It's Time to Switch to Crypto Full Time
Daily Fantasy Sports is a Dying Profession
It’s still profitable to play, but I can see the end because DFS is following poker’s profitably trajectory, albeit at a much quicker decline.
In 2003-2010, poker was booming.
Chris Moneymaker, 2003 WSOP champion and unlikely pioneer of the poker boom
It was ubiquitous on ESPN channels, the recreational players were significantly weaker than the professionals, and the ratio of recreational to professional players in online games was high enough that virtually any online table or live tournament was profitable for me.
After Black Friday forced the largest poker sites out of the US, the better American professionals moved to continue playing poker while all the recreational players and weaker professionals from USA quit playing: the games were instantly more difficult, and spurred a revolution in poker which forced everyone who continued to play to improve, but made all the games less profitable.
Daily Fantasy Sports Boom Period: 2013-2016
Constant advertisements on sports channels, weak professionals, and clueless recreational players made it highly profitable. Poker and DFS have many similarities, but one of the biggest differences was scalability: I can enter a lineup in every contest on the site while poker requires attention: the amount I could play was limited by the number of tables I could focus on at once. As I became one of the best in the world in a few different sports, I was able to play very big and grow profits at a rate that was impossible in poker.
Scalability and Access to Information Ruined Profitability
The scalability has a downside: introduce just one shark into the ecosystem and there is an instant non-trivial drop in profitability. This issue leads me to the other large difference between DFS and poker: preparation. Playing DFS is like having to map out a game theory optimal strategy for one hand of poker, while playing poker requires many on the spot decisions that can only be made through countless hours of practice. Let me explain this better using an example.
Suppose you wanted to play poker in a casino tonight and asked me for some tips. I would give you a basic hand chart that told you what hands to open from each position, and general guidelines on how to play in others, but you would still have to go play poker and you’d quickly find yourself in unique situations that I wasn’t able to cover in a brief lesson. Compare this to DFS, where I can tell you 6 guys you need to play, and a handful of viable choices at each unfilled position. With just a couple minutes of advice you can now go make a lineup that nobody in the world can beat after rake. So making that one new shark in an ecosystem is far easier with less barriers than poker.
There are many websites devoted to helping others be better DFS players: Rotogrinders, Fantasylabs, DailyRoto and FanVice are some of the more popular ones. These sites have successful DFS players giving out strong advice for every sport every day. The growth of these sites, combined with reduced advertising due to legislation, and rising rake means the games are dying at a much quicker rate than poker. I see the end coming and I’m preparing for it.
Cryptocurrency is the (my) future
I bought my first bitcoins back in 2013 when the price was roughly $550, then sold them off when it hit $800 because it felt unsustainable. But mid last year I was more bullish on the market, and started buying as many as I could, and I diversified by using my BTC to first buy Ether, and then other cryptos.
It should come as no surprise that due to the parabolic rise of the crypto market and the ever increasing difficulty of DFS, I've made the majority of my profits this year because of cryptocurrency investments. Every few years I am left wondering how I could be so lucky: I stumbled into poker at its peak, stumbled into DFS at its peak, and stumbled into cryptocurrency at the right time. But now that I'm here, I need to make the most of it.
I can still make decent money in DFS: in the first 2 months of the MLB season, I made $22,616. However, this pales in comparison to the money that can be made in the crypto space. I'll still play the upcoming NFL season, but that is less time consuming than other sports and I'll be able to treat it like a part time job.
Approaching a Bear Market?
There has been speculation in the past few months that we are approaching either a rapid or extended downtrend. From one perspective, this would argue that I should continue playing DFS and simply HODL my coins and not think about what's happening. However, I argue the opposite: by managing my assets during the downtrend properly, I can mitigate the losses more than my expected DFS profits.
How to improve my knowledge?
Restarting my computer science education
Comp Sci was my 2nd major in undergrad, but it's been over 10 years since then. I'm currently taking CS50: Introduction to Computer Science offered by Harvard as a refresher. The course teaches the basics of programming languages, and we learn C, Python, Javascript, MySQL, and a few other useful languages.
I signed up for a monthly membership at codecademy: I took the Python course, and learned Command Line, and plan on doing their full stack path.
I've looked into a few coding bootcamps, but they all run at bad times for me, so I'll probably just do it on my own using online resources.
Taking CryptoCurrency classes
The University of Nicasio in Cyprus is offering a graduate level program in Digital Currency. The first class is a free MOOC (massive open online class) that starts September 4th -- I suggest signing up. To finish the graduate degree you have to take at least 8 more courses (some required, some elective) which cost 1510 euros each, for a total cost of €12,080 for all 9 courses.
Learning to trade
A while back the steemspeak trading guys recommended taking the pips course. Other than this, I'll need a refresher on some economics classes and maybe even a personalized MBA from online classes. Any suggestions here?
Studying Individual Cryptos
Read whitepapers, research teams behind projects, look at price history charts, read rumors, reddits etc. You can learn a lot about a cryptocurrency in a few hours of research. Of course it helps to have the coding, economics, and digital currency abstract understanding to work your way through the material efficiently, but anyone can skip those steps and just read everything they can.
I was originally planning on making a "Learn a CryptoCurrency a Day" series where I outlined my thoughts on a different coin every day, but that's a bit too restrictive. I'll occasionally post my thoughts on one (more so to help me remember through explaining it), but I don't want to pigeonhole myself into a routine on it.
Any Suggestions?
I know more about the space than most of the people I talk to, which is a problem because I don't know nearly as much as many of the people on this site, so I need to crowdsource some suggestions: just anything you guys think I should add to my list of topics to study, magazines/articles to read, people to follow on steemit/twitter, etc.
Thanks! Looking forward to a new adventure.
My name is Ryan Daut and I'd love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my page, then click in the upper right corner if you would like to see my blogs and articles regularly.
I am a professional gambler, and my interests include poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.
Welcome back @daut44! Been missing your posts around here. I've also taken the same CS50 course in the past but found I liked the edX CS MOOC's on python, databasing (R and SQL), and Statistics through MIT and UT Austin better. I found the exercises were more applicable and I liked the instructional videos more.
I have a feeling if you take on trading with the same gusto as fantasy sports and poker, you are going to have equal, if not more, success in your future!
In high school and undergrad I coded mainly in C++ and java, and the limited programming I've done since has been in python so I thought I needed a full refresher, so one that started with C and the basics and built up quickly was attractive. I'll get to the databasing languages eventually, they're part of most full stack curriculums.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but I've never taken stats--one reason why I'm putting off the database languages as I'd like to take a stats class before or concurrently with them. I believe I took every other undergraduate math class and during my short PhD stint I was on the Analysis/Algebra/Logic track so somehow Stats fell through the cracks. I used to think just knowing combinatorics was sufficient, but yea....it's not lol, some of your posts that should have made complete sense were pure gibberish to me. Oh well, just another thing on my list to learn and another reason why I don't want to slave away all baseball season =).
I assume this is part 1 of the stats series you were talking about? https://www.edx.org/course/foundations-data-analysis-part-1-utaustinx-ut-7-11x-0
Good to see you still contributing around here and your posts doing well.
Yep! That's the one I took a while back for a refresher. You would flourish, for sure, but the #1 thing I took from that course wasn't necessarily the stats, but the ability to use the R programming language. The stats instruction was pretty awesome, for sure, But once you get into R, your mind will be racing with all of the applications to stuff you have already doing with analysis- just done so much more efficiently.
wow great insightful post
meep
Awesome post. I love to gamble as well haha! Check out my page if you wish and follow
Cool post, I was into dfs the last couple years and can agree! Ownerships went from 40 to 80 real quick on the "best plays of the week"
Yup, too many touts and too easy to be good.
I feel like I had a similar experience in poker, missed dfs completely and actually got into crypto early but not hard or fast enough. I actually recognize your name from the poker community as well. Best of luck good sir!
Hey i am Umar Usman
and i am new on Steemit i really like your posts
and i am also following you
can you please follow me back
and upvote my last post
here is the link
https://steemit.com/nature/@omrusman/last-night-s-sunset-over-lake-texoma
Thanks
waiting for your response
Very nice post dude. But changing a little the subject... I can not believe I'm talking to the guy who played that unbelievable hand with Haxton. I am a low stakes poker player and have always wanted to be able to get in touch with someone who has won such a great tournament. I hope I can share experiences with you.
You are a Legend man!!
Thanks. Unfortunately I don't play much poker nowadays, so a lot of my advice is a bit dated. I'm sure there will be some nice poker content here in the future though.
Nice to see you and Brandon Adams on here. I just made my account last week, but we have similar paths and interests.
I started in MTG then moved into Poker where i've been ever since.
I started DFS late (2015 or so) but am just now slowing down and focusing more on crypto.
I have a full time job as a project manager now, but i spend all of my spare time researching ICO's/crypto twitter etc.
I have 0 background in Computer Science so i do feel a little disadvantaged sometimes, but the poker/dfs background and general knowledge of markets/economics helps enough to know more than most people.
But like you i definitely feel behind the people here.
Everytime I see your name all i can think of is that legendary bluff Ike pulled lol.
I will folow of course, and I am very interested in your path forward in the crypto space!
Suggest taking a few of the CS courses I linked -- they're free. That said I have a feeling CS is the least important part of my study path for specifically crypto, but maybe the most important overall.
Thanks for another great post. I started following you after I heard you on Joe Ingrams podcast last year and you always have a lot of great information. I have been playing DFS for a few years now and I am finally getting to the point where I am making some good money, so I don't really like hearing that you think it is going to be hard to beat soon haha.
I am a software developer and learned most of all I have known just through youtube, stackoverflow and codecademy. I think you will be able to learn all you need through those sources and won't need a bootcamp to help.
If you ever need some help feel free to reach out or if you ever want to collab on something with a random dude hit me up.
As I was reading this post I was thinking "I wish I were half as smart as him." Then I realized you work your ass off to learn what you know.
I haven't personally read it, but it's been referenced by enough other authors that I know it well, so I recommend reading Mindset by Carol Dweck. Basically she found there are two ways to look at ability: innate and learned. People who think they improve through growth outperform those who think their abilities are set in stone.
I used to think I was naturally gifted in some areas and weak in other areas, but in reality I was just passionate and spent many hours of my childhood learning skills and a way of thinking about the world that made me excel in certain disciplines. Sure there are outlier geniuses, athletes, etc, but when it comes to learning and brain capacity I believe most people have similar potential.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll add it to my reading list. I have four books to read before it, but I'll get there soon.