5 ms·

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 t

by 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.
- ssharp 11y ago
  When I was looking at this last year, there were several paid options to get direct access to datasets and/or API's, without having to scrape. Out of curiosity, what sport(s) were you modeling?
  - phreeza 11y ago
    I was modeling football (soccer). All the commercial data sources I found had no publicly listed prices, only 'contact us for a quote', so I couldn't be bothered because it seemed likely to be too pricey.
hoopism 11y ago
Read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haralabos_Voulgaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haralabos_Voulgaris. I've heard him speak a few times and read some articles about his operations. It's enough to make me not want to waste my weekends cobbling together my own system.
- downandout 11y ago
  The more interesting guy is Zeljko Ranogajec [1], who has made himself into a billionaire with horse racing betting algorithms. It's pretty incredible to think that it is possible to beat a game with a ~20% rake so badly that you become a billionaire. Bill Benter [2] is another horse racing billionaire. Both of these guys started as low-stakes blackjack card counters and pretty much worked their way up from nothing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] http://www.gambler-profiles.com/bill-benter-the-richest-of-them-all http://www.gambler-profiles.com/bill-benter-the-richest-of-t...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
downandout 11y ago
I wrote a tool that scraped all of Fanduel's results so that I could experiment with different models and backtest the model against real contest results. I have yet to find a model that would be profitable at stakes worth playing in football or baseball, after more than a year of tinkering. The winning players are almost all using algorithms, I just wish I knew which one.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  As the recent news indicates, they have additional inputs to their models.
MSM 11y ago
I had/have an algorithm that I use for MLB games. The stats are relatively easy to find and past that it's just trying to figure out what things "matter". I had a lot of fun day dreaming about which things are important to factor in. Some parks are hitters parks, some pitchers walk batters more often, most batters have a better average depending on the handedness of the pitcher, etc. There are thousands of things you can factor in. If I'm being honest, it didn't make a whole lot of money before I shelved it myself. The most important factor is that the lineups are rarely submitted early enough for me to bet on a full day. Usually I found myself being able to only play the late games, which is typically 4-6 total teams. It really limits the creativity of the lineups. In the future I'd like to try it with some other sports (NBA is a big one, because the lineup issue shouldn't be as big of a factor, same with hockey). But I don't expect to make millions, it's just a programming problem that's a ton of fun to solve for.
- xirdstl 11y ago
  That sounds pretty fun. Despite not having played fantasy baseball for about ten years, I still have dreams (not aspirational dreams, the sleep kind) about playing, at least monthly. Maybe it is time.
- swanson 11y ago
  Yeah, it's very hard for it to be a completely "hands-off" process. Just some warning though, NBA is actually one of the worst offenders in having incomplete lineup information until right before games start because NBA teams are not required to list their inactives (NFL teams are with at least one hour notice before kickoff). I liked playing NBA last year, but you have to basically block off 6-7pm EST to just track injury news, late scratches, and changes to the starting lineups :(

by ssharp 11y ago

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.

ssharp 11y ago
When I was looking at this last year, there were several paid options to get direct access to datasets and/or API's, without having to scrape. Out of curiosity, what sport(s) were you modeling?
- phreeza 11y ago
  I was modeling football (soccer). All the commercial data sources I found had no publicly listed prices, only 'contact us for a quote', so I couldn't be bothered because it seemed likely to be too pricey.

hoopism 11y ago

Read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haralabos_Voulgaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haralabos_Voulgaris. I've heard him speak a few times and read some articles about his operations. It's enough to make me not want to waste my weekends cobbling together my own system.

downandout 11y ago
The more interesting guy is Zeljko Ranogajec [1], who has made himself into a billionaire with horse racing betting algorithms. It's pretty incredible to think that it is possible to beat a game with a ~20% rake so badly that you become a billionaire. Bill Benter [2] is another horse racing billionaire. Both of these guys started as low-stakes blackjack card counters and pretty much worked their way up from nothing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] http://www.gambler-profiles.com/bill-benter-the-richest-of-them-all http://www.gambler-profiles.com/bill-benter-the-richest-of-t...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

downandout 11y ago

I wrote a tool that scraped all of Fanduel's results so that I could experiment with different models and backtest the model against real contest results. I have yet to find a model that would be profitable at stakes worth playing in football or baseball, after more than a year of tinkering. The winning players are almost all using algorithms, I just wish I knew which one.

jessaustin 11y ago
As the recent news indicates, they have additional inputs to their models.

MSM 11y ago

I had/have an algorithm that I use for MLB games. The stats are relatively easy to find and past that it's just trying to figure out what things "matter". I had a lot of fun day dreaming about which things are important to factor in. Some parks are hitters parks, some pitchers walk batters more often, most batters have a better average depending on the handedness of the pitcher, etc. There are thousands of things you can factor in. If I'm being honest, it didn't make a whole lot of money before I shelved it myself. The most important factor is that the lineups are rarely submitted early enough for me to bet on a full day. Usually I found myself being able to only play the late games, which is typically 4-6 total teams. It really limits the creativity of the lineups. In the future I'd like to try it with some other sports (NBA is a big one, because the lineup issue shouldn't be as big of a factor, same with hockey). But I don't expect to make millions, it's just a programming problem that's a ton of fun to solve for.

xirdstl 11y ago
That sounds pretty fun. Despite not having played fantasy baseball for about ten years, I still have dreams (not aspirational dreams, the sleep kind) about playing, at least monthly. Maybe it is time.
swanson 11y ago
Yeah, it's very hard for it to be a completely "hands-off" process. Just some warning though, NBA is actually one of the worst offenders in having incomplete lineup information until right before games start because NBA teams are not required to list their inactives (NFL teams are with at least one hour notice before kickoff). I liked playing NBA last year, but you have to basically block off 6-7pm EST to just track injury news, late scratches, and changes to the starting lineups :(