I’m your casual DFS player. I have a full time job which prevents me from spending every waking hour thinking fantasy. I subscribe to a Fantasy site for what I’d like to deem as above average intelligence. I read Evan Silva’s match ups every week which is solid advice from someone who eats, breathes, and sleeps fantasy. Yet at the end of the day, from a financial perspective, there is no point for me to play daily fantasy sports and I’m not alone.
The Demise of DFS
My stats since the ’16 football season started. To date I’ve entered 49 tournaments and have lost $102. Placing 91st out of 65,687 entries in the NFL $9 Slant has been the highlight which netted $41. I tend to dabble in the $10-$20 range and these tournaments are not nearly as soft as you may think.
If I wanted to join a $20, 3 man league right now, I’d see 3 players sitting in 11 leagues of the same offering. AEJones. Condia. MakeitRain84. To someone who has never played before, they may enter one of these contests. To the people who pay even a little bit of attention, they’d wonder why on Earth are these guys playing $20 stakes and why don’t they play each other?
Some Player Background:
Just a 5 million dollar payday and he enters a $20 contest.
AeJones – Ranked #10 out of all players on Rotogrinders.com
Here’s a Reddit AMA titled “I’m Aaron Jones, 48 hours ago I made 5,000,000 playing Daily Fantasy Sports”
Condia – Ranked #56 – Condia Interview with RotoGrinders
MakeitRain84 – Ranked #53
Rnningfool – Ranked 5,300,000, maintains a killer blog.
This is like asking the 6th man of your high school basketball team to play Kevin Durant 1 v 1.
What To Do?
Draftkings has created leagues titled “Casual” leagues where players with experience badges cannot play. This is smart. However this was only implemented 3 weeks ago. I’ve played 156 total DK games which would qualify me for this. These leagues would solve my concerns not having to play against upper echelon competition. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know this existed and I’m sure others do either. Obviously Draftkings identified this as an issue. Casual leagues will not solve this problem of declining interest though.
The first week this season, the $20 entry Sunday Million had 1.4 million entrants. Last week only had 231k entrants. The game’s interest is slipping away from casual players for a key reason:
- Players losing money
My Take
“The entire DFS economy depends on about 5 percent of the players,” Singer said. “Those sharks will go away if they can’t make a profit.” – Washington Post
I do more research on football than 95% of my friends. If I can’t win, I wouldn’t expect them to either. This isn’t an egotistical claim. It’s fact of the matter that you are putting your money up against people where DFS is their livelihood. They have more money than you. More lineups. Better tools. Better networks. Better intelligence on how coaches game plan. It’s an uphill battle that makes 0 sense to play.
I look at it as an entertainment expense. People pay $15 for a movie and DFS is in the same exact grouping for casual players. I don’t doubt people will continue to play but it will be less and less each year as the realization that you won’t win gets clearer. This won’t prevent people from playing of course. Look at sports betting and poker. Millions of people gamble their pay checks away to casinos and sports books. The smart ones know there is no such thing as easy money. Hopefully this post clears up the idea that winning at DFS is not impossible, but you most likely aren’t going to do it.
As someone who follows sports closely and likes to gamble, I have zero interest in even trying DFS. Our Fantasy league is fun. One on one match-ups each week with people we know and enough money to make it worth my while. An hour before that draft I’m on an even playing field with everyone else.
DFS and the idea of competing against thousands each week for $9 entry to hopefully “hit it big” is so unappealing. All the “casual” players are on an even playing field while some studs with algorithms and money put everyone at a disadvantage. Can you get lucky? Of course you can, but it’s not going to be because you did your research. Everyone playing does their research – “X running back is coming off a bye and the D-Line for Y had two injuries last week! This is an easy play!”. You and literally thousands of others are coming to those same conclusions.
There’s more thought that goes into than the lottery. But when everyone is putting in roughly the same amount of thought, then it cancels out, and your chances are just as good as playing the lottery. Though to your point this provides more entertainment, which is valid. But how entertaining is it to lose money every week rooting for players you don’t give a hoot about?
You haven’t seen me Oooooh Killem when OBJ scores a TD.