Whereas a traditional wedding too often features a bride who cares about every detail and a groom who is trying not to reveal the extent of his hangover, a lesbian wedding celebrates two people who are often both desirous that the event be amazing, in part because they are throwing a party that they years ago anticipated never to be able to throw. Last summer, I attended a lesbian wedding — and it was . . . intensely fun. The one downside to the wedding was the aftermath. At the end of the night, I had to pull out of a long, narrow, curving, downward-sloping, one-way, stone-lined, ill-lit driveway in reverse — as my wife sat in the front seat singing along to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” as if she were Leslie Knope at The Bulge. Except for that, it was a great night.
This is the 29th 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.
Pulling out of a Driveway in Reverse
Let me set the scene for you and tell the story. Then I’ll get to the DFS application. The wedding was at a private residence in the hills of Santa Fe. At night, when you’re backing out of a curvy driveway going downhill, those hills might as well be mountains.
To get to the house, we pulled off of a dirt road and into a long, bending driveway that went up a hill and narrowed as it got closer to the house. Eventually, the driveway (which was lined by stones on both sides and overhung by low- and outward-hanging trees) narrowed so that it was wide enough only for one car to fit through with relatively little visibility and room for maneuverability.
Of course, because we (read: my wife) wanted us to get good seats — and a “good” effing parking space — we arrived at the house pretty early (a couple of hours or so before sunset), which meant that we were waaayyy up the driveway, lots of cars eventually were parked behind us (effectively blocking us in), and consequently we had to be some of the last people to leave the wedding.
And the longer you’re at a wedding, the more alcohol everyone you’re supposed to drive later is likely to consume. And the more awesome the wedding is — especially when it’s at a private residence that doesn’t have a ticking rental clock on it — the longer the people parked behind you are likely to stay at the wedding and thereby make you stay at the wedding.
By the time we were able to depart, because of how all the cars were situated we (meaning I) had to pull out of that driveway from hell in reverse.
You see the problem?
The Solution: Be a Forward-Thinking Backward-Driving Planner
What is the solution to this situation? (And let me just say that I am exaggerating for the purposes of this story.)
The solution is not to be in that situation in the first place.
I could’ve parked on the dirt road before pulling into the driveway, thereby bypassing the entire situation from the start — except that would’ve meant that my wife would’ve had to walk a long way in heels in the middle of a hot summer on a dirt road and up a steep driveway. I would rather maneuver thousands of miles of impossible driveways in reverse than give her that kind of ammunition to use against me for the rest of my natural life.
(Side note: I should say that my wife is awesome and I love being married.)
In retrospect, the solution is pretty clear. In daylight, before I was tired and everyone around me was sh*tfaced, accompanying Lady Gaga, and incapable of giving me any directional guidance, I should’ve backed into the driveway so that hours later I would simply be able to put the car in drive and leave the wedding with ease.
I should’ve done the hardest part first so that later, when conditions were less optimal, I would still be in a manageable situation. I would be able to pull out headfirst. I should’ve backed into the driveway at 5 PM instead of waiting to back out of the driveway at 2 AM.
Punting Early (Revisited)
In my last installment of The Labyrinthian, I encouraged you to punt early in your matchups in order to take advantage of late swap. This strategy is informed by my brief time of playing bridge in grad school, and the core principle behind this strategy is simple: If you must do something suboptimal or difficult, do it in a way that is most optimal for you or when you are most able to attempt it with success. With this principle in mind, in this piece I urge you to select value and/or punt plays first (instead of last) when you are constructing your lineups.
If you are like a lot of people, you build your lineups in the following manner:
- With our Trends tool, you identify a number of high-priced players you like. These are the players who will be in lots of cash game lineups, and you spend a lot of time sorting through them in order to decide which premium players you ultimately want to use.
- You go to our Models tool and lock in to your lineup the premium players you have chosen.
- With the limited salary you have left, you then try to find two to three cheaper players who (with their likely subpar production) won’t totally destroy your awesome (and totally unrealistic) partial lineup.
You see the problem, right? You pulled into this narrow driveway headfirst. You should’ve backed in so that later, when circumstances were less optimal, you would nevertheless still be in a decent position to maneuver.
For DFS purposes, the equivalent of backing in would be finding cheap players you actually like — which is the hardest part of DFS — and then building a lineup around them instead of trying to find them at the end of the lineup-building process and finding that you can’t maneuver any of the few cheap players you like into your lineup.
An Example: 3/28/2016
As I write this, I am looking at the Phan Model for the DraftKings slate of March 28, 2016. If I were pulling into the center position of this slate headfirst, I would probably spend a lot of time deciding which guys I wanted to use out of this group:
- Hassan Whiteside, $8,400, Heat
- Karl-Anthony Towns, $8,100, Timberwolves
- DeAndre Jordan, $7,700, Clippers
- Pau Gasol, $7,300, Bulls
- Brooks Lopez, $7,100, Nets
- Al Horford, $6,800, Hawks
Here’s the thing: These six guys have the highest center salaries in the slate, and any of them is likely to be at worst a decent option. Out of these players, it does matter whom you choose, but when the slate is over the difference between the best player in this group and the cohort average (from a Plus/Minus perspective) is likely to be smaller than the difference between the best player in this next group and the average of this second cohort:
- Robin Lopez, $5,400, Knicks
- Jonas Valanciunas, $5,200, Raptors
- Jared Sullinger, $4,900, Celtics
- Enes Kanter, $4,800, Thunder
- Jusuf Nurkic, $4,100, Nuggets
- Steven Adams, $3,700, Thunder
- Plus maybe thirty other fairly cheap centers
When picking from the high-priced guys, you have a fair chance to find a player you are more or less OK rostering. But when picking from the cheaper options, you really need to like a guy to feel decent about using him. If you are attempting to discover players unlikely to destroy your lineup — players who have good Consistency and match for a lot of Pro Trends — you’ll have a much easier time blindly finding an expensive player who fits that description than a cheap player.
And I’m not saying anything revolutionary. We all know this — but relatively few people actually take this into account when constructing their lineups.
Getting Out of the Driveway
Let’s say that you built your lineup in the traditional way, from the top down, and you now have $4,000 to spend on a center. In the 3/28/16 slate, that leaves you with relatively few desirable centers from whom to choose. And let’s say that you’ve done research in the Trends tool and the trends you’ve created lead you actually to dislike all the centers in this slate in that price range.
What do you do? You either rebuild your lineup (again, from the top down) or you trick yourself into settling for a player your research says you shouldn’t like. Both of those options suck.
What you should do is back into the situation by starting with the low-priced players you actually like. Lock those players into the lineup. Now, let’s say that — because you started with cheap players — when it comes time to select a final player (again, a center) you have $8,000 to spend. With that much money, you can easily find a center whom you believe is acceptable. And then you might even have enough money left over to make small upgrades at a couple of other positions.
Backing into your lineup first by locking in the cheap players you like gives you a lot of maneuverability at the end of your process when you are deciding between higher-priced players. You seem to have more room to navigate, even if the spatial constraints are exactly the same. You have an easier chance of getting out of the DFS driveway.
Oh, yeah — it also helps if you aren’t making your lineups after a long night of partying at a lesbian wedding. But that’s just one man’s opinion.
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 29
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.
