DFS Thursday Report: I Lit $900 on Fire Tonight Because of an Organizational Error

picture of me earlier tonight. source: DC wikia

In my blogpost last Sunday, I showed my entries from the first 5 slates of football across 5 different sites. It required a huge amount of organization to keep everything straight and stay on top of my entries. All told I had over $120,000 in play across maybe 60 lineups in 10,000 different contests across 5 sites. Well today I made an organizational error and put in a dummy placeholder lineup that effectively has 0 chance to win and will get back nothing.

After week 1 games ended Monday night, I started registering for week 2 contests.

Registering for 5 sites worth of contests takes hours: I wouldn't trust a computer script to register as diligently as I do with a mouse, especially when I am avoiding certain contests with only other top professionals. Instead of lengthening the process by also analyzing week 2 matchups late Monday night when I'm exhausted after a weekend of hard work, I enter a dummy lineup filled with random players and use that lineup to enter all the contests I want to play. I generally make my HU contests and register for the 50/50s and double-up contests that night so I can be the first one in the lobby.

As the week progresses, I continue registering for contests a few times a day while doing lots of research. Basically I'll wake up on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, do 30-60 minutes of registration, scrolling through each site for new contests I can play, then do another 30-60 minutes of registration before I go to bed. In between the registration I'll review what happened week 1, read reports from NFL beat writers, read analysis from journalists like Evan Silva, work on my own projections for players, check out salary differences across the different sites, and fine tune each of my lineups. The first game of the week is always on Thursday night at roughly 830pm EST and all of the sites have a Thursday-Monday 16 game slate.

Instead of setting every lineup on each site, I only set the lineups for Thursday contests.

This is to save time: besides the Thursday Slate, there is the Main slate with the last 15 games, the Sunday only slate, the early only slate, the afternoon only slate, the afternoon on slate, and the primetime slate. I don't bother setting the last 6 slates as I have another 3 days to do so and can organize more on Saturday. I use the time saved by not setting these lineups to register for more contests, do more Thursday research, and come up with the perfect lineup for each site.

So for instance, on Draftkings, here are lineups for 3 of my upcoming slates:

As you can see, there are injured players mixed in because I just quickly filled in the lineup with random choices to expedite the registration process.

There are two things to note about Draftkings:

1. Draftkings lists the lineups in chronological order, the first being the next one to start
2. Draftkings allows Late Swap

Late Swap

With late swapping, players don't lock until their game starts. So for instance, tonight I played no Jets or Bills players, so my entire Draftkings Thursday night lineup is wide open and I can set it however I choose. Some sites don't allow late swap: once the contests start, all of the players lock and you cannot make any changes.

This brings in quite a bit of strategy when dealing with both. For instance on a site without late swap, I have to make a more conservative lineup on Thursday that avoids any players who have injury issues and might miss Sunday's game. While on late swap sites, I may choose to stay more open in case someone who is injured is a last minute scratch, opening up cheap value plays with increased usage.

So for the Thursday night slate, I need to correctly set my Thursday lineups on sites that don't have late swap, and I usually make sure to stay open on the sites that do have late swap.

For instance, the above is what I entered for Thursday Yahoo contests (please don't use those players, they were a random group of guys I used to enter all my contests). Yahoo DFS allows for late swap, so I didn't need to worry about setting the lineup: I just needed to concentrate on the sites that didn't allow late swap. But for Fanduel, Fantasyaces, and FantasyDraft, I needed to set the lineups.

FantasyDraft

FantasyDraft does neither of the two things I listed above about Draftkings. There is no late swap and contests are not listed chronologically -- instead they are either listed by which lineup is registered for more contests or which one was edited most recently (I actually don't know the answer). So tonight I needed to make sure that my FantasyDraft lineup was set properly.

I worked all day today on football: I went through each site registering more contests, I did lots of reading, watched podcasts, worked on projections, and set my Thursday lineups for each site. But I messed up on FantasyDraft: I assumed that the lineup listed first was Thursday contests, and that the lineup listed second was Sunday contests. I was wrong, and left my dummy placeholder lineup in on my Thursday contests.

Jamaal Charles is dealing with an injury and almost certainly won't play Sunday. Jimmy Graham is also dealing with an injury and won't play that much. I have none of the players I wanted in this lineup, and it probably gives up about 50-60 points of expectation and has virtually no chance of returning any profits.

It's currently winning, but that won't last: it had a player going tonight and none of the good players have anyone tonight.

This is the 3rd time I've accidentally entered a placeholder lineup into contests.

The first time was also on FantasyDraft during NBA season. NBA gets really hectic right before contests lock. There is lots of injury news coming in and sometimes you get caught up searching twitter for the latest news and setting the lineups on other sites. FantasyDraft was the smallest site I played so I prioritize it last in the pecking order. That night so much news was coming in that I just completely forgot to set the lineup, yet somehow the placeholder lineup I chose won anyway.

The second time was during baseball, when games started an hour earlier than I expected at 9am on a Saturday after I had been out drinking. I thought I had til 10am but was wrong and paid for it. Luckily that time I only had a few hundred on it, so as of now I am up money lifetime entering dummy lineups.

The other two instances were pure negligence. I forgot to set one and the other I overslept. In both other cases I felt like I completely deserved it and let them go. Tonight felt different though: I set a lineup on that site, and it would have been the Thursday night lineup on most other sites that list them chronologically, but it wasn't on FantasyDraft. I tried emailing the site's support to ask if there was anything that could be done, but there isn't. They have no late swap, my lineup is entered, I can see other players lineups, and it wouldn't be fair to my opponents.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still 100% to blame for this, all I had to do was read the top line that said the lineup I was editing started in 3 days, but in my rush I missed it, but I still hoped the site could remedy it since I entered the lineup I wanted to play just minutes before lock, albeit in the wrong place.

Rules for Placeholder Lineups

I'm not the only DFS player to enter a placeholder lineup. One of my best friends did the same last year during NFL twice. Saahil Sud, the #1 overall ranked DFS player has done so many times, including one last month where he didn't set a Fanduel baseball lineup that he had mid 5 figures on.

Besides just being more diligent and thorough, the best way to mitigate the damage from something like this happening is to have a few rules for placeholder lineups. I used to have these for NBA, but it's been a while since I've had to worry about injuries (they don't really happen often in Golf), so I stopped following them.

The rules:

1. Don't put any injured players in your placeholder lineup, making sure everyone is healthy.
2. Spend the entire salary cap

As long as all of my players actually play the game and I spend all of the money, there is a chance my lineup can win, like it happened in NBA season. DFS is gambling: there is an element of luck involved. I would say the strong optimal lineups I come up with in NFL is roughly 80% to win against a random lineup that picks all healthy starting players that spends all the money, but at least it would have a small chance to win.

How To Get Past The Mistake

Fortunately I won a lot of money week 1, have the bankroll to sustain a small hit, and had this happen on the smallest lineup I played for Thursday so the damage won't be that bad. In fact, I have almost $30,000 in play on other sites tonight, so if my expected ROI is roughly 10-15% in NFL, then even with the loss I should still be making a few thousand dollars in expectation on the night.

$900 isn't the end of the world, but I've been sitting here for 2 hours feeling like a complete idiot, beating myself up more than I would if my legitimate lineups lost a lot of money. A lineup losing happens, even the best lineups I make are sometimes only 65% to win against my opponents. But entering a lineup that is close to 0% mentally bothers me a lot more.

I'm not religious, but I've always been fond of the serenity prayer, authored by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I have to be able to move on and focus on what I can control since those contests are locked and I cannot change them.

Luckily I don't need much wisdom to recognize that.

---

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.