“Take Me Home, Yeah”
Last week I was back in Texas spending time with my family. My parents have lived in the same place my whole life and so my bedroom in that house is a veritable menagerie of relics spanning a period of more than 30 years. Next to each other on the same way-too-small-for-a-grown-man desk that my mother bought for me probably 25 years ago is a baseball from grade school and a shot glass from college.
I didn’t check, but the odds are at least 41.3 percent that somewhere in that room — and where I have no idea — is a very outdated collection of materials that would make Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart say, “I know it when I see it.”
Each time I return home after being away for months, my immediate feeling upon entering that room is always the same: 50 percent “Where did the time go?” and 50 percent “What the f*ck am I going to do with all of this sh*t after my parents die?” To borrow from Alice in Chains, “Say goodbye, don’t follow.”
That I’m quoting AIC shows the extent to which even thinking about that room has me caught in a temporal vortex. Actually, I don’t need much of an excuse to quote AIC. My greatest regret of the summer is that I didn’t get to see them open for the reunited Guns N’ Roses. I mean, if you’re going to walk down the nostalgic streets of ‘rawk’ at night, you might as well take the so easy brownstone night train deep into that jungle of a paradise city where anything goes, amirite, rocket queen o’ mine?
Where Was I?
Anyway, my first night back home I was perusing my bookshelves and I found an old book that my mom bought for me maybe 22 years ago but that I never read: Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.
If you don’t know who Fischer is, let me tell you: He’s the guy who has absolutely nothing to do with the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, which by the way is perhaps the finest instance of ’90s cinematic proto-clickbait that I can think of at 1:00 AM.
To whoever thought of that movie: Job well done on making the entire world pay millions of dollars to see a movie that almost no one would’ve wanted to see otherwise. You — and definitely not Fischer — are the true genius of that film.
Some Bobby Fischer Facts
In case you’re too lazy to Wikipedia who Bobby Fischer is — and I’m pretty sure that I can use ‘Wikipedia’ as a verb in that way — here are some facts about the guy. (Obviously, these facts come from Wikipedia.)
• He went to high school with Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond.
OK, that’s enough facts. If you don’t know that Fischer was a preternatural reclusive chess prodigy who was maybe the greatest grandmaster of all time, then . . . just know that he’s sort of the Sandy Koufax of chess . . . except that Koufax actually embraced his Jewish heritage and never became someone who made anti-American and -semitic statements on a regular basis, so . . . let’s move on . . .
Let’s Get Back to the Book
So I read this book, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. For what it’s worth — which is nothing — some people on some forum on some site called chess.com six years ago mentioned that they think that the book sucks. Other people on the same forum thought that it was worthwhile. So, you know, #Information . . .
I found the book somewhat intriguing. Some of it will definitely come in handy the next time I play chess, which will probably be not in this lifetime. More importantly, since I tend to be an active reader — I read slowly and think a lot about how what I just read might by applied widely in a macro sense — I had some DFS-related thoughts that I’m going to try to remember and write down here in no particular order.
The Checkmate Is King
The book begins at the end: Checkmate. Here’s Fischer’s explanation for why the book deviates from standard practice and starts with the endgame:
Since checkmating is the object of the game, I think it is the most basic thing to learn. The checkmate is the “knockout” of Chess. The book starts with one-move mates and then develops these ideas into mates of two, three, or four moves. You will be able to see these mates and apply them in your games.
In chess, it’s possible that way too many people think of the beginning first: “What opening move should I make?” That’s a useless question. One’s opening should be determined by what one wants or expects to happen later in the match. The question one should really be asking is this: “Given all of the circumstances of this contest, how do I envision checkmate occurring?”
Fischer was great in all areas of chess, but he was especially renowned for his endgame. Studying his endgame is like studying Don Juan’s technique of bringing women to climax: We are watching masters at their best, and we should realize that what they do best not coincidentally is what matters most in their chosen fields.
In DFS, far too many people start at the beginning. They look at the matchups and the players they like. They look at the Vegas data. They look at everything except what matters most: The cash line. They haven’t thought (with accuracy and precision) about the number of points they need their lineups to score to accomplish their goals. Every slate is different, just like every chess match. The checkmate — how you reach the cash line — will differ for each slate.
If you want to cash in your contests, you need to start by thinking about where the cash line is going to be — our Player Models can help with this — and then you should work backwards from there to construct your lineups in such a way to give you the best chance of hitting that cash line. Don’t just advance your king’s pawn and then start moving bishops and knights without a very good idea of what you want them to have done by the end of the contest.
Start at checkmate and then retro-construct from there. Or, per Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, “I open at the close.”
Coordination of the Pieces
I like to quote myself. Here’s what I just said:
Don’t just advance your king’s pawn and then start moving bishops and knights without a very good idea of what you want them to have done by the end of the contest.
Start at checkmate and then retro-construct from there. Or, per Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, “I open at the close.”
Basically, what I’m talking about is coordination. In chess, it’s not enough to know how you want checkmate to occur. You need to know how to get the pieces in the right position to mate in the first place. You need to have a sense of how your strategy will manifest itself through your tactics.
In other words, you need to act like a general instead of some checkers player who happened to find a chessboard. You must move your pieces in synchrony. You want to have all of your pieces oriented properly and attacking in the same direction.
For DFS, the apparent analogy is stacking. On the recent Daily Fantasy Sports Roundtable, FantasyLabs co-founder Jonathan Bales said that people probably don’t stack in NFL DFS nearly as much/often as they should. He’s right, especially for tournaments. We all know that there are correlations that make stacking worthwhile. We can also stack in price-efficient manners.
But stacking is about more than just correlation. It’s about coordination. If you think that you need to hit a certain point threshold to have a decent chance of winning a guaranteed prize pool, and if you choose to start a particular quarterback in a lot of your GPP lineups because you think that he gives you the best chance of hitting that threshold, then you should also probably create a massive stack around him, because what are the odds that he will have a GPP-winning performance without also getting a lot of support from his teammates (or bestowing them with a lot of production)?
In the best instances — in the classic checkmates that people talk and read about years later — multiple pieces are always attacking in intricate ways. What makes these mates legendary is not that they happened. It’s how all of the pieces were masterfully coordinated in order to bring about a mate that no one saw coming.
If you have a queen piece that you think has the potential to win a contest, you should bring the bishops, rooks, and maybe even a knight and a pawn along for the party.
Robustness and Antifragility
Seriously, it has been like three weeks since I last mentioned Nassim Nicholas Taleb, so — like a power hitter emerging from a slump or Melvin Gordon scoring a touchdown this year — this section is due.
The Talebian terms ‘robustness’ and ‘antifragility’ (obviously) don’t appear in BFTC, but they are nevertheless applicable to the game of chess. I couldn’t help but think of them when I was reading BFTC. In the moves that Fischer makes early in the game, he is implicitly seeking to establish positions that can withstand and leverage uncertainty.
Even if one has an idea of the percentage odds of the game unfolding in various ways, chess is a game of uncertainty. One can never know for sure how an opponent will play. The goal, of course, is to establish positions that give one a good chance of bringing about the intended mate — but one also must attempt to organize pieces so that one is robust enough to withstand attacks and antifragile enough to benefit from moves that throw the entire board into chaos.
The applications for DFS are apparent. Even if one has a very good idea of how certain NFL games will go and what ownership patterns within a particular slate will look like, one still (in GPPs) must embrace the possibility of the uncertain. One must construct a portfolio of lineups with robustness and antifragility in mind. One must entertain the emergence of the unknown. One must be open to all eventualities.
I could link to probably another 10 articles, but I’ll move along to a final (and related) idea.
Versatility Is Queen
In chess, one can be robust and antifragile through the positioning of the pieces. One can be versatile enough to be “open to all eventualities” in the way that one structures the board.
But versatility can also be a function of the pieces that one uses, which is why people like to attack with the queen when it’s safe enough to do so. If one attacks with the queen, a bishop, and a knight, one has an encompassing approach that covers a lot of space. The individual and collective versatility of those pieces enables them to be employed successfully across an array of situations and possible moves. If, though, one is attacking with a vanguard of pawns, one has basically no versatility. If the pawn attack fails, one has little recourse.
In DFS, we can leverage uncertainty in how we construct rosters on a macro level — but the micro level is just as important. If we roster players who are versatile, who can accumulate fantasy points in a variety of ways, we give ourselves flexibility.
If a pitcher who is favored but has little else to recommend him doesn’t get the win, then the odds are high that he will sabotage the lineups in which he is rostered. If, however, you roster robust strikeout pitchers or pitchers who throw a lot of innings, then you have a greater chance of success even if the game goes in a way that you didn’t expect.
In NFL, the versatile players who afford you multiple ways to win I’ve talked about before:
• Skill position players who return kicks and punts
• Running backs who catch passes
• Receivers who run the ball
• Quarterbacks who run the ball
• Kickers on teams with coaches who like to run trick plays
That last one is a joke . . . sort of.
This isn’t an earth-shattering point, but rostering players who can contribute in multiple ways is something you should do. When chaos strikes, the versatile pieces tend to be those that mate the king.
A Sense of an Ending
Somewhere in my bedroom closet in Texas I think is a box full of pictures of ex-girlfriends and all the gifts they gave me in college. Let me tell you about how all of those relationships ended . . .
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 83
This is the 83rd 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 of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
Matthew Freedman is the Editor-in-Chief of FantasyLabs.
