5 ms·

I guess the reasoning behind the conclusion is here: > When Hosoi compared the R values of FanDuel contests to actual professional sports teams, she found that

by schwap 10y ago

I guess the reasoning behind the conclusion is here: > When Hosoi compared the R values of FanDuel contests to actual professional sports teams, she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less skill and more randomness than > their fantasy corollaries (with the exception of basketball, whose many opportunities to score reduce its randomness). In fantasy hockey, skilled contestants will succeed slightly more often than elite NHL teams will. In a real-world hockey game, a weird puck bounce can lead to a fluke goal. > Because hockey games are relatively low-scoring, moments of randomness can have an outsized impact on the outcome of a matchup. To a lesser extent, the same is true in baseball and football, both games where scoring opportunities can be hard to come by. But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example), every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly lopsided.

simplemath 10y ago
>But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example), every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly lopsided. Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back
- ssharp 10y ago
  It's a completely ridiculous comparison. Imagine a high school team playing the Cleveland Cavaliers or Golden State Warriors. Poker is probably a better example since it's far more likely for bad players to play in a game against a great player than it is a bad basketball player to play against Lebron James. In poker, the more skilled players there are at the table, the harder it is to tell who the bad players are. Even the highest cash games in the world rely on extremely wealthy gamblers who aren't skilled in order to remain lucrative to the professionals.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back Why? If you really did that, then every single game would be considered a game of chance, even chess. I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusions, but only comparing the top players isn't a legitimate thing to do -- if you take any distribution and zoom in at the extremes, it will look just like noise.
  - schwap 10y ago
    It's not as ridiculous as you think. To continue to abuse the hockey analogy, there are ~979000 registered hockey players in the US and Canada[1]. There are 30 NHL teams, each with a contract limit of 50, for a total of 1500 players. That's 0.153% of all hockey players in North America. EDIT: Need to read better, that's an order of magnitude off so it is a bit ridiculous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registered_players_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registere...
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      I think you're missing what I'm saying. The criticism is, 'I don't like the article's metric because it doesn't zoom in on the tail of the distribution'. But if you do that with any game, the answer you will get is uniformly 0.5, even when comparing chess to tic tac toe.
      - schwap 10y ago
        No I understand your argument, I'm just trying to illustrate how small a part of the tail professional sports really is (turns out it's small but not that small).
        simplemath 10y ago
        Depends on the sport. For NBA and NFL athletes in the US, it is close to 1 in 10k high school athletes in those sports that make it to the pros
- jjuel 10y ago
  If you read down the article it does say that games of skill between similarly skilled players will result in 'chance' having a bigger affect on the outcome. But lets not act like DFS are not a game of skill.
slg 10y ago
From the article >laws in the United States tend to have the opposite opinion, and favor skill over chance >FanDuel approached Anette Hosoi... to see if their offerings were more games of skill or of chance >she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less skill and more randomness than their fantasy corollaries That should tell you exactly why the conclusion is flawed. As the old line about lies and statistics implies, the numbers could be massaged to show numerous different results. I imagine it is just a coincidence that in this instance the numbers show exactly what the sponsor of the research wanted to show. Both this research and this article are nothing more than PR puff pieces for the daily fantasy sports industry.
- deong 10y ago
  But you can't tell the conclusion is flawed just from that. You're saying that funded research is by definition only valid if it yields results that are neutral or harmful to the interests of whoever funded it. That's blantantly, obviously false. You can take that as one piece of data that should tend to raise your level of suspicion, but you still have to look at the actual study to evaluate it.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    That's a critical thinking error. When an interested party funds research, they don't publish results that are misaligned with their interests. In technology, you'll see shill "analysts" publish white papers that the FooCorp Model Bar Computer delivers 46% more ROI. This is similar bullshittery.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - smcl 10y ago
      Ben Goldacre - a British epidemiologist - has done a lot of work on this area, but focused on the Pharmaceutical industry and their practices in running/publishing the results of drug trials. He's got a great blog at http://www.badscience.net/ http://www.badscience.net/ and a book called Bad Pharma.

by schwap 10y ago

simplemath 10y ago

>But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example), every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly lopsided. Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back

ssharp 10y ago
It's a completely ridiculous comparison. Imagine a high school team playing the Cleveland Cavaliers or Golden State Warriors. Poker is probably a better example since it's far more likely for bad players to play in a game against a great player than it is a bad basketball player to play against Lebron James. In poker, the more skilled players there are at the table, the harder it is to tell who the bad players are. Even the highest cash games in the world rely on extremely wealthy gamblers who aren't skilled in order to remain lucrative to the professionals.
smallnamespace 10y ago
> Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back Why? If you really did that, then every single game would be considered a game of chance, even chess. I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusions, but only comparing the top players isn't a legitimate thing to do -- if you take any distribution and zoom in at the extremes, it will look just like noise.
- schwap 10y ago
  It's not as ridiculous as you think. To continue to abuse the hockey analogy, there are ~979000 registered hockey players in the US and Canada[1]. There are 30 NHL teams, each with a contract limit of 50, for a total of 1500 players. That's 0.153% of all hockey players in North America. EDIT: Need to read better, that's an order of magnitude off so it is a bit ridiculous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registered_players_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registere...
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    I think you're missing what I'm saying. The criticism is, 'I don't like the article's metric because it doesn't zoom in on the tail of the distribution'. But if you do that with any game, the answer you will get is uniformly 0.5, even when comparing chess to tic tac toe.
    - schwap 10y ago
      No I understand your argument, I'm just trying to illustrate how small a part of the tail professional sports really is (turns out it's small but not that small).
      - simplemath 10y ago
        Depends on the sport. For NBA and NFL athletes in the US, it is close to 1 in 10k high school athletes in those sports that make it to the pros
jjuel 10y ago
If you read down the article it does say that games of skill between similarly skilled players will result in 'chance' having a bigger affect on the outcome. But lets not act like DFS are not a game of skill.

slg 10y ago

From the article >laws in the United States tend to have the opposite opinion, and favor skill over chance >FanDuel approached Anette Hosoi... to see if their offerings were more games of skill or of chance >she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less skill and more randomness than their fantasy corollaries That should tell you exactly why the conclusion is flawed. As the old line about lies and statistics implies, the numbers could be massaged to show numerous different results. I imagine it is just a coincidence that in this instance the numbers show exactly what the sponsor of the research wanted to show. Both this research and this article are nothing more than PR puff pieces for the daily fantasy sports industry.

deong 10y ago
But you can't tell the conclusion is flawed just from that. You're saying that funded research is by definition only valid if it yields results that are neutral or harmful to the interests of whoever funded it. That's blantantly, obviously false. You can take that as one piece of data that should tend to raise your level of suspicion, but you still have to look at the actual study to evaluate it.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  That's a critical thinking error. When an interested party funds research, they don't publish results that are misaligned with their interests. In technology, you'll see shill "analysts" publish white papers that the FooCorp Model Bar Computer delivers 46% more ROI. This is similar bullshittery.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - smcl 10y ago
    Ben Goldacre - a British epidemiologist - has done a lot of work on this area, but focused on the Pharmaceutical industry and their practices in running/publishing the results of drug trials. He's got a great blog at http://www.badscience.net/ http://www.badscience.net/ and a book called Bad Pharma.