What the hell just happened?
Not a very good showing for the Daily Roto Sharks free lineups, so what happened out there? Mostly, every driver that got caught in a crash or had any kind of car trouble (Hoods flying off, leaky break-lines, chain reaction crashes on restarts… you name it), was in one of our lineups. 5 guys went for negative points in the entire field (Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Jamie McMurray, Austin Dillon and Kasey Kahne) and I had some exposure to every one of them.
Overall, between the free lineups and some personal lineups that I did to test a full subscription offering, I ran about 25 lineups, which I’ll to compare against the results of the $3 Slingshot which had about 42,000 entries. The chart below shows the normal distribution curves of all Draftkings entries based on the results of the $3 Slingshot (blue line), and the Daily Roto Sharks Nascar Model (orange line). The blue columns represent the actual distribution of entries in the Slingshot, grouped into 20-point buckets.
All Entrants, Average Score: 152.8, Standard Deviation: 71.5
Daily Roto Sharks, Average Score 149.7, Standard Deviation: 55.2
You’ll see that overall, the model was just slightly under the average of all entries, and with a tighter group of scores. Unfortunately the set of free lineups sat mostly in the bottom half of all of the lineups produced. Also unfortunate, average scores generally result in an overall losing effort in cash games, and the tighter group of scores meant that there was not much upside as far as tournament entries. I personally ended up with about a -50% ROI today. The high lineup score was 268.5 and the low was 12 (Hope you don’t mind me hiding that behind a strikethrough).
Let’s quickly compare that to the results from the previous race at Pocono. Same chart, but in this instance Draftkings entries were pulled from a contest with about 26,000 entries (still plenty) and the DRS results are the result of just 10 generated lineups.
All Entrants, Average Score: 165.0, Standard Deviation: 56.7
Daily Roto Sharks, Average Score 199.0, Standard Deviation: 41.4
You’ll see that the result here was much stronger, the average score was much higher than the average and the tighter standard deviation meant that the scores had consistent value. This created a lot of value in both cash games and GPPs. The high score was 275.25 and the low was 138.
Conclusion/Lessons Learned
1. You don’t get into the Daily Fantasy Sports game unless you can take a loss, everyone will end up on the bad side of the average sometimes, the key is learning from it and bouncing back.
2. We WILL bounce back.
3. I saw almost no noticeable difference in my GPP vs Cash Game lineup sets aside from a few drivers here or there. In fact, my cash game lineups may have performed better in the GPP’s today and vice-versa. By picking 6 drivers of a 43 driver field, half of which is basically unusable, there isn’t as much opportunity to differentiate between cash games and tournament plays. I may still package 2 sets of lineups, but they will not be designed for either cash or tournament specifically, instead they will likely be packaged as being more conservative or more aggressive.
