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UFC Fight Night Shark Autopsy DFS MMA

We have brought Shark Autopsy to the MMA. With one of the biggest cards of the season coming up, I wanted to break down what our sharks are doing to make them successful. I am going to break down this past week’s card today and hopefully next week while I am on vacation, I will break down a few more of the previous cards to see if strategies stayed the same or differed. This is an autopsy of the $4 20 max Hammerfist.

First off, meet the sharks in autopsy

  1. BDHolla89- He is number one in MMA
  2. CZYX- He is number 2 in MMA
  3. blazeman8- He is ranked 4th in MMA, but not ranked at all in all sports (which makes me believe he is a MMA specialist)

I also wanted to compare their strategies and break down our very own ChiefST and Suntszu

First off, before I break these down, I want to give you all the big data set to search through for yourself:

There is something about how organized and clearly rules driven BDHolla is. He clearly will not go over 50% owned, which really helps him gain exposure to a lot of fighters and allows him to get a core of 8-10 fighters per card. You can also see that Blazeman is the only one to go 100% on a fighter, however him and geek also have some 95% exposures which is basically the same thing.

 

FADES

I think one of the first things I thought about when I started playing MMA was how to deal with fading fighters. Anyone can win a fight and picking the one dog who does is typically the way to hit the nuts. So I wanted to look at how many fades each of our sharks had.

As you can see, most of our sharks chose to fade at least 5 fighters, which amounts to about 20-25% of the entire card. Therefore, it seems that most of our sharks want some exposure to 75-80% of the card.

Vegas Movement

One of geek’s core beliefs in MMA is that Vegas movement is king. But do the other sharks also believe that. Below is a list of the top 6 line movements and the shark’s exposures with respect to the field:

You can really tell that there are two different strategies. If you listened to Suntszu in chat last week, he said at first that he did not really look at Vegas as a key stat for him. As shown in the numbers, he is underweight the field average along with BDHolla. The thing about BDHolla that is interesting is that he does not go over 50% on a fighter so he is not willing to make big bets and therefore will not have a high average difference.

However, Blazeman and ChiefST are the President and Vice President of the Vegas Line Movement Club. Blazeman8 (who if you remember is a MMA specialist) made massive bets on Means, Kish, and Koch, while nearly fading Reyes. If you remember the card, he did not have that great of a week. ChiefST took a very similar approach with big bets on Kish and Koch while fading Reyes against the field.

I think this shows that multiple strategies will work. Whether you want to take BDHolla’s approach of never going over 50% on a fighter or following Vegas closely like Blazeman and Geek clearly do and making massive bets, all of these players are in the top 10.

Heavy Favorites and Heavy Dogs

As I go through more fight cards, this section may change as new fights occur and I am very curious if it does. I want to analyze how the sharks feel about the top favorites as well as the top dogs. Do they fit dogs in to pay for more studs? Do they play their studs more evenly?

As you can see on this card, most of our sharks played the heavy favorites at higher exposure than the field and played the heavy dogs at lower exposure than the field. This again really gets to the Vegas argument. Most of the sharks (except Suntszu) clearly respect what Vegas thinks and uses it to play favorites and fade dogs, but even Suntszu was marginally above the field in exposure to heavy dogs.

 

Conclusion

First off, I believe that understanding how many people the sharks fade is important. We see that our sharks, in the last card faded about 20-25% of the fighters. This is what I will use as my standard going forward in future fight cards as well as my research in past cards. Also, I wanted to use this first article as a deep dive into the different strategies at play.

We can see multiple strategies in play. We see BDHolla come out and really spread out his exposures, picking the fights he wants exposure to, which if his picks hit, he is very likely to hit the nuts. We also have a strategy that Blazeman and ChiefST tend to share of going heavy exposure on one or two fighters and fading some chalky options as well.

I will hopefully have another Shark Autopsy coming out by Wednesday on another previous card to compare with this one to get a better sense of what everyone really does. Anyway, thank you for reading and I hope you all enjoy the 4th.