If you listen to "experts" of all stripes talk about their strategy in Daily Fantasy, you will often hear the phrase, "One of my Lineups," as in "I'd make sure to get exposure to Andrew McCutcheon today in one of my lineups," or "I think Jimmy Nelson has a shot at a really good game, so I'll build at least one of my lineups around him."
It begs the questions:
These questions are never answered. They just float off into the ether as some sort of understood supposition, that requires zero explanation. I don't like this tactic; what they are doing is giving the casual player enough information to pique their interest, but not enough to really succeed. They'll even end the segment with a plug from one of the sites and the enticement that you can start for as little as $1 (Which is technically true, but nearly impossible to have even a modicum of success from; you can never say in "one of my lineups" if you're only buying one lineup).
The Imporant thing to understand is that you should be playing more than one game.
There are two ways to have multiple lineups going in a single day. First, because there are often multiple contest within a single day of baseball: Early Games, All Day, Turbo, Late, etc. You could theoretically have multiple lineups in completely different parts of the baseball slate with completely different competition (if you avoid the All day slate). But this isn't what they are talking about. They are talking about playing a handful of lineups in a single bracket of games.
What they are doing is building a handful of separate lineups that compete against each other. It's a clear admission to the randomness of the daily fantasy process. No one is ever sure of 9 or 10 players on a given day. If you think you're sure, I assure you, you are wrong. But what a person can have is a very good feeling about a handful of players, and a good understanding that another handful are priced too low for their production. On a good day, this might cover 7 or 8 of your slots. A typical day will be in the 5-6 range. If you fall in the 4 or below category, my best advice is for you to sit out that set of games. So they are often shuffling between different last few players on their rosters. Another possibility is that three of the guys you feel great about cost a high dollar amount to roster, making fielding a full roster containing those three functionally impossible. So they build multiple roster to accommodate all of them.
The next thing is to better understand the DFS betting process.
If you play a single game, there are only two results, and the best you can hope for is a 80% return on your entry. If you bet $10, you either lose $10 or you gain $8, because $2 goes to the house. But if you play in more than one game, the permutations of possible outcomes grows. Take the same $10 and play 5-$2 games or 10-$1 games and the possibilities landscape changes dramatically.
When you play one game there are two outcomes; 5 games produces 6 outcomes, and 10 games produces 11 outcomes. It might be counterintuitive to gamble in an atmosphere where losing your bets is part of the process, but the chorus of "one of my lineups" tells you this is true. Once you realize that it is impossible to double your money, dropping from a 80% return on your entry to a 44% or a 26% isn't that much of a stretch. There are so many variables to this game, you need to be honest with yourself and admit you are going to be wrong a lot more than you think.
Multiple betting doesn't change the outcome that much, outside of dramatically lowering the possibility of returning a full 80% on your money. But it hedges your downside risk just as significantly. Maybe your $10K SP Chris Sale screws the pooch in his outing, but in one of your lineups, in one game the other guy also fielded Sale, you might only lose $6.40. Maybe you bypass the elite 1B's like Goldshmidt, Rizzo, and Cabrera for a more affordable Mike Napoli and he knocks a couple of balls out of the park to carry one of your outings on an otherwise bad night for you. Maybe, you find one of your opponents to have really gambled on his two pitchers failing miserably to hand you a win. If you think about it, the outcomes are going fall along something that resembles a bell shaped curve, where even though you have $10 at stake, the most likely outcomes are going to be winning or losing less than a dollar. But when you get one Lineup really right, you sweep for more money. It keeps you in the game for the times when you guess right. All the while, the worst possible outcome, completely losing your full entry, becomes far less likely, and you can do no worse than betting on one game and getting it wrong.
If you know that the typical night ends with an outcome somewhere between you winning or losing $3.60, you really don't have $10 bucks on the line each and every night. Your most often tossing out less than $4 bucks for a shot at winning twice that. Something that more closely approximates one's typical gambling experience.
You need to hone your skills at picking better lineups to make the good outcome happen more often than the bad outcomes. But this is what the "experts" see than you might not. Just spend a minute on the Lobby and you'll see the sheer quantity of game some of the hardened veterans are tossing out each and every day. They're not gluttons for punishment, and they are so awesome at DFS that they always win. They simply know that leveraging your bets is an excellent strategy.
It begs the questions:
- How many lineups are you making?-
- If the point is to make the best lineup you can put together, why are you making more than one? How can you have two "best lineups?"
These questions are never answered. They just float off into the ether as some sort of understood supposition, that requires zero explanation. I don't like this tactic; what they are doing is giving the casual player enough information to pique their interest, but not enough to really succeed. They'll even end the segment with a plug from one of the sites and the enticement that you can start for as little as $1 (Which is technically true, but nearly impossible to have even a modicum of success from; you can never say in "one of my lineups" if you're only buying one lineup).
The Imporant thing to understand is that you should be playing more than one game.
There are two ways to have multiple lineups going in a single day. First, because there are often multiple contest within a single day of baseball: Early Games, All Day, Turbo, Late, etc. You could theoretically have multiple lineups in completely different parts of the baseball slate with completely different competition (if you avoid the All day slate). But this isn't what they are talking about. They are talking about playing a handful of lineups in a single bracket of games.
What they are doing is building a handful of separate lineups that compete against each other. It's a clear admission to the randomness of the daily fantasy process. No one is ever sure of 9 or 10 players on a given day. If you think you're sure, I assure you, you are wrong. But what a person can have is a very good feeling about a handful of players, and a good understanding that another handful are priced too low for their production. On a good day, this might cover 7 or 8 of your slots. A typical day will be in the 5-6 range. If you fall in the 4 or below category, my best advice is for you to sit out that set of games. So they are often shuffling between different last few players on their rosters. Another possibility is that three of the guys you feel great about cost a high dollar amount to roster, making fielding a full roster containing those three functionally impossible. So they build multiple roster to accommodate all of them.
The next thing is to better understand the DFS betting process.
If you play a single game, there are only two results, and the best you can hope for is a 80% return on your entry. If you bet $10, you either lose $10 or you gain $8, because $2 goes to the house. But if you play in more than one game, the permutations of possible outcomes grows. Take the same $10 and play 5-$2 games or 10-$1 games and the possibilities landscape changes dramatically.
When you play one game there are two outcomes; 5 games produces 6 outcomes, and 10 games produces 11 outcomes. It might be counterintuitive to gamble in an atmosphere where losing your bets is part of the process, but the chorus of "one of my lineups" tells you this is true. Once you realize that it is impossible to double your money, dropping from a 80% return on your entry to a 44% or a 26% isn't that much of a stretch. There are so many variables to this game, you need to be honest with yourself and admit you are going to be wrong a lot more than you think.
Multiple betting doesn't change the outcome that much, outside of dramatically lowering the possibility of returning a full 80% on your money. But it hedges your downside risk just as significantly. Maybe your $10K SP Chris Sale screws the pooch in his outing, but in one of your lineups, in one game the other guy also fielded Sale, you might only lose $6.40. Maybe you bypass the elite 1B's like Goldshmidt, Rizzo, and Cabrera for a more affordable Mike Napoli and he knocks a couple of balls out of the park to carry one of your outings on an otherwise bad night for you. Maybe, you find one of your opponents to have really gambled on his two pitchers failing miserably to hand you a win. If you think about it, the outcomes are going fall along something that resembles a bell shaped curve, where even though you have $10 at stake, the most likely outcomes are going to be winning or losing less than a dollar. But when you get one Lineup really right, you sweep for more money. It keeps you in the game for the times when you guess right. All the while, the worst possible outcome, completely losing your full entry, becomes far less likely, and you can do no worse than betting on one game and getting it wrong.
If you know that the typical night ends with an outcome somewhere between you winning or losing $3.60, you really don't have $10 bucks on the line each and every night. Your most often tossing out less than $4 bucks for a shot at winning twice that. Something that more closely approximates one's typical gambling experience.
You need to hone your skills at picking better lineups to make the good outcome happen more often than the bad outcomes. But this is what the "experts" see than you might not. Just spend a minute on the Lobby and you'll see the sheer quantity of game some of the hardened veterans are tossing out each and every day. They're not gluttons for punishment, and they are so awesome at DFS that they always win. They simply know that leveraging your bets is an excellent strategy.
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