As if we needed another signal that the Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) industry is continuing to explode, I learned last week that Daily Fantasy eSports is now a thing at a few small, newer niche sites. Alphadraft and Vulcun are both offering paid and free contests in daily fantasy League of Legends, one of the most popular computer games, and one I used to play quite a bit.
When I first saw this I thought it was a bit ridiculous. I mean, I play DFS and follow sports in general pretty closely now that I work at DraftKings, but fantasy esports seems like a totally different animal. Are there really enough people out there not just playing but watching professional league of legends to create a reasonable DFS universe? Apparently the answer is a resounding YES, as not only have both sites grown quickly since their launch but they actually have bigger contests than DraftKings does in sports like Premier League Soccer.
Yes. the English Premier League has fewer users and smaller contests on DraftKings (the only DFS site to offer soccer in the US) than these new sites have in the LCS (League of Legends Championship Series - the top professional league). I thought that was a pretty impressive stat, so I dug around a bit more and found some pretty wild figures surrounding the crazy popularity of League of Legends and eSports:
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| The 2013 World Championships were held at the Staples Center in LA |
2013 World Championships saw 8.7 million concurrent viewers tuning into the livestream to watch from around the world. 2014 Saw 11.2 million peak concurrent viewers. The World Championships brought in 32 and 27 million total viewers each year respectively. Here is a pretty nifty infographic on these viewership figures.
Another interesting data point is that of the 70M total worldwide viewers of eSports, nearly half of them come from the United States. Given how big eSports are in China and Korea I would have expected the USA to make up a much smaller portion of the global viewing pie. This is also fantastic news for DFS eSports, as current legal restrictions prevent overseas players from entering these contests on most sites.
Speaking of which, let's get to the meat of this blog post:
How To Win at DFS League of Legends
First things first, if you don't know what League of Legends is, here is quick and dirty explanation:
League of Legends (LoL) is a 10-player online computer game in which two teams of 5-players fight head to head in a 30-40 minute match. Each team has a base that they are trying to defend while destroying that of their opponents. It's based on a custom map that some folks built for WarCraft 3 called DotA (please click on that link) a good while ago.
If you like really awesome data visualizations, the following NYTimes article has a really cool video that I've attached, as well as a more detailed explanation of what's going on.
Basically, the game has two teams, in this video illustrated by blue and pink. There are three main paths on the map that connect the two bases, known as Top, Mid and Bottom (pretty easy so far). Additionally, you'll notice a good deal of buzzing going on in between the lanes. This is known as the "Jungle".
The five players on each team are given dedicated roles and positions. Again, conveniently these positions are known as Top, Mid, Bottom and Support. Typically, each team will send two players to the Bottom lane, with one person each designated to Top, Mid and Jungle. The reason for this is strategy around global map objectives that exist on the bottom half of the map, but it has become very standard. Additionally, those two bottom lane players are known as AD carry and Support. I won't get into detail, but basically AD carry (ADC) is a role that is very vulnerable and weak in the early stages of the game, but scales very, very well as the game progresses. The Support player follows the ADC around during the early game to assist them and make sure they can survive the early game and reach their huge late-game power level.
Cool, so how does DFS work? Good question.
Here's what a roster looks like on AlphaDraft.
It has the same look at feel to a traditional DFS site. You have a salary cap and several roster positions you need to fill out using players from the games that are happening that day. On AlphdaDraft, the roster requirements are pretty simple:
- One of each role (Top, Mid, Jungle, ADC, Support)
- One Flex player (any role)
- One Team (think of this as a Defense in traditional fantasy NFL games)
The players are given points based on how they do in their respective games, while the team you select is given points based on team-based global objectives in the game. As you can imagine, the success of all these roster spots is highly correlated to winning the game (the more kills, assists and fewer deaths you accrue as a team, the more time you have to secure map-objectives and ultimately win the game).
League of Legends DFS Strategy
Now that we know how the game works and rosters are built, it's important to think about what strategies we want to adopt when building a lineup.
Most important thing is to consider what type of contest you are playing in. As usual, I will focus exclusively on playing in top-heavy payout tournaments, or GPPs. The reason I do this is that it is easier to use simple game theory to give yourself a big edge. You don't need a particularly powerful model or understanding of the game flow or players as long as you understand the game theory behind your choices.
Take this lineup as an example. This particular team tied for 2nd in a recent GPP on AlphaDraft and let's understand why. First, the goal of GPPs is always to create lineups with the most "upside". This is just a shitty way of saying "pick lineups with high correlated players". You want to do this to give yourself the best possible chance of finishing at the very top of the leaderboard, where all the payouts are. Highly correlated players lead to high variance teams as either all or none of them will have productive fantasy outings. If one does extremely well, they likely all will do extremely well.
This is most obviously reminiscent to NHL and MLB DFS, where the optimal GPP strategies are to stack players from the same team in MLB, or same line in NHL. The idea being that if the 3rd batter for the Indians hits a homerun and 2RBIs, it's very likely that the guys nearby him in the batting order are also doing well. Additionally, the better a team does the more at bats they will accrue, giving them even more options to score fantasy points. In NHL, because goals are so infrequent and each goal is accompanied by up to two assists, you want to play players who are (almost) always on the ice together. Thus, if one scores a goal you are maximizing the chance that your other players will secure one or both assists.
In League of Legends, this stacking most obviously manifests itself in the Support + ADC combination. You should always have only one support, and you should always pair that support with the ADC that they will babysit throughout most of the game. Thus, if the support does extremely well, it's likely because their ADC and team is doing incredibly well, as Support players almost exclusively accrue fantasy points through assists.
On AlphaDraft, you're only allowed to play three position-players from the same team. Thus, the optimal strategy is to select three players from two different teams (not playing each other so as to prevent kills causing deaths among your team).
Additionally, due to the fact that, in order to win, you will need one of the games you are playing to last a very long time so as to maximize the number of kills and assists. During very long games, AD Carries reach their highest power level, and are thus the most likely to accrue a massive amount of fantasy points. Some teams have very strong Mid laners, and will see the Mid laner carry the game when it goes late, but usually it's the ADC.
What this means is that your Flex position should always be an ADC or Mid, as they have the highest "ceiling" among all positions in long games.
Simplifying this, the following rules will let you become a winning tournament player in DFS League of Legends:
- Pick two teams
- Pick teams expected to win, or teams you think are under-hyped
- This information can be found by looking at the differences between betting odds on LCS games from sites like Pinnacle and the fan-vote results from League of Legends themselves. Games where a team is under-represented by the fan-vote relative to their implied odds of winning from Pinnacle are great choices.
- Pick the ADC and Support from one of the two teams
- Pick three players from the 2nd team, including either Mid or ADC
- Round out your roster with players from each of the two teams
- Make sure you have either 2 Mids or 2 ADCs when you complete
- Pick the "Team" position of one of the two teams you drafted.
- The Team score is highly correlated with game length and success, both things your counting on by stacking 3x of each team.
There might be some interesting correlation between Jungle, Top or Mid but at this point there's not enough data to prove anything conclusive, and in general it will depend on which positions are better represented within various teams based on historical stats.
Anyway, that's about it. The secret to being good at LoL DFS is simple: stacks on stacks.
