Can Daily Fantasy Sports Become a Full Time Job?

Here on the blog I’ve been preaching some of the techniques the “Pros” use to dominate in the Daily Fantasy Sports space for years. Concepts like using multiple diversified lineups and how to spread your wagers between cash and GPP contests.  You can check out our full slate of Daily Fantasy Football Strategies and Tips HERE

Recently a reader here (thanks P-Head) send me a link to some articles on the Wall Street Journal on this topic that I wanted to share. Both detail people that have quit their jobs and are making their full time living playing daily fantasy sports.

The first discusses a guy named Drew Dinkmeyer, a 31 year old investment analyst that was planning to leave his job and go full time in daily fantasy – Making a Full Time Living with Fantasy Sports

This next one discusses a 29 year old player, Cory Albertson, that created an algorithm that generates hundreds of “optimized lineups” which he then uses to create diversified optimized lineups for that days contests – A Fantasy Sports Wizard’s Winning Formula. According to the article, Cory was able to profit over $200,000 in his first full season and is expecting to finish this year up close to a million.Here are some excerpts:

“Using tactics more familiar to a hedge-fund manager than to your average sports enthusiast, Albertson is earning thousands of dollars almost every day. One NFL Sunday, he took home more than $100,000. “It is like securities trading,” Albertson explains, “and athletes are the commodities.”


“In between attending business-school classes and cramming for exams, Albertson plays a new high-volume variety of fantasy sports that allows him to compete in hundreds of leagues each day. He may be the most consistently profitable fantasy sports enthusiast in the country. And the reason is that to him, fantasy sports isn’t really about sports. It’s about data. He doesn’t trust his eyes to tell him who the best players are; he only trusts the numbers, which tell him who is overvalued and who is undervalued. Albertson’s strategy is almost literally a formula, and it bears little resemblance to casual fandom. “It’s all about having logical inputs that lead to logical outputs,” he says.”

Both articles were great reads and I highly recommend them. Looking over the article on Cory Albertson and his algorithm method I was impressed with the reasoning behind their formula. They wanted to take emotion out of the player selection process and allow for cold calculating statistics to determine player values. In a sense it confirms everything I’ve preached here for the past year. Take a look back at our cheat sheets for the 2014 fantasy football season. Rather then provide just a limited number of “top plays” at each position I preach diversified lineups with many multiple configurations to allow for the greatest possibility of finding the magic “optimized lineup” that can win a tournament while still allowing each individual lineup to stand on it’s own in cash or 50/50 contests. I’m currently testing algorithm based lineup construction for NBA Fantasy Basketball to see how things go. What I would say so far is that there is no magic bullet that replaces good old fashioned research. The algorithm based lineup generator is only as good as its projections.  Still I can see the value in having a computer try to Tetris together an ideal group of players to fit the salary cap particularly when it comes to Fantasy Basketball, a sport I have almost no fantasy experience in.

ConclusionI do think there is some advantage to using algorithm based lineup generation to create diverse optimized lineups, the same can be done using the match up based strategy I use in the cheat sheets here on this site. In particular when it comes to Fantasy Football, with it’s much smaller pool of start-able players, it’s possible to come up with diverse optimized lineups without using a computer. Not everyone should or would even want to be a full-time fantasy sports professional player. Still for those of you that take this hobby seriously the lessons are clear. The strategy of multiple diversified optimized lineups is the way to go of you ever want a shot at winning a big tournament.

When football season rolls around come back here each week and check out our Daily Fantasy Football cheat sheets. I will break down all the good value plays for the week and identify some exceptional value plays or “all in” plays. Use the player list to come up with multiple diversified lineup variations. If you follow that plan you should have long term success. All I ask in return is that you register for your FanDuel or Draftkings account using our provided links and take advantage of the deposit matches and bonuses our promo codes have to offer.

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