Profiting from Daily Fantasy Sports
Can a sports junkie use their sports knowledge to make money from one of the new daily cash fantasy sports sites like Draftkings or Fanduel? After playing at Draftkings for a lengthy amount of time, I would say absolutely.
The game of daily fantasy sports is all about skill. If you don’t follow sports and read up on the current news, you have a very slim chance of winning. The guys that put the research time in are the ones who are crushing their opponents every night. Players get hurt and under perform but over time if you continually pick better players than your opponents you will make money. If you love sports and checking on stats, you have a great shot at making cash with daily fantasy sports.
If you cannot spend a good portion of time keeping up with current news, your best bet would be to invest in a lineup optimizer. With an optimizer at hand, you are able to get real time, quick stats on performance of players to help you build the best lineup possible.
I’ve never said that I am a downright expert at fantasy sports, but I see some guys making the same mistakes each week. You can tell guys will pick certain players just because they are from their favorite team or they just really follow the player. Being biased towards players you like does not make you money. If you can stay unbiased and just base your picks off cold stats and current news, you will have a nice edge on some of your opponents.
Having an edge is how you make money in poker and the same way you make money in daily fantasy sports. If you do your homework, you should have a positive expectation on every fantasy match you enter. Your main goal is to have a positive ROI (Return on Investment). Say you play in 100, $5 fantasy football 6 man matches and make a profit of $250. Your ROI would be 50% since you paid $500 to enter the matches and were paid out $750. $750 – $500 = $250 profit. $250/$500 = 50% ROI.
If you could sustain a 50% ROI, you would know that for every $1 you invest into a fantasy sports match you will be making a .50 cent profit on it. Daily fantasy sports lets you scale your investment easily by providing you lots of matches to enter each day. If you enter $100 worth of matches every day with a 50% ROI, you would be making $50 profit each day! Enter $1,000 worth of matches and your making $500 a day!
Being able to have an edge and then keep using that edge in multiple contests everyday is why I’m excited about daily fantasy sports. How sweet would it be to enjoy the excitement every day of rooting on your players plus know that at the end of the month you should have around a $1,500 profit, if your betting a $100 a day with a 50% ROI at Draftkings or Fanduel.
