Max DaLury Revisited

I heard Max DaLury today on the Rotogrinders Daily Fantasy Fix Podcast while I was at the gym, and I think I vastly underestimated one aspect of his strategy (you can listen to this podcast on Stitcher here, it is 28 minutes long).

I didn't even consider the "stacking" part of the plan.

Max Dalury's Twitter Photo

Max said on the podcast that he normally goes with six players from a team he chooses to stack with.  He was talking about stacking Blue Jays in a night where he won 51% of 888 rosters laid out in tournaments.  When he was pressed as to how he chose the six, beyond the top 2 guys (Josh Donaldson & Joe Bautista), he said he "didn't want to go into that part of the strategy."  This deferral means that stacking strategy is a part of the equation that he feels is too valuable to divulge.  Which clearly tells me that my overlooking this concept is a significant error on my part.

The only other thing he refrained from divulging was how he actually finds the time to enter and track 888 rosters on a given night.

I will venture a guess as to what this means for his "Stacking Strategy," and there are two ideas that may explain it:

• The Cornerstone Concept

I've heard other players who talk about rostering multiple lineups talk about choosing two or three players as "anchors" for their team, while mixing up the other 5 or 6 hitters around them.  Because he was forthcoming with the idea that he did focus on Bautista and Donaldson, it may be that he expands the anchoring concept into the stacking concept when focusing on one team. Pick one or two batters to build around, and make players 3, 4, and 5 change within the team.  If you're stacking the same team in multiple lineups, you probably shouldn't be using the same stack in all of them.  Because the nature of this game is highly random, you need exposure and luck, a lot more than expert prediction skills.  It would make sense that if he had a good read on how to pick secondary and tertiary players with a single MLB team, he'd want to keep that to himself.

• The Volume Concept

I would be remiss if I didn't consider the possibility that there was absolutely no strategy at all.  When you play 500+ lineups, you can cover the vast majority of possible combinations, possibly all of the reasonably likely high quality options. What skill there was may not have been in choosing the players from Toronto to focus on, but rather in choosing Toronto and the weak arm of John Danks to exploit in the first place. If this were the case, he would refrain from revealing this information because it would be embarrassing to say that there's not really any skill to it.

I've noticed that the Max DaLury handle pops up in virtually every Satellite, Step contest, and Qualifier.  This means that it's part of his strategy to get as many free games as he can to make the extremely high volume multiple entry scheme more affordable.

He did say one thing that bears repeating when discussing how he started in Daily Fantasy (This is a paraphrase not a direct quote, but the concept itself is important).

:

The reason you should be playing is because it's fun.  It's more fun to win money, but it needs to be fun for you regardless.