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Principles of Becoming the Best in DFS: Part 4

Life has a lot of guided principles. These are just a few that guide mine in DFS. As a reminder, I’m not a DFS Pro. With a full time career and family, I do not have time to deploy enough effort to make a run at becoming a professional DFS player. I do however make regular withdrawals from multiple sites, been to a live final, and haven’t redeposited since my initial jump into DFS. I consider DFS a supplementary income stream that I take seriously. I believe given the time, I would have no issue making the transition to full time pro. You can take what I write with a grain of salt as it’s my own perspective on how to be successful at DFS.

Principle 6: Effort

What if I told you the difference between being on the top of the food chain in DFS was something you could learn and replicate? Would you believe me? Do you think the same players winning day in and day out is due to luck or skill? Often times I read in our own slack chat how lucky some people are in DFS when in reality they should be focusing on how much effort someone puts into it. When is the last time you put in a real effort into your line ups? Did you spend just the day researching the slate for tonight? Maybe a few hours? Or 30 minutes? Take a step back and think about how much effort you’ve put into it over the past few weeks, months, and years.

I have an unpopular opinion you’re not going to want to hear: You’re not putting in enough macro effort to move on to the next level. With all the above questions, can you guess which ones I left out? Here’s where effort really kicks up a notch and the questions you should answer for yourself:

  • How much time in the past week have you spent looking at your research process?
  • Did you tweak your projections this week? If so, why? If not, why?
  • What conversations about your process have you had this season and with whom?
  • What stat did you dig into deeper this season to see its impact on overall performance?

My guess is that many of you have no answer to any of these questions and that’s ok. For the moment. Guys that get to the next level and do this for a full time job spend more of their time working on their process than their line up constructions on any given night because night to night it doesn’t matter. The more fine-tuned your process is, the faster your line ups get built and the less time you need to spend researching every night. You’ll find putting in the hard work, the work no one else wants to do up front, will stream line the stuff everyone else is working on. Your line ups will end up building themselves as you find the lynchpins every night earlier in the day and building models around them.

Pro Tip #7: The stuff you want to do the least is the most important.

No one wants to comb through data building projections and looking into the why a player is a great play on a slate. No one except the guys treating DFS as an income stream and a profession that is. The hardest, boring, tedious work behind our tools is what separates our coaches from the rest of the pack. Looking at implications of someone being hurt and how that will affect everything on a given night is important. As a practice, when you see someone isn’t going to play or isn’t starting, see if you can come up with the impacts before one of our coach’s posts it in Slack. Make it a game. Here’s one for you to use for practice in NBA if you’re not sure what I’m talking about:

  • ABC is going to be out, on a road game, first of a B2B, against NYK. Second leg is in LA. They’re playing for a playoff spot vs. a team that’s out of contention. The O/U has moved down 4 points with MKE being projected to win by 4.

Who gets more minutes? Who’s starting? Will it be a heavy 5 or 6 man rotation? What usage rates change? How did aDVP changed? Who do you target?

It’s not a pop quiz, so I won’t hound you for answers. However, this is a scenario that happens every night and to multiple games. If you’re not sure how to start finding the answer it’s ok. I didn’t’ either when I first started. I didn’t even understand half of what I just read until the second season of NBA I played. You can find a lot of this information by looking up NBA stats on Basketball Monster or free tools over on RotoGrinders. If you’re still struggling, look back into past scenarios in slack where you have the answer, and try to reverse engineer it.

 

That’s really it. Those are the six driving principles I use to guide my everyday conquest of mastering DFS. Every day is a different struggle and battle, but in the end following these principles has led to profitability and sustainability in an industry where people lose more than they win. Many of the things I talk about can be applied to your everyday process for everything. No one is going to be standing around ready to hand out anything to you. Put in the effort, make smart decisions, and use the tools available to you to succeed. No one gave me anything I have right now, I fought for it. 8 years ago I was working part time at Target unloading semi’s. Today I’m writing this while I fly first class on a business trip for a fortune 500 company.

My parting thoughts: Every day will present you with another opportunity to learn something. Spend less time on things that don’t matter. If it’s not adding value in your life, do something that does. Have conversations with people about things your passionate about. Sounds corny? It might be, but that’s the part of your brain holding you back from succeeding.