A First Look at Fan Duel

I've been on Fan Duel for a week and I'm down less than a dollar, principally because I've not been anywhere near close to the money in the Tournaments on the site.  Also, I'm not playing too many games each day, as I'm trying to get a feel for the differences in the system.

I won in a Turbo Game (3 Games to choose from) today, which I find kind of interesting.

First, it seems pretty clear that a one pitcher format is much easier to play in for head to head contests.  The pitcher is more important here than on Draft Kings, as you can see than Freddie Freemen's tremendous game was outscored by Francisco Liriano's Good Game.  Freddie would've needed a third home run to pass the Pittsburgh Southpaw.  One must understand that when fielding Pitchers there are three possibilities that can occur:

1. You field better pitchers than your opponent
2. Your opponent fields better pitchers than you
3. You field the same pitchers

I consider two of the three possibilities to be acceptable outcomes for me as a player.  I choose better P's, I'm usually golden.  If we choose the same P's then that incredibly volatile position is taken completely out of the equation, which at very minimum means I have a chance to win.  In a one pitcher format the frequency of selecting the same pitcher is much higher than a two pitcher format.  So I believe that Fan Duel builds a system that makes the most difficult position to figure out a little less make or break for the player.  I think this makes H2H's on FanDuel a little bit easier than Draftkings.  However, due to the scoring system, the opposite is true for tournaments:  If you don't choose a pitcher that scores within 4 points of the best pitcher on FanDuel, you have virtually no chance to even place in a tournament.  

The second interesting thing is what happens when you control for duplication

My Team	His Team
Andrew McCutcheon	Buster Posey
Brett Gardner	David Peralta
Neil Walker	Ender Enciarte
Jordy Mercer	Chris Owings
Jarrod Saltalamacchia	Jace Peterson

We both nailed the pitcher, as well as Freddie Freeman and A.J. Pollock, and whiffed on Chris Johnson.  The bottom two were clearly affordable lineup fillers and not strategic targets.  If you were asked to choose between my three or their three, I believe that most people would take my three, but this part of the match doesn't really matter much.  Sure, he outscored me by 3 points here, but it accounted for less than 10% of either of our scores.  The game was one, as it almost always is by how well your bottom feeders do.

The two things to be gleaned from this are:

• Getting Value from a player is more important than one might imagine.

I don't think I focus enough on value when choosing player.  The evidence of value's role becomes very clear when spotlighting the players at, or very close to, the minimum salaries.  But getting a player who outperforms his cost is the key to the game.

• The tremendous amount of luck in Daily Fantasy

I wish I could say there was some formula that made me think that Jordy Mercer would hit a homerun today and Jarrod Saltalamacchia would get two hits.  I can tell you there wasn't.  It doesn't mean there wasn't a process to it; I had my reasons.  Both guys have demonstrated the capacity to hit the long ball by each having years in the Big Leagues with over 20 Homers.  And both were facing Pitchers I considered hittable, or at least hittable enough.  But If I played this combination yesterday or tomorrow, I'm pretty sure the results would be worse.  It's another reminder of the gambling aspect of Daily Fantasy.  I took a flyer on two long shots and hit; my opponent was not so lucky.