”
— Babu Bhatt, “The Cafe,” Seinfeld
I don’t like to brag about this, but I’m pretty much a world-class humanitarian. I know that sounds like the first half of an Anthony Jeselnik joke — and it probably is — but it’s also true.
For instance, I think about helping other people almost all the time. That counts for something.
Anyway, I’ve recently started volunteering for a local community service program. I mean, the judge told me I had to do it, but I also wanted to, so it’s a win-win-win for everyone. And what do I do as a volunteer? I literally teach refugees from war-torn countries how to read. Again, this isn’t a Jeselnik joke.
In all seriousness, I believe that you should be the change you want to see in the world, and that’s why I’m volunteering. It’s the small act I can do to be a good neighbor to disadvantaged people who believe in the promise of this country. Incrementally, maybe I can make the world a better place for a few people trying to find a home. That seems worth doing. Not everyone has the time or desire to teach adults how to read, but we can each do something small on a regular basis to improve the world, even if it’s just being a little bit kinder to the challenged barista who always screws up the d*mn coffee order.
Also, when I tell people that I teach refugees how to read — and that’s basically how I start every conversation with strangers (“Hi, I’m Matt, I write about fantasy sports for a living, but my real passion is teaching refugees how to read”) — people automatically assume I’m a good person, which is the main reason anyone does anything altruistic, right?
But, all joking aside, in the end I volunteer because, when I teach refugees how to read, I learn subtle lessons about daily fantasy sports.
That was a joke. Sort of.
Adult Learning
Unless you’re Davis Mattek, who started playing fantasy sports when he was seven years old — he just turned 16, I think — you’ve probably learned how to play DFS as an adult.
You’re an adult learner.
As I’ve recently learned, adults learn information differently than children. While many children can learn a variety of concepts quickly, adult success is usually the result of one main factor: Repetition.
I think this principle also extends beyond learning. For instance, if you want to improve your physical health, then you need to exercise, eat well (or at least better), and get good sleep . . . regularly . . . over an extended period of time. From one day to the next you might not notice a difference, but over the weeks, months, years, and even decades . . .
- You’ll become healthier in comparison to your old self.
- You’ll become healthier in comparison to other people.
. . . and then one day, before you know it — you’re f*cking dead.
OK, that time I really went for the Jeselnik-style joke. But you get the idea: Through repetition, adults achieve success.
Laubach Way to Reading: Level 1
That’s the name of the first book that many adults learning to read English use. It basically teaches the alphabet. There are accompanying workbooks. And everything — everything — is structured around the idea of reinforcing through repetition.
Here’s how adult learners are introduced to the letter “G” in the first lesson of the book:
This simple system is actually quite brilliant: The image of the girl looks like a lowercase g; the image of the girl is presented again, this time with an overlaid g; the image of the girl is translated into the word “girl” (with the g appearing twice); and then word “girl” disappears, and there are just two gs remaining.
Also covered in a similar fashion in Lesson 1 are the letters “B” (bird), “C” (cup), “D” (dish), “F” (fish), and “H” (hand).
And then on the next page there’s a picture of a girl holding in her hand a bird (or a cup, dish, or fish — I can’t remember), and there are a ton of sentences that are all versions of each other. For example:
- The girl has a bird in her hand.
- The girl has a cup in her hand.
- The girl has a dish in her hand.
- The girl has a fish in her hand.
Repetition, repetition, repetition.
I guess here’s a decent place to transition to DFS.
Adult Learning in DFS
The repetitious nature of learning successfully as an adult (I think) applies to DFS in at least four ways.
Repetition in Slates
One of my earliest Labs pieces was on how to become the DFS outlier. I’m not saying that you need to construct rosters with our Lineup Builder or sort through our Player Models for 10,000 hours in order to learn how to play DFS — but, in the big picture, learning how to play DFS probably isn’t harder than learning how to read as an adult.
If repetition works for adults learning to read, it probably works for adults learning to play DFS. You don’t need to play every day, but you probably should at least review slates each day and throw some rosters together just to stay sharp at analyzing salary dynamics and building lineups.
Repetition in Process
Not only is it important to participate in slates regularly, but it’s also important to build a logical and repeatable DFS process. About this time last year, I talked about the process of not being awful at DFS. That particular process might not be for everyone, but all DFS players need cohesive research and roster-building programs that are functional. Eventually, these programs become ritualized and repeated with each slate.
For instance, FantasyLabs Co-Founder Peter Jennings (CSURAM88) likes to exercise while he’s thinking about DFS. As he mentioned on the DFS panel at the 2017 Sloan Conference, he has a walking desk, and he likes to stay active the hour leading up to lineup lock because he feels mentally sharper. That’s his ritual.
Here he is (just a few days ago) talking to Joey Ingram on the Poker Life Podcast:
There are a few items to point out:
- Pete’s riding a stationary bike.
- Pete’s already starting to get winded at the two-minute mark.
- It’s part of Pete’s process, and Pete is way better at life than I am, so I’m going to STFU.
The point is that the best DFS players often have individual processes that they employ each slate: Rituals, habits, patterns, whatever. For them, those repeated processes facilitate success.
Repetition in Research
Whether or not you play every slate, it’s a good idea to do some historical (or archival) research on a regular basis. This is different than slate-specific research. To research slates, you look at players, salaries, positional scarcity, etc., and see how all of those factors impact your ability to put together competitive lineups.
All of that’s important and should be researched regularly — but historical research is truly (I believe) where the edge resides in DFS. In any field, it’s important to have some historical perspective. For instance, if I wanted to become an expert in Shakespeare, I could get pretty far by reading his plays and poems — but I’d get so much further if I read the playwrights and poets who influenced him; his contemporaries who wrote scripts for other playhouses and poems for public circulation; and the generations of playwrights and poets who followed him . . . as well as modern research on the place and time period in which he lived.
Context matters, and history is the ultimate context. That’s why our Plus/Minus metric is so valuable: It’s based on the history of the interaction between salary and production.
Lots of great historical research can be done with the Labs Tools, especially our Trends tool, which honestly might be the resource Labs subscribers should use the most. By repeatedly grinding trends, contextualizing scenarios, and backtesting ideas, adult DFS learners can become much better players.
Repetition in Tournament Lineups
In Week 13 of the NFL season, Eric Crain joined the NFL Daily Fantasy Flex pod to talk about the upcoming slate. About a month earlier, Eric had won the Week 8 DraftKings Millionaire Maker, and on the pod he talked a little about his strategy for GPPs.
What he said then was similar to what he had written before the season started in his RotoAcademy course, Mass Multi-Entering NFL GPPs:
When people start scripting, the single biggest mistake they make is wanting to play too many players. The general public thinks that making 150 lineups means a player can cover every imaginable scenario. If that were true, one in every 150 teams would be winning first place in every tournament.
When you’re scripting, the goal should not be to try and cover every possible player. Instead, the goal should be to cover as many angles as possible on a small core of players.
For Eric, sound GPP multi-entry roster construction calls for the creation of a core group of players supplemented with ancillary players who make lineups unique.
Let’s revisit the sentences from Lesson 1 of Laubach Way to Reading: Level 1:
- The girl has a bird in her hand.
- The girl has a cup in her hand.
- The girl has a dish in her hand.
- The girl has a fish in her hand.
Repetition, repetition, repetition: There are tons of sentences like this. They’re all built around a repeating core. They all make sure that by the end of the lesson the adult learner will know certain words, phrases, and letters through maximal exposure.
Basically, building 150 GPP lineups is like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: You don’t live 150 different days. Instead, you live the same day 150 times and hope that one of the times you get everything right.
Also, I should say that our DFS Ownership Dashboard can help you learn GPP ownership trends, which in turn will help you learn which players to include in your core. Pro subscribers should consult the DFS Ownership Dashboard basically all the time.
Repetition.
Repetition
Just to clarify: When in the introduction I said, “I literally teach refugees from war-torn countries how to read,” I actually meant to say something like this:
Yesterday was my first day volunteering, and my student didn’t show up, so I spent about five minutes looking through the training book and 55 minutes making photocopies of random worksheets — and if my student doesn’t show up again next week I’m never volunteering for anything again ever in my entire life.
The boy has an article in his hand.
The Labyrinthian: 2017.38, 133
This is the 133rd installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation. Previous installments can be accessed via my author page or the series archive.
