One of my favorite DFS writers – other than all of the writers here at FantasyLabs, obviously – is J.M. Tohline. During the NFL season his columns are always a must-read for me, as he brings a fresh perspective to how we view DFS. I bring him up because of one particular column he wrote during the 2015 NFL season, which asked the reader to attempt to come to an understanding of why we play DFS.
He broached this topic prior to the small Thanksgiving Day slate of games and the fact that many profitable players tend to avoid such slates due to the extreme variance. Understanding why you play DFS is important in such a scenario, because if profit is your only goal, these may be situations to avoid. If you play for pure enjoyment, then these small slates may carry more value to you.
While I believe this question as a whole is one we all need to ask ourselves, I wanted to explore the general idea further, but from a narrower perspective. Specifically, “Why do you enter GPPs?”
Without pause, I’m sure the answer from each of us would be that we enter to win. But I’m not certain that is necessarily the truthful answer, at least not always.
For many of us, our roster construction, whether we fully realize it or not, may actually be implying that we are playing to simply cash in the tournament versus having a legitimate chance at winning it (legitimate being a relative term when we’re talking about large-field GPPs).
Don’t get me wrong, if given the choice between some money or no money, obviously we want some money. What I’m referring to is how we’re constructing these lineups and the decisions we’re making with certain players, not necessarily how they’re performing and whether they’re cashing or not.
Facing your Fears – Fading the Unfadeable
If you’ve done any reading on game theory as applied to DFS, I’m sure you’re well aware of the generally accepted principle that fading an extremely high-owned player is often an advisable course of action. Yet, no matter the sport, we routinely see players owned at ridiculously high percentages, which implies that plenty of people are forgoing this thought. My opinion – don’t be one of these people. Well, try your best not to be at least.
The struggle to fade Devonta Freeman early in the 2015 NFL season was one that many dealt with. He just kept performing and if you didn’t have him in your lineup, it was essentially impossible to take down a GPP. If you followed the herd and rostered Freeman, it’s very likely that you were consistently cashing in GPPs during this time period. But was rostering him really getting you any closer to winning a GPP? If you were one of the 50-60% that fired him up in your lineup early in the season, it’s more than likely that you really weren’t, though the results you were seeing may have had you believing otherwise.
Consider this, at such an extreme ownership percentage, having Freeman in your lineup doesn’t really help you climb the leaderboard. Every positive play he has is also contributing to the totals of 50-60% of the field. So you still have to beat all of them with the remainder of your lineup and everyone else that didn’t play him, many of whom will likely have a significantly different lineup construction than you. Sure, if Freeman goes off like he did many times, you may eliminate many of those who faded him. But in all likelihood, you’re still going to have to beat 75-80% (I completely made this number up, but ballpark-wise, it’s reasonable).
If you faded him and he left in say the first quarter of the game with an injury – as he did in Week 11 of 2015 – you have essentially eliminated half of the field just by fading this player.
Such a thought process invokes the idea of anti-fragility, which deserves a column all of it’s own (and has received many throughout the DFS community in the past), but we’ll just touch on it briefly here.
The public and DFS community all say that Freeman will dominate and have an awesome game, but what occurs when he doesn’t – maybe he gets injured, pulled because of a fumble, gets stuck in traffic on his way to the stadium, I don’t know. The idea is that random events occur and in sports, likely occur at an even higher rate. When we assume that we know all and can perfectly project every player’s performance to the decimal spot, we run the risk of creating a very fragile lineup.
Now, we say all of this and yet Freeman did appear on many GPP-winning teams this season, so I must be an idiot, right? Maybe, but let’s bring this back to the idea figuring out why it is we enter GPPs in the first place.
If you are truly entering a GPP for the sole purpose of winning, wouldn’t your odds be greater if you had opted to fade Freeman? Let’s consider the following scenarios.
Scenario A: Freeman dominates, scores multiple touchdowns. Because he was owned by 55% (hypothetically) of owners, we still need to beat all 55%. There are also likely to be additional players that have nice games, if players that faded Freeman hit on multiple of them, they’re still in it as well. Unless Freeman scores four or five touchdowns, you likely haven’t eliminated the remainder of the field, but you do have a nice edge over them.
Scenario B: Freeman gets injured early on before contributing much, if you faded him you now have 55% of the field essentially drawing dead. Now, you are competing for that top prize with only the remaining 45%.
I like the odds quite a bit better in Scenario B, you?
Now obviously your lineup still has to perform – which you can make sure it is by utilizing our Player Models page and new My Lineups page to generate multiple GPP lineups. But instead of competing against the entire field and assuming you have that exact perfect lineup pegged, you’re taking on a dramatically reduced population.
So why do many of still roster players like Freeman, whether it be NFL, NBA or any DFS contest really?
Part of it is likely attributed to the fact that we’re overconfident in our abilities to outperform the field – again, I’d point this crowd back to that whole anti-fragile idea – but I’d theorize that for many of us, we’re simply afraid of what will occur if we don’t roster a player such as Freeman.
We fear that he’ll go off and we’ll be sitting there looking up the leaderboards at everyone who rostered him. And so we roster him, because we’d rather have a chance at a nice cash and maybe a chance at winning, however small that may be.
Such activities align themselves well with the idea of loss aversion. Essentially, loss aversion hypothesizes that people have a stronger preference to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain. So when we put our money into that large-field tournament without Freeman on our roster, we know that there is a very good chance that we may be kissing that entry fee goodbye. It’s easy to think about fading a player leading up to lineup lock, but it gets a lot more difficult to actually lock it in when your money is on the line.
Next time you’re presented with a slate featuring an incredibly chalky play, ask yourself the question again and see if your lineup construction really reflects your true answer to the question, “Why do you enter GPPs?”
