I’ve decided to do weekly articles on applying something that has nothing to do with sports to daily fantasy. I started with an article on the Monty Hall Problem and then last week wrote about Wyatt Earp and probability. This week, I want to give you a brain teaser and then see if we can find any DFS truths from it. Here it is:
Johnny’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?
I’ll give you a moment to answer to yourself.
….
No, the answer isn’t June. It’s Johnny.
If you’re like me, you probably felt incredible stupid when you realized that the answer was Johnny and it was literally the first thing told to you in the riddle. But don’t feel stupid – your brain is designed to pick up patterns, and that’s exactly what it did. Unfortunately, our brains are sometimes too good at picking up patterns, and it can really hurt us when there aren’t any.
If you’ve ever seen the movie The Number 23 with Jim Carrey, you’ve seen the ugly, far end of this phenomenon. In the movie, Carrey is obsessed with the number 23 and believes that everything in the world – all actions and events – can be connected to that number in some way. Carrey’s mind in the movie is in hyper-drive creating patterns – most of ours don’t quite work that dramatically and we probably aren’t quite as paranoid, but I think you get the exaggerated effect. Our brains can trick us. (Also see: the millions of forums and YouTube videos about UFOs, attacks, the Mayan calendar, and other things humanity has become obsessed with.)
The same thing can happen in DFS or sports in general. A popular one in the NBA recently was the adage that a PG-led team can’t win a title. Then Stephen Curry happened last year. Before that, there was a definitive trend – you weren’t wrong in recognizing that – of the best player on the title team not being a point guard. However, that trend was more likely just noise than anything actually substantial.
Let’s say you play a ton of NBA DFS slates and find that whenever you roster elite SFs on short slates (four games or less), you typically do well in tournaments. After a couple times of that happening, your brain is naturally going to store that as a successful pattern and thus encourage you to do the same thing in short slates in the future. I’d be willing to bet a whole lot of money that that particular trend is complete noise, but it’s not so easy to see that from the outside. Sometimes, we’re too close to our brains (obviously, Bryan, it’s in our heads) and our plays to realize whether something is an actual pattern or not.
The best thing to do is to constantly re-evaluate your thought processes on things. Force self-awareness. Don’t ever assume patterns – that’s a great way to lose money on bad plays. Use our Trends tool to test your assumptions with actual data. Or ask friends. There are a lot of ways to get control of your brain instead of letting it control you with fake patterns. Patterns are great – our brains find them because we evolved that way, as patterns help us survive – but our biggest strength can often be our biggest weakness. And yes, I am indeed ending this article with that incredibly cliché phrase. Last question – will I end every article from now on with a cliché phrase?
