Donut Shop is Open
What’s up everybody! Over the recent weeks people I’ve had so many conversations about how to create a player pool and what to do with it. I’ve been asked what in the world goes into creating a player pool and what type of decisions do I weigh heavily over others in order to end with the players in my pool that I do. Today, I am going to show you a bit of what I do to create my pool and make this more or less an example of my process with this small three game slate.
Let’s get to work!
Where’s the Edge?
Alright, I am first looking at the Research Station to identify who’s in a pace up spot, what Vegas is predicting, and what type of game flow we may or may not have. It’s just a small three game slate so I can pretty much see this all from one tiny image, but normally I’ll use the sort category option and do it quickly. You can always just hop into the Domination Station to see a quicker view of total/spread and use the Research Station to check out the pace of play.
Next, I want to look at who’s home, who’s away, what type of rest each team is on and if anybody is on a back to back. From this image, I see that the Boston Celtics have had four days of rest for this game against the Knicks and they are also playing at home. I can also look at each player on their team by sorting the “Team” tab and looking at aDvP for each player on the Celtics. I’ll do this up and down the entire slate and just kind of take a broad strokes look at each team and matchup prior to digging into any type of deep data dive.
I want to begin to look at individuals on each team and see how often they would hit their value returns based on their current price tag for the 2018 season. This is a great tool to identify whether a player has had a price increase that is too high to target. I.E. If Joe Shmoe hits 5x value only 22% of the time at his current $6,400 price tag, then I know that unless he has a massive pace-up matchup and high implied total, then there is a probability that he won’t hit 5x value. Conversely, if Joe Shmoe is priced at $6,400 and I see his 5x multiplier is hit 65% of the time and his 6x salary multiplier is hit 44% of the time at his current price, then he’s a fantastic value for the slate.
After identifying some solid values I want to take a broad look again at what type of statistics that a team might give up. Looking at this I am able to spot if a defense allows opposing teams to shoot a high volume of three pointers, if an opposing team gives up a ton of rebounds, and what their average allowed points per game is.
I want to know who’s hot and who’s playing more minutes as of late. I can compare different categories by looking at how they’ve done recently in sample sizes of 1, 3, 5, and 10 games. This is a nice way to identify if someone who I might not pay attention to normally is getting hot or if a situation on their team has changed, whether that is due to a change in the rotation or injury – I know at least am aware.
Now it’s time to start looking at personal usage, averages, per min rates, and history against the team they are playing that night. Sometimes, if I find that I have a question about individual performances against opposing teams I simply research the previous games played against one another and try to identify if anybody was injured at the time, if they played extra minutes due to overtime and anything along those lines that might be skewing the numbers.
Lastly, I want to take a peak at our early morning projections within the Domination Station. I want to look at who is being projected for high fantasy points per minute and what total projections look like.
Once I have finished most of my research for the morning (remember, this is just a brief dusting of information that I am trying to expose myself to), I create my initial player pool and enter it onto FanDuel and DraftKings as place holder lineups. You can read and follow along with that tutorial in my “How to Make 20 Lineups in 5 Minutes” article.
Salute to the Member Success
A massive GET SOME to a brand new member who won $200,000 in the FanDuel Milly Maker in his first week as a member of the DFS Army! Kudos to a few of our NBA member wins from this week as well including a $100,000 winner in NFL and a $100,000 winner in NBA, in addition to a $76,000 win by a staff member!
Our members and coaches create a type of bond that goes beyond fantasy sports discussion and DFS coaching. Often you’ll find members and staff sharing conversations about life in general, sports, family, work, stressors, and testimonies. It’s a really unique community and one that drove me to leave every other company I was working for at the time to focus on this one. We’ve already had a $200,000 winner in 2018 and our “Member Hall of Fame” is littered with results from the 2017 and current 2018 NFL season. I hope that we as a company and community, are able to change the life of a player or even potentially an entire family!
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Closing Remarks
Feel free to take a sneak peek at our available options. No matter what you choose, we cannot wait to hear from you and work with you in Slack. In addition to our website and content, being able to talk with you in a group setting or one on one is what really makes this company, and its members, so special.
If you’re playing as a hobby there is a place for you here. If you’re playing as a means to a secondary income, join the club, as hundreds of members are doing just that. If you’re trying to make this a career (we have a dozen or so staff and members that do are full-time DFS pros), then we implore you to join our community, use our services, tools, articles, podcasts, research station, domination station optimizer, and last but not least, our members-only chat service where you can discuss the DFS slate one-on-one with our Pro’s and coaches.
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Fortune favors the bold, go make your own luck!
-Donuts