6 ms·

In Fantasy Sports, Signs of Insiders’ Edge

51 points by caminante 11y ago

durzagott 11y ago
Does anyone know why American headlines are written in this way? It would sound more natural if it was "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports" I've seen this a few times before, so I'm guessing it must be a cultural thing.
- harmegido 11y ago
  My only guess would be that it more quickly gets you to the subject. If you don't care about fantasy sports, you're unlikely to care regardless of the predicate used.
- stygiansonic 11y ago
  It might be a New York Times thing, or at least one that has perhaps spread to other American journalists: [0][1][2] "The new-style headlines are a far cry from stereotypical Times headlines, which have been mocked for the prepositional phrases that often introduce them, like this one from last Monday’s paper, “After 8 Shots, a Quiet Officer Now Scorned.” Their frequency years ago once led to a Twitter meme in which book titles were rewritten in that style. (Among them: “Of Oz, the Wizard.”)" 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-check-out-this-column-on-headlines.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-c... 1. http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book-titles-rewritten-as-new-york-times-headlines/ http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book... 2. Yes, the irony is that this is also a New York Times article.
- parennoob 11y ago
  Yes, it's to grab your attention with the broad subject, and then tell you something interesting about it. This ensures that you click on the headline. In your version of the headline "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports", your typical American reader has already lost interest by "Signs of Insiders' Edge" which is kind of an obscure metaphor. Whereas the paper one grabs the attention with "Fantasy Sports". You like fantasy sports, you play fantasy football at your cubicle job every day. "Insiders' Edge"? Oh shit, there must be something wrong with it. Better click on the headline and check that out. Boom, NYTimes serves you 200 ad impressions (or sells a paper copy).
- eitally 11y ago
  You already received a solid and accurate reply, but consider it as the headline equivalent of how you would structure a lengthy email you actually want the recipients to read. Firstly, you know the subject line is critical, but people will almost always glance at an email regardless. Secondly, you know you need short paragraphs or the wall of text will scare them away. Thirdly, you need to explicitly structure each paragraph with a strong subject -- either an easily parsable complete sentence or a bullet. Fourth, don't write it like you would a novel. Focus on facts and eliminate editorialization. Finally, close it with a call to action. Frankly, with the advent of Google Drive/Docs, I've started getting in the habit of putting all the meat of an email in a separate linked document and just placing the subject, intro and call-to-action in the body of the message itself. This is roughly how newspapers work, too.
coldcode 11y ago
I still find it hard to understand why fantasy sports that pays money to winners is different from bookmaking. Betting on players instead of teams is hardly different; all you are doing is narrowing the odds a little. You are still betting money for a chance to win money. Maybe people think it's more like playing Powerball.
- jegutman 11y ago
  Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other. Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun. Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time! I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).
  - eterm 11y ago
    In betting exchanges you also bet against other people (with the house taking a cut, as with DFS), but those are banned under gambling regulation.
    - ssharp 11y ago
      Some online sports books used to operate betting markets where you'd essentially buy options on teams, with the price of the option being determined by the demand. The house would make money on the spread. The fundamental difference between why that's illegal and betting on daily fantasy football is not, is simply that the anti-online gambling laws of the U.S. specifically allowed for betting on fantasy football and outlawed other types of gambling. When that law came about, I believe in 2007, daily fantasy football either didn't exist or was extremely niche. It really took a few years before big players like Draft Kings and Fan Duel got substantial traffic. When the law came about, there were a lot of small players who came and went.
chillydawg 11y ago
Just as with sports betting in general, there will be a very small cabal of bookmakers and pro punters who absolutely clean up and everyone else who funds them.
ssharp 11y ago
I signed up for an account on Draft Kings last year after seeing a ton of advertising for it. I had been seeing the daily fantasy sports stuff for years after the U.S. destroyed online poker but allowed for betting on fantasy sports, but hadn't tried it and it didn't seem all that popular. After signing onto Draft Kings, I saw that it had obviously become extremely popular. I dabbled around a bit in the NBA games and quickly saw some strategies that would likely work if tailored more. However, it was entirely clear that the way to win money in those contests would be to build a model that could spit out lineups. In the big tournaments, a model could easily create a large number of high-variance lineups. In head-to-head or smaller games, it could create lower-risk lineups. I started to draw up a lot of ideas on what the model could do to try and predict things like playing time, share of points/rebounds/assists, etc. When it came time to actually build it out, I shelved it, largely because it was going to take time and money to work with the type of stats I needed, but also because I'd assume there are already a lot of people on these sites doing this. In fact, I'm assuming everyone who is profitable on those sites is running model-generated lineups. There are still lots of fish pumping money in, but the people taking it out would be at least as, and likely more, sophisticated than what I could do. There is an extremely popular NBA bettor and he runs a multi-million dollar operation, hiring several analysts to help him make his predictions. In fact, he's actually consulted privately with several NBA teams because his analysis was ahead of what many NBA teams were doing several years ago. If those are the types of people you're up against, it's a battle of algorithms, not people.
- phreeza 11y ago
  I went one step further and actually implemented an MCMC model and ran it for a while. It did turn a slight profit on low stakes games for the 3 months that I ran it. I stopped and did not move on to higher stakes games because I live in Germany and there appears to be no simple way for me to legally participate in these games and then withdraw my money. I am keeping the scripts ready for when the fad invades Germany, though! I agree on the stats part. Scraping them from various sources was definitely the most painful and limiting part of the project, and I was only able to obtain a limited amount of data even then. If I could get a complete and large dataset to work with, I would be tempted to give it another shot, just to see how far more data takes me.
Bostonian 11y ago
No one is forced to bet on fantasy sports, so I hope the government does not get involved trying to make it "fair".
klenwell 11y ago
If your takeaway from this article is "if only I had more time to write an algorithm" or "if only I could get my hands on some better data", you're missing the point here. That geeks with computers were going to win all the money should have already been obvious to anyone who hangs around here. The scandal here is that employees of these two sites have been effectively colluding with each other to dominate each other's contests. So even if you had implemented your can't-lose algorithm, you'd still be losing. As to buried ledes, how's this? Neither company would say how much its employees had won, but Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for FanDuel, said DraftKings employees had won less than $10 million in her company’s contests. Infamous Twitter pariah Justine Sacco is working again. Good for her.
- caminante 11y ago
  Wow re: Sacco! Good recall -- assuming it's the same person. I guess her PR spin abilities apply to her career too. P.S. I find the language re: $10M funny. $1 less is still a big number, and I sense weasel words.
- socialist_coder 11y ago
  Seriously, it seems like everyone is ignoring that these insiders are just straight up CHEATING their users by allowing their own employees to share information and play on rival sites. This is fraud.
swanson 11y ago
I've had decent success at buying this kind of "edge". There is a ton of free information out there, but if you are willing to shell out a little money upfront, you can get pretty close to the same tools the "pros" are using. $50-100 for a season can get you access to algorithmic/machine-learning backed predictions (with secret sauce) and $20/month for high quality lineup optimization tools and automated entry scripts. The vast majority will not pay for tools/projections but for an outlay of ~$100, I won around 10x that on NBA games last season (plus had a lot of fun).
- samsnelling 11y ago
  Would you mind sharing a few links? I've been interested in the prediction engines for NBA games for a few years now.
  - swanson 11y ago
    Sure, here is what I used for last season: https://basketballmonster.com/ https://basketballmonster.com/ for projections (terrible website, but really good). Don't have much information on their approach, but the common wisdom for NBA is to project fantasy points per minute and then predict how many minutes each player will get. Factors also include pace (how many possessions each team will get) and DVP (defense vs position). https://twitter.com/baskmonster https://twitter.com/baskmonster the best twitter account for posting injury/lineup news https://www.fantasycruncher.com/ https://www.fantasycruncher.com/ lineup optimizer and scripting auto-entry. Also has a really nice free feature called "Lineup Rewind" that you can use to "back test" previously days/weeks data. Fantasy Cruncher comes with their own projections, but I didn't use them; you can import the BasketballMonster projections into the tool instead.
exhilaration 11y ago
On Wednesday, he posted his story on Reddit.com. Twenty minutes later, the DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish called him. On Friday, Robins, Kalish and Liberman — the founders — sent an email intended to mollify their customers, many of whom are concerned. Can anyone find this Reddit discussion? I'd like to see what the public thinks of all this.

51 points by caminante 11y ago

Does anyone know why American headlines are written in this way? It would sound more natural if it was "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports" I've seen this a few times before, so I'm guessing it must be a cultural thing.

harmegido 11y ago
My only guess would be that it more quickly gets you to the subject. If you don't care about fantasy sports, you're unlikely to care regardless of the predicate used.
stygiansonic 11y ago
It might be a New York Times thing, or at least one that has perhaps spread to other American journalists: [0][1][2] "The new-style headlines are a far cry from stereotypical Times headlines, which have been mocked for the prepositional phrases that often introduce them, like this one from last Monday’s paper, “After 8 Shots, a Quiet Officer Now Scorned.” Their frequency years ago once led to a Twitter meme in which book titles were rewritten in that style. (Among them: “Of Oz, the Wizard.”)" 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-check-out-this-column-on-headlines.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-c... 1. http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book-titles-rewritten-as-new-york-times-headlines/ http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book... 2. Yes, the irony is that this is also a New York Times article.
parennoob 11y ago
Yes, it's to grab your attention with the broad subject, and then tell you something interesting about it. This ensures that you click on the headline. In your version of the headline "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports", your typical American reader has already lost interest by "Signs of Insiders' Edge" which is kind of an obscure metaphor. Whereas the paper one grabs the attention with "Fantasy Sports". You like fantasy sports, you play fantasy football at your cubicle job every day. "Insiders' Edge"? Oh shit, there must be something wrong with it. Better click on the headline and check that out. Boom, NYTimes serves you 200 ad impressions (or sells a paper copy).
eitally 11y ago
You already received a solid and accurate reply, but consider it as the headline equivalent of how you would structure a lengthy email you actually want the recipients to read. Firstly, you know the subject line is critical, but people will almost always glance at an email regardless. Secondly, you know you need short paragraphs or the wall of text will scare them away. Thirdly, you need to explicitly structure each paragraph with a strong subject -- either an easily parsable complete sentence or a bullet. Fourth, don't write it like you would a novel. Focus on facts and eliminate editorialization. Finally, close it with a call to action. Frankly, with the advent of Google Drive/Docs, I've started getting in the habit of putting all the meat of an email in a separate linked document and just placing the subject, intro and call-to-action in the body of the message itself. This is roughly how newspapers work, too.

coldcode 11y ago

I still find it hard to understand why fantasy sports that pays money to winners is different from bookmaking. Betting on players instead of teams is hardly different; all you are doing is narrowing the odds a little. You are still betting money for a chance to win money. Maybe people think it's more like playing Powerball.

jegutman 11y ago
Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other. Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun. Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time! I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).
- eterm 11y ago
  In betting exchanges you also bet against other people (with the house taking a cut, as with DFS), but those are banned under gambling regulation.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    Some online sports books used to operate betting markets where you'd essentially buy options on teams, with the price of the option being determined by the demand. The house would make money on the spread. The fundamental difference between why that's illegal and betting on daily fantasy football is not, is simply that the anti-online gambling laws of the U.S. specifically allowed for betting on fantasy football and outlawed other types of gambling. When that law came about, I believe in 2007, daily fantasy football either didn't exist or was extremely niche. It really took a few years before big players like Draft Kings and Fan Duel got substantial traffic. When the law came about, there were a lot of small players who came and went.

chillydawg 11y ago

Just as with sports betting in general, there will be a very small cabal of bookmakers and pro punters who absolutely clean up and everyone else who funds them.

ssharp 11y ago

I signed up for an account on Draft Kings last year after seeing a ton of advertising for it. I had been seeing the daily fantasy sports stuff for years after the U.S. destroyed online poker but allowed for betting on fantasy sports, but hadn't tried it and it didn't seem all that popular. After signing onto Draft Kings, I saw that it had obviously become extremely popular. I dabbled around a bit in the NBA games and quickly saw some strategies that would likely work if tailored more. However, it was entirely clear that the way to win money in those contests would be to build a model that could spit out lineups. In the big tournaments, a model could easily create a large number of high-variance lineups. In head-to-head or smaller games, it could create lower-risk lineups. I started to draw up a lot of ideas on what the model could do to try and predict things like playing time, share of points/rebounds/assists, etc. When it came time to actually build it out, I shelved it, largely because it was going to take time and money to work with the type of stats I needed, but also because I'd assume there are already a lot of people on these sites doing this. In fact, I'm assuming everyone who is profitable on those sites is running model-generated lineups. There are still lots of fish pumping money in, but the people taking it out would be at least as, and likely more, sophisticated than what I could do. There is an extremely popular NBA bettor and he runs a multi-million dollar operation, hiring several analysts to help him make his predictions. In fact, he's actually consulted privately with several NBA teams because his analysis was ahead of what many NBA teams were doing several years ago. If those are the types of people you're up against, it's a battle of algorithms, not people.

phreeza 11y ago
I went one step further and actually implemented an MCMC model and ran it for a while. It did turn a slight profit on low stakes games for the 3 months that I ran it. I stopped and did not move on to higher stakes games because I live in Germany and there appears to be no simple way for me to legally participate in these games and then withdraw my money. I am keeping the scripts ready for when the fad invades Germany, though! I agree on the stats part. Scraping them from various sources was definitely the most painful and limiting part of the project, and I was only able to obtain a limited amount of data even then. If I could get a complete and large dataset to work with, I would be tempted to give it another shot, just to see how far more data takes me.

Bostonian 11y ago

No one is forced to bet on fantasy sports, so I hope the government does not get involved trying to make it "fair".

klenwell 11y ago

If your takeaway from this article is "if only I had more time to write an algorithm" or "if only I could get my hands on some better data", you're missing the point here. That geeks with computers were going to win all the money should have already been obvious to anyone who hangs around here. The scandal here is that employees of these two sites have been effectively colluding with each other to dominate each other's contests. So even if you had implemented your can't-lose algorithm, you'd still be losing. As to buried ledes, how's this? Neither company would say how much its employees had won, but Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for FanDuel, said DraftKings employees had won less than $10 million in her company’s contests. Infamous Twitter pariah Justine Sacco is working again. Good for her.

caminante 11y ago
Wow re: Sacco! Good recall -- assuming it's the same person. I guess her PR spin abilities apply to her career too. P.S. I find the language re: $10M funny. $1 less is still a big number, and I sense weasel words.
socialist_coder 11y ago
Seriously, it seems like everyone is ignoring that these insiders are just straight up CHEATING their users by allowing their own employees to share information and play on rival sites. This is fraud.

swanson 11y ago

I've had decent success at buying this kind of "edge". There is a ton of free information out there, but if you are willing to shell out a little money upfront, you can get pretty close to the same tools the "pros" are using. $50-100 for a season can get you access to algorithmic/machine-learning backed predictions (with secret sauce) and $20/month for high quality lineup optimization tools and automated entry scripts. The vast majority will not pay for tools/projections but for an outlay of ~$100, I won around 10x that on NBA games last season (plus had a lot of fun).

samsnelling 11y ago
Would you mind sharing a few links? I've been interested in the prediction engines for NBA games for a few years now.
- swanson 11y ago
  Sure, here is what I used for last season: https://basketballmonster.com/ https://basketballmonster.com/ for projections (terrible website, but really good). Don't have much information on their approach, but the common wisdom for NBA is to project fantasy points per minute and then predict how many minutes each player will get. Factors also include pace (how many possessions each team will get) and DVP (defense vs position). https://twitter.com/baskmonster https://twitter.com/baskmonster the best twitter account for posting injury/lineup news https://www.fantasycruncher.com/ https://www.fantasycruncher.com/ lineup optimizer and scripting auto-entry. Also has a really nice free feature called "Lineup Rewind" that you can use to "back test" previously days/weeks data. Fantasy Cruncher comes with their own projections, but I didn't use them; you can import the BasketballMonster projections into the tool instead.

exhilaration 11y ago

On Wednesday, he posted his story on Reddit.com. Twenty minutes later, the DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish called him. On Friday, Robins, Kalish and Liberman — the founders — sent an email intended to mollify their customers, many of whom are concerned. Can anyone find this Reddit discussion? I'd like to see what the public thinks of all this.