DFS 101: eSports Edition

The past few weeks I've funneled almost all of my daily fantasy sports (DFS) volume away from MLB and into eSports, something I never thought would happen. Several AlphaDraft users have asked how I build my lineups, how I incorporate odds, etc. For someone who plays traditional DFS sports these are all super obvious questions and answers, but a majority of players on AlphaDraft seem to be going through the DFS learning curve for the first time, so I figured it would be a good time to provide a bit of an overview and introduction to some things that I've taken for granted after playing NFL, NHL and MLB at decent volume.

Building a Lineup:

There isn't one way to build a lineup. I'll go into much more detail down the line, but here are some really, really, really important things to keep in mind that will help you immeasurably in the long run:

• Know what kind of contest you're playing in.
• This sounds obvious, but there's a fundamental difference between a contest that pays out only the top few spots a lot of money (top-heavy payout style, I'll refer to these as "tournaments") and a 50/50 (half-win) or head-to-head. More below about what strategies you should use in these various contest formats.
• Create a lineup-building process that's repeatable.
• Treat DFS like a science experiment. The scientific method is actually really, really helpful here. Have a process, and follow it. If it works, know why it worked. If it doesn't work, know why it doesn't work, or at least where you can start looking to make changes.
• Track your results.
• This should be obvious, but a lot of people ignore this piece. Track your results. Know how you're doing. Importantly, what kind of contests you're doing well in and poorly in. If you're crushing 50/50s and head-to-heads but losing all your tournaments, you should be focusing your money on those formats that you're winning.
• A corollary to this is track what buy-ins you're playing at as well. Maybe you're having much greater success playing several $\$5$ 50/50s (half-wins) rather than playing one or two $\$10$ contests.
• Use data where you can.
• Again, it's important that any lineup you build pass the eye-test, but it's also important to avoid overly relying "on your gut". It's not a bad thing if you're just great at picking lineups based on feel, but it makes it very hard to turn DFS into a repeatable process, and there's no reason to avoid data that's available to you if it's accurate and useful!

Overall team projections today... Unfortunately there were several upsets but because I didn't go too big on any one team I still came out way up in cash games.

Alright, now that I've written down these horribly vague guidelines, I'll go through exactly what these mean and how they apply to lineup building.

Contest-Specific Lineup Construction

The most important thing when building a lineup is knowing what type of contest it's going to be used in. For simplicity and industry continuity I'm going to refer to contests as one of two types:

• Tournaments
• Top-heavy payout curve where only the top 5-10% of the field make a good return. Here your goal is to finish at the very top. You don't really care if you come in the top 25th percentile vs the bottom 5th percentile. The return to you is the same for each: 0.
• Because of the payout structure, the best strategy is to pick a high-risk, high-reward lineup. On AlphaDraft this means stacking 3-4 players from one team, and 2-3 players plus the "team" position from another team. I talk a little about the concept of "stacking" in my other post here.
• Pick for correlated variance: in order to win first in one of these tournaments you need several players with 40+ points. If Piglet gets 45 points, it's very likely that Xpecial, Dominate, Fenix and/or Quas also had some really great point totals, as the game they played was likely very bloody and drawn-out. If Liquid loses in this situation, whatever. You will never win every tournament, but the goal is to find some teams like Liquid that could win in a bloody game, and when they do you want to have as many of them as possible. AlphaDraft lets you roster 4 players from a single team, so do that. In tournaments.

Example of "tournament" contest structure and my winning Liquid-Dignitas stack.

• Cash Games
• I use the term "cash games" to refer to 50/50s (half-win) or head-to-heads. The fundamental difference between cash games and tournaments is that your lineup should be constructed with a completely different goal in mind: you want to build a lineup that has the lowest possible chance of sucking, and finishing in the bottom-half.
• This means correlated variance isn't a great idea. In the above roster, if Liquid lost quickly that lineup would be utterly worthless. This means it's generally a bad idea to pick more than 3 players from a single team (unless one team is drastically underpriced or in the easiest possible matchup).
• Essentially, by picking players from 3-4 teams rather than 2 you're hedging - it's incredibly unlikely that all 6 of the players you select have amazing games, especially if they're on different teams, but it's also incredibly unlikely they all have horrible games. This means you shouldn't finish in 1st out of 100, but should hopefully finish in the top 50 more often than not.

Example of cash game. Top 5 win $180. Even though ROC lost, I only picked 3 of them, while many opponents picked 4x ROC - killing their chances of winning when ROC lost.

Just to reiterate, the goals for the different contest types are very different... I feel like too many people don't do this, and it's really important.

• Tournaments: Win. If you ain't first, you're last.
• Best strategy: high variance, boom or bust lineup with a "high ceiling".
• Cash Games: Don't suck. You don't care if you win, just want to beat half the people.
• Best strategy: safe picks across several teams for a "higher floor".

Alright, enough of that. Now that we know what kind of lineup we want to build, no we have to figure out how to build it.

The Lineup-Building Process

I mentioned the scientific method mostly in jest, but it really is important to make sure that you know what you're doing so that you can adjust your play style or lineup construction process if you're not doing well, or be able to continue building the same way if your process is working.

Defining the process:

A lot of people seem to pick players based on gut feel. That's not the worst idea ever, but it's very, very hard to do this reliably and repeatably. Additionally, it makes decisions at the margin very difficult and often-times arbitrary.

For example, Bjergsen is a God. We know that. But at what point is salary prohibitively expensive? Unless his matchup is awful he's almost always going to be one of the better mids in NA LCS (recent general disarray of TSM aside). However, if he's $\$10,000$ is he worth picking? What about $\$9,000$? What if Shiftur costs $\$7,000$ and is playing Team8? What if he's $\$8,500$ and playing Team8? It's very, very, very hard to determine whether a certain player is a "good value" if you don't have some objective expectation of how they will perform. If Bjergsen costs 25% more than your alternative, you need to be confident that he'll score 25% more points on average, and being confident in a statement like that is very hard if you're relying solely on your gut.

The state of TSM right now: General Disarray. 

Player Stats and Game Odds:

In order to avoid relying solely on your gut, it's important to have some data to sift through. FantasyRift has pretty good stats on most leagues, and it's in a very clean form that already calculates AlphaDraft points for you... I'd suggest using that as a primary resource, and looking up match-history, etc, as a secondary check.

Another important resources is a way of calculating team's odds of winning. This can be done subjectively, by gut, or by relying on external odds. I use a combination of several sportsbooks that offer betting on eSports to calculate a team's chance of winning a game. Sites like Pinnacle, Nitrogen and Unikrn offer relatively real-time odds for upcoming LoL pro games that are reasonably accurate. No odds will be perfect, but using these as a baseline can be extremely helpful in determining which teams are expected to win, and where you might be able to find some value in a traditionally mediocre or poor team in a great match-up against an even worse team.

Interpreting Odds:

I already got several questions about how this is done, but it's quite simple. If we look at the upcoming Unicorns of Love vs Copenhagen Wolves match this week we see UOL at 1.08 and CW at 7.20 on Unikrn. This means that UOL is roughly a $1/1.08 = 92.5\%$ to win, while UOL is at $1/7.20 = 13.8\%$ to win. However, these two numbers add up to over 100%. This is because Unikrn takes a commission, so the odds are never going to add to 100% exactly. The ratio is still what we want, however. So $92.5\% / (92.5\% + 13.8\%) = 87.0\%$. Similarly CW can be calculated the same way at $13.0\%$.

We can use odds like this to make the aggregate stats on FantasyRift more relevant. In this match, it would be relatively surprising if Vardags only scores 16.59 points (his current season average). The reason is that he is a heavy favorite in the match-up against Wolves, and as such should do better than his season-average would suggest. I use per-win and per-loss projections for each player weighted by their respective odds of winning and losing, but there are all types of things you can do.

I'll typically look at the overall salaries of each of the odds-favored teams to get a sense for which teams may be under- or over-priced.

Track Your Results

This is a quick one, really just a reminder. Track your results. Keep a spreadsheet of how much you're depositing, winning, etc. Also, keep it updated by game-type. Are you crushing tournaments? 50/50s? Know where and how you're winning so you can focus your money into these types of contests. Pretend your a portfolio manager - you don't want to hold on to stock that keeps losing you money, you should sell it and invest in a game-type that you're (more) profitable in.

I've been tracking my results pretty closely the past 4-5 weeks, and have been dumping a bunch more money into AlphaDraft than I had previously as my methodology has been proving quite successful and profitable. Here's a recap of the top-10 (gross, not net) winners each of the last 4 weeks. As I saw more success, I continued upping my play... 

The Rise of nickyd

Week 1 - 9th

Week 2 - 6th

Week 3 - 3rd

Week 4 - 1st!

Alright, that's it for tonight. If people have questions feel free to ask me on AlphaDraft if I'm in the chat, otherwise drop 'em off here. I'll try to help out when I can. Additionally, if you've got suggestions for further info on DFS eSports, drop 'em here as well.