- Can You Make A Living Playing Fantasy Sports
- How To Make A Living Playing Fantasy Sports Illustrated
- Can You Make Money Playing Fantasy Sports
- Over a year later, I’m enjoying my 6th winning month in a row and I barely see the poker table anymore. It’s become very clear to me that yes, you can win playing daily fantasy sports. Daily Fantasy is Filled With Inexperienced Players. A lot of people compare online poker and daily fantasy sports, and for good reason.
- Learn how you can earn an honest income playing on fanduel. By playing the right games, and entering the right lineups, you will consistently win!
- Peter is one of a handful of individuals making a living in the daily fantasy sports industry. The concept is simple: working within the confines of a salary cap, users build a team of players, all.
This is the second of our Q&A’s with people in the DFS industry, and it’s with msize44, a former sports bettor who has transitioned into the daily fantasy sports market. He was nice enough to answer a few basic questions about his background, his strategy, his process, and where he thinks the DFS industry is heading. We had a great time hearing his responses, and we hope you enjoy as well.
[Note: Also check out our first Q&A with DraftDay’s Scott Redick, an avid daily fantasy NBA player.]
Create an overall budget for your DFS career. Say you plan to spend $200 at most for a season. Allocate no more than 5% of that, or $10, for each week’s play. Then, each week, divide your money.
Q: Would you consider yourself a “high-volume professional player?” About how many games are you entering on a daily basis during this MLB season and across how many different sites?
A: “Yes. Obviously ‘high volume’ is a relative term. I enter hundreds of games every day across [a dozen] different sites. I am the head of a small four-person syndicate, and together we put into play around $10,000 per night, more on Tuesday and Friday nights. We have accounts at I believe 14 different sites (StatClash, Fantasy Aces, Swoopt, Wardraft, Star Fantasy Leagues, DraftTeam, DraftDay, Fantasy Throwdown, StarStreet, FantasyFeud, DraftKings, FanDuel, Fantasy Elite and DraftStreet before it was just purchased by DraftKings). We play higher volume during the NBA season and way higher during football season.”
Q: What’s your background? When did you get started with daily fantasy sports (DFS)?
A: “I have been a professional sports bettor for almost a decade and still make some money off of traditional sports wagering. But as the offshore market has gotten increasingly difficult to move money and less efficient markets have dried up in terms of how much you can get down on those inefficient markets, I have switched to DFS. Now, 85 percent of my income comes from DFS and 15 percent from sports betting … When you start winning a lot and get continued positive results, you come to the realization that this is your job.”
Q: How many hours do you spend on this per week? What’s your typical day look like?
A: “I spend 60+ hours a week on DFS. I work basically 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. West Coast time every day.”
Q: Would you consider your approach more numbers-oriented or more feel-oriented?
A: “My approach is 80-percent numbers based and 20-percent feel based. I have spreadsheets for everything with projected point totals, and those point totals are just put into the DFS sites’ different salaries to come up with the most efficient players and most efficient lineups. Spreadsheets in my opinion work best for football, second-best for basketball, and worst for baseball due to the massively high variance for an offensive player’s projected point total in baseball.”
Q: What’s the biggest win you’ve ever had in a single event?
A: “I won $250,000 in Week 16 of the NFL last season … I just worked hard to accumulate tickets for the big events at each site throughout the year, and then cashed in with some nice Peyton Manning to his wide receiver stats combined with LeSean McCoy in everything against the laughable Bears rush defense of the past season.”
[Editor’s note: Manning threw for 400 yards and 4 TDs against the Texans in Week 16 last season, and McCoy had 162 total yards and 2 TDs.]
Q: For someone completely new to DFS but has a good grasp on sports betting, analytic thinking and the sport they’d specialize in, how long do you think it’d take for them to be +EV in DFS?
A: “Sports betting is way different than DFS. Obviously there is overlap in the information, but like anything it takes experience to learn the ins and outs and different strategies. The best DFS players (and the DFS industry in general) have no clue about sports betting. As a whole, they are completely uninformed and novices about sports betting. I don’t really have a feel for the other end of the scenario, but I’m guessing it is the same thing. I feel like I have a good fusion of both worlds, and that is why I have done quite well in both realms. My general sense is that sharp sports bettors have yet to grasp how fast DFS is growing and how big of a market it actually is and will be. If you live in the United States and consider yourself sharp, you should be playing DFS.”
Q: What percentage of the people on one of the big sites like FanDuel or DraftKings truly know what they’re doing, and what percentage could be described as “fish?”
A: “The number of ‘fish’ has decreased dramatically in the past year with the rise of RotoGrinders and other sites that inform new players and veteran players about basic strategy and daily advice. There are very few completely clueless fish out there at this point, but there are a lot of people playing who aren’t what I would call ‘sharp.’
“That being said, I think searching out clueless opponents might have been a viable strategy two years ago, but it is not any longer because no one really plays heads-up games anymore. Everything is large-field double-ups, triple-ups and matrix games; head-to-head produces very little revenue for DFS sites at this point. Also, the real money is made in the large-field guaranteed prize pool (GPP) tournaments where you win an entrance ticket into a destination final or just a final in general. Assembling teams for this type of tournament is completely different than constructing a team for a heads-up game or double-up game (commonly referred to as cash games).”
Q: Which site would you say is the toughest to win at?
A: “Whatever site has the least overlay that you can find is the toughest to win at. [Editor’s note: ‘Overlay’ is generally defined as when a large-field GPP or double-up doesn’t fill enough for the DFS site to make money. If the guaranteed prize pool is larger than the total amount of entry fees, the difference is the ‘overlay,’ and it’s a very +EV situation for the participants.]
“Some sites have sharper pricing, and some have easier pricing to attract more of the common players. Any site that has sharp pricing and team composition of positional flexibility will in most cases give the sharper player more of an advantage. A site like FanDuel with soft pricing might be more difficult for a +EV player, although those factors are mitigated to a degree by the size of the player base of a site, which leads to the ability to get more money down on a daily basis.”
Q: How much are the top players in this industry teaming up?
A: “Not sure how much good it does you to ‘team up’ with another top player. I actually believe not letting anyone know you are a top player is probably the smartest thing to do long term. The only reason a top player would share information is if they are compensated for it, or if they are trying to cultivate a ‘personality’ in case the industry really blows up. (Or the third case would be if you are me and you answer Betting Talk’s questions.)”
Q: Order these three from most common to least common… The people making a lot of money in this industry have a background in A) poker, B) sports betting, C) stock trading/Wall Street/finance?
A: “Most common is none of those. Fantasy sports in more niche than people realize, and DFS is even more niche than regular fantasy sports and has its own game theory and many, many small intricacies. If I had to take a guess I would say Wall Street, poker, and sports betting in that order.”
Q: What’s the next big step the DFS industry has to take to become more mainstream?
A: “The DFS industry simply needs to market and advertise. Watch the World Series of Poker this year, and you will see DraftKings advertising all over the place. It has grown a lot already and will continue to grow. There are a lot of rumors floating around that one of the big boys (Yahoo, ESPN, Google) will enter the DFS market soon, and if they do then it will explode. Also, there is something to be said for dumbing down the game to make it a pick ’em format instead of the somewhat ‘convoluted for the average guy’ salary cap format.”
Q: Following up on that question, what happens when that “big boom” comes? The assumption has to be there would be much more “dead money” coming in, so does that change strategy or outlook at all?
A: “If the ‘big boom’ comes, then there will most definitely be more dead money in games. But, perhaps more importantly, the GPPs will expand and there could be more overlay on a daily basis. The large-field double-ups will definitely become softer, and they are already soft.
“The biggest misconception about DFS is that the rake makes it an unworkable situation, but keep in mind there is overlay every day if you know where to look, and all sites have loyalty programs that further reduce rake. If you can get figure out how to manipulate the affiliate programs, you can even further reduce rake. If you have a large bankroll you have a massive, massive advantage in DFS because in large-field GPPs you have the ability to make multiple teams in big tourneys and take full advantage of all overlay.
“Myself and my group have qualified for at least 20 major championships over three different sports. We already have a DraftKings, FanDuel, and StarStreet ticket for their respective baseball championships this year, which equals over $90,000 in liquidity.”
Can You Win Playing Daily Fantasy Sports?
A little over a year ago, I started to hear about daily fantasy sports betting and was intrigued. I really love sports, and always felt like I was good at analyzing what was going on in the field or on the court better than the average joe. I had heard about other professional poker players taking it seriously, but had no idea if they were having any success or not. When I talked to some other poker players about daily fantasy, some were a bit incredulous. My brother Danny had just quit his job at a bank in Chicago and he seemed to think that daily fantasy was not only winnable, but something that could be more profitable than poker for us. Over a year later, I’m enjoying my 6th winning month in a row and I barely see the poker table anymore. It’s become very clear to me that yes, you can win playing daily fantasy sports.
Daily Fantasy is Filled With Inexperienced Players
A lot of people compare online poker and daily fantasy sports, and for good reason. It’s a strategy game you can play from your home, tournaments are awarding big money, and 20-something year olds from all over the US are making it into a job. It’s also becoming very popular, just like online poker did years ago, and it’s flooded with recreational players. If I were to compare the timeline of online poker to potential timeline of daily fantasy sports, daily fantasy is online poker circa 2003.
The biggest daily fantasy site, FanDuel, has published key financial numbers that show just how astounding the growth of the daily fantasy industry has been. Every year since 2011, FanDuel’s revenue has nearly tripled, and their paid active users have quadrupled. In most games I have played during the football season, there are at least 3 inexperienced players for every one professional. This sounds like what online poker used to look like, but not what it looked like around black Friday. Towards the end of my online poker career, the ratio was inverted: Most of my games had only 1 inexperienced player, and a table with two inexperienced players was one I considered to be a juicy game. And even at that point, in the decline of online poker, 100’s of players were making six figures or more a year. While it’s not easy to become a winner at daily fantasy, the profit potential is massive because of the amount of money inexperienced players are putting in every week.
The Pros Are Winning Big
The biggest winner in daily fantasy football on FanDuel wagers a lot of money per week. I don’t know the exact number, but given the amount of games he is sitting in a rough estimate of how many games he is playing in, I would say he at least wagers $300,000 a week. Assuming he at least has the same ROI as I do, and his ROI is certainly better, a rough estimate of his expected winnings for the football season is $1,020,000. This is for just the 4 months of the football season. In basketball, he likely wagers over $20,000-$50,000 per day. And this is just on FanDuel. So it’s safe to say the most winning daily fantasy professional is at least making millions of dollars.
There have been at least 5 daily fantasy professionals who have won tournaments for over $1,000,000 this year. There are countless more who wager over a million dollars a year. Winning pros are not just winning a nice supplement to their income, they are making careers out of playing daily fantasy.
You Can Learn To Predict Fantasy Statistics
Can You Make A Living Playing Fantasy Sports
Predicting whether a player is going to have a good fantasy day is a skill. There may be some days where a good pick does poorly or gets an unlucky break, but in the long run if you make good picks you will make money.
You can learn to predict fantasy statistics using matchups. Over/Under lines and fantasy points allowed are just some statistics you can use to help predict fantasy performance. You can learn to properly measure the impact of injuries and offseason acquisitions on fantasy performance. You can also learn how to take advantage of each DFS sites pricing algorithm and scoring system to build optimal lineups. There are countless ways you can get an edge over your opponents.
You Won’t Win Right Away
How To Make A Living Playing Fantasy Sports Illustrated
I’ve told friends and poker players to get into Daily Fantasy, and some have with a little success. With those who haven’t succeeded, I see the same problem over and over again. They expect to develop quickly and don’t put enough time and energy into learning. When they don’t win immediately, they decide it’s just not for them.
I started playing daily fantasy at the end of the 2013 football season. Looking back at that season, I was clearly a losing daily fantasy player. But I knew I was getting better, and I felt like I could become a winning player. I decided to dive into daily fantasy basketball after the football season was over, and had similar struggles. My account balance went up and down throughout the season, and a win streak was never sustained. But I could tell I was getting better, and by the end of the season I started to win more consistently. The differences between my lineups and the lineups of players I knew were winning pros became smaller and smaller. I knew if I was at least making similar picks to winning players, that I was theoretically winning too.
It wasn’t until baseball season, about 7 months after I started playing daily fantasy, that I became a consistent winner. Danny and I made prediction model for fantasy baseball that continued to improve over the season. In July, I had the biggest winning month of my career, and have not had a losing month since. If I keep up my winning pace next year, I’ll have a better year in daily fantasy than I ever had playing poker, and I’ve been playing poker for nearly 10 years. And I don’t think I’m special. I wasn’t a sports junkie and I never was a good season long fantasy football player. Many of you reading this article are way better equipped to win at daily fantasy sports than I was when I started, and I think anyone who commits to learning how to play daily fantasy could easily do as well as I have, if not better.
View all posts by Max J Steinberg