EU LCS W7D2 - Projections and Thoughts

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Alright, EU Day 2! Despite going 100% against my model (told me to pick 4x UOL, 2x FNC) I still managed to come up positive thanks to some aggressive head-to-head choices. Anyway, on to Day 2.

Team Projections and Odds

As happened with today's games, my model is pretty much always going to tell me to play whoever is facing CW. While CW haven't necessarily given up the most kills when they lose, they are pretty much always heavy underdogs which means their opponents will be some of the safest plays you can make.


Anyway, it's never a good idea to just blindly pick SK (especially since they're relatively expensive tomorrow), so lets take a bit of a closer look at this particular match-up. A couple things I always look for is a simple check to determine whether a particular game has the potential to turn into a messy affair, which is obviously ideal for fantasy. To do this I take a look at a teams kills/game relative to their overall win rate. There's an extremely close relationship here, and by identifying whether teams land above or below their expected value we can say that they are sloppier or safer, more aggressive or more passive than average.

Yellow = CW ; Grey = SK

This chart shows us a couple things. First and foremost, there's an incredibly tight correlation between a team's winning percentage (total wins / total games in the current season) and their average kills-per-game. However, some teams, notably SK gaming, deviate pretty heavily from this average. What this chart essentially says is that obviously FNC players have the best aggregate stats, they're always winning! However, SK as a team is much more aggressive, getting many more kills per game (this data even includes today's lackluster affair) than their record would suggest.

Importantly, because this chart shows that SK outperforms their record, what it also means is that when SK is favored, we can similarly expect them to outperform their odds as far as kills are concerned.

Yellow = CW ; Grey = SK

This chart tells a similar story, but from the perspective of deaths, and the story makes sense. CW has played relatively cautiously this split, despite winning only 2 games (stick with what ... doesn't work I guess?) However, we again see that SK outperforms their record as far as deaths are concerned. This tells us that their aggression can also be to a fault. What's cool for us is that this means that SKs aggression has a chance to result in a game with more than expected kills and deaths, which is pretty much exactly what we're looking for in a DFS match-up.

Unsurprisingly my model really likes whoever is playing CW. This time around it's SK, so all aboard the CandyPanda train!

Alright, so now that we all know my favorite team for tomorrow, let's think about some of the other match-ups. Unsurprisingly my model likes the odds associated with H2K, UOL and FNC. For a tournament lineup, it could definitely make sense to run some stacks from the GIA / GMB game, as they'll likely be relatively low owned due to uncertainty around the outcome.

One thing I'll add here, with the news of Kikis leaving UOL, there's some risk there. However, this will also be his last game with them, so there's a chance he wants to go out on a bang. He and the team made the decision to part ways last week, and it very clearly didn't negatively affect his performance today. Take that for what you will.

Favorite Players by Position

Top: As far as average projections, there's verry little between Huni, Csacsi, freddy and Odoamne. So it's really a matter of preference here and who fits nicely into your lineup. Vizicsacsi and freddy122 even cost the same tomorrow, so feel free to literally flip a coin here, I might.

Jungle: Svenskeren and Kikis are by far my favorite two junglers today, especially after the disappointing performance Reignover put up on Rengar today, I'm probably putting him in the metaphorical doghouse for a few games. If you're playing in a tournament, Amazing and Jankos are great choices as far as potential production in the event they win (if you want to pay $8k for Amazing tomorrow, you better be playing in a tournament... that price is insane).

Mid: Same story, but I can't justify paying $9,500 for Ryu tomorrow. His value just isn't there, when Febiven and Fox are both substantially cheaper, and even PowerofEvil can be slotted in for a small amount of salary relief. Again, Froggen, Pepii and Nukeduck are all great value if you're playing a tournament lineup stacking their respective teams.

ADC: Alright, this will probably be my biggest point of debate tomorrow: do I pay up for Hjarnan or not. I absolutely love CandyPanda and Hjarnan, and even Rekkless is way up there. However, Hjarnan's price tag pretty much puts him out of the equation unless you want to supplement him with MrRallez. Honestly, Rallez is so cheap that it could make sense to roster both him and Hjarnan in a HWW. You know at least one of them will have a huge game, and possibly both if the game gets out of control.

Support: There's literally no difference between kaSing, nRated and YellOwStar. Pick whoever fits in your lineup, as there's a bit of a drop after those 3. Don't pick Mithy, he's crazy expensive. Unless you're playing in a tournament, in which case pick him, as zero others will and in the (31%) chance of an OG win, you'll win everything.

Alright, that's it for me, happy drafting! If you are still trying to figure out what I mean when I say cash game or tournament lineups, check out this brief little write-up here, and you can sign up for AlphaDraft here: http://bit.ly/1D2g2Lc. See you out there!

EU LCS W7D1 - Projections and Thoughts

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I'm still in the process of deciding exactly how I'd like to structure this post and with what cadence I'll put these out, but for now I'm going to attempt to do every day there's EU or NA LCS action... In the future I might run through both days of EU and NA in one post each, but let's see how long I can keep this up with more individualized daily thought.

Team Projections and Odds

Let's take a look at what my model thinks of this weeks matchups. I'll provide a write-up on roughly how my model works, but for now that's my secret :) [it's not that complicated, you weight historic performance of players with their likelihood of winning using some voodoo math]:

W7D1 team aggregate stats and projections. Value is simply points per $. Coloration is provided for readability... Blue/Green is good, Red bad.

Unsurprisingly, the heaviest favorite of the night, UOL, is the best projected team for overall points. To those who have watched them play, especially in past LCS splits, this makes total sense. UOL historically has played in drawn-out, high kill matches. Last season they ranked 4th in EU in kills-per-game while also managing to rack up the 3rd most deaths-per-game. That's an impressive feat, and evidence of the blood-bath nature of their games.

There will be blood... of Unicorns and Wolves.

However... this current season is somewhat of a different story. This season they have the 4th fewest deaths and 4th fewest kills per game in EU. Their opponents, the Wolves, have also been somewhat tame, putting up only the 6th most deaths and fewest kills in EU. However, my model does take into account historic performance of players, and some of last seasons blood and gore is built out here. Additionally, because they are such heavy favorites to win (and knowing CW doesn't really ever kill anyone) they are still a very safe bet to put up decent points, but there's a chance my model is overselling their total point production if we believe they are 100% over their glorious spring-split blood baths.

As expected, I think Origen and Fnatic are also good bets, with my model strongly preferring rostering Fnatic due to their lower prices. While I really like ROC players when they win, they are currently not favored enough for me to roster many of them in cash games, but perhaps would make a solid tournament play.

Favorite Players by Position

Top: Unsurprisingly top laners in EU haven't particularly separated from each other in terms of carry ability, so I generally prefer them in the order of their likelihood of winning. There's honestly not much difference between Huni and Vizicsacsi statistically, so it's really a preference in terms of how you view each game will play out... I personally think csacsi has a wonderful matchup against Lenny (who has not been playing great), but that assumes they actually lane against eachother.

Jungle: Kikis, Reignover, Amazing and Jankos are all very close for me, separated only really by their salary and expectations of game flow. I really don't know if H2K will let Fnatic walk all over them, so there's a chance that game is more controlled and objective focused. On the other hand, Giants have given up the 2nd most deaths per game this split, while Origen have come out guns blazing putting up the 3rd most kills-per-game (and a propensity for late-game fountain-dives and BM'ing) making this match potentially bloody, which is always good for DFS.

Mid: Again here FNC and UOL come out on top, but based on game-flow it might be risky to pick Febiven despite his cheap price tag. However, my model likes him a lot, he's been playing pretty well and it would be silly to have no exposure to Fnatic. I may take a gamble on him to free up some cap space for more expensive ADCs, but Peke and PowerofEvil are solid alternatives.

ADC: If you're going to pay up for a position, do it at ADC in EU. At least according to my model. I rate Niels, Vardags and Rekkles very highly. Even CandyPanda shows up high on my list and at terrific value. There's always a chance Niels shows up higher than he should in my model due to his reduced sample size of just half a split, but never-the-less he's also a great choice as long as he keeps putting up big numbers in favorable matchups.

Support: Pick your poison here. I personally don't see much difference statistically between Mithy, Hylissang and YellOwstar... They're all decently priced with similar projections. For me it depends on 2 things: what type of game are you playing and who have you already picked. I'll generally use the support position to hedge on teams that I'm over-invested in with a cash lineup, while tournament lineups I'd just grab whoever is supporting my ADC of choice. For example, if I've only got 1-2 UOL players and 2+ FNC or OG players, I might grab Hylissang to give me a bit more exposure to the UOL game and make sure I'm not too invested in either FNC or OG.

Alright, that's it for me, happy drafting! If you are still trying to figure out what I mean when I say cash game or tournament lineups, check out this brief little write-up here. See you out there!

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.