In Fantasy Sports, Signs of Insiders’ Edge | Hacker News Reader

In Fantasy Sports, Signs of Insiders’ Edge

nytimes.com

51 pointscaminante37 comments

If your takeaway from this article is "if only I had more time to write an algorithm" or "if only I could get my hands on some better data", you're missing the point here.

That geeks with computers were going to win all the money should have already been obvious to anyone who hangs around here. The scandal here is that employees of these two sites have been effectively colluding with each other to dominate each other's contests. So even if you had implemented your can't-lose algorithm, you'd still be losing.

As to buried ledes, how's this?

Neither company would say how much its employees had won, but Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for FanDuel, said DraftKings employees had won less than $10 million in her company’s contests.

Infamous Twitter pariah Justine Sacco is working again. Good for her.

Wow re: Sacco! Good recall -- assuming it's the same person. I guess her PR spin abilities apply to her career too.

P.S. I find the language re: $10M funny. $1 less is still a big number, and I sense weasel words.

Seriously, it seems like everyone is ignoring that these insiders are just straight up CHEATING their users by allowing their own employees to share information and play on rival sites.

This is fraud.

I signed up for an account on Draft Kings last year after seeing a ton of advertising for it. I had been seeing the daily fantasy sports stuff for years after the U.S. destroyed online poker but allowed for betting on fantasy sports, but hadn't tried it and it didn't seem all that popular. After signing onto Draft Kings, I saw that it had obviously become extremely popular.

I dabbled around a bit in the NBA games and quickly saw some strategies that would likely work if tailored more. However, it was entirely clear that the way to win money in those contests would be to build a model that could spit out lineups. In the big tournaments, a model could easily create a large number of high-variance lineups. In head-to-head or smaller games, it could create lower-risk lineups.

I started to draw up a lot of ideas on what the model could do to try and predict things like playing time, share of points/rebounds/assists, etc.

When it came time to actually build it out, I shelved it, largely because it was going to take time and money to work with the type of stats I needed, but also because I'd assume there are already a lot of people on these sites doing this. In fact, I'm assuming everyone who is profitable on those sites is running model-generated lineups. There are still lots of fish pumping money in, but the people taking it out would be at least as, and likely more, sophisticated than what I could do.

There is an extremely popular NBA bettor and he runs a multi-million dollar operation, hiring several analysts to help him make his predictions. In fact, he's actually consulted privately with several NBA teams because his analysis was ahead of what many NBA teams were doing several years ago.

If those are the types of people you're up against, it's a battle of algorithms, not people.

I went one step further and actually implemented an MCMC model and ran it for a while. It did turn a slight profit on low stakes games for the 3 months that I ran it. I stopped and did not move on to higher stakes games because I live in Germany and there appears to be no simple way for me to legally participate in these games and then withdraw my money. I am keeping the scripts ready for when the fad invades Germany, though!

I agree on the stats part. Scraping them from various sources was definitely the most painful and limiting part of the project, and I was only able to obtain a limited amount of data even then. If I could get a complete and large dataset to work with, I would be tempted to give it another shot, just to see how far more data takes me.

When I was looking at this last year, there were several paid options to get direct access to datasets and/or API's, without having to scrape.

Out of curiosity, what sport(s) were you modeling?

I was modeling football (soccer). All the commercial data sources I found had no publicly listed prices, only 'contact us for a quote', so I couldn't be bothered because it seemed likely to be too pricey.

Read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haralabos_Voulgaris. I've heard him speak a few times and read some articles about his operations.

It's enough to make me not want to waste my weekends cobbling together my own system.

The more interesting guy is Zeljko Ranogajec [1], who has made himself into a billionaire with horse racing betting algorithms. It's pretty incredible to think that it is possible to beat a game with a ~20% rake so badly that you become a billionaire. Bill Benter [2] is another horse racing billionaire. Both of these guys started as low-stakes blackjack card counters and pretty much worked their way up from nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec

[2] http://www.gambler-profiles.com/bill-benter-the-richest-of-t...

I wrote a tool that scraped all of Fanduel's results so that I could experiment with different models and backtest the model against real contest results. I have yet to find a model that would be profitable at stakes worth playing in football or baseball, after more than a year of tinkering. The winning players are almost all using algorithms, I just wish I knew which one.

As the recent news indicates, they have additional inputs to their models.

I had/have an algorithm that I use for MLB games. The stats are relatively easy to find and past that it's just trying to figure out what things "matter". I had a lot of fun day dreaming about which things are important to factor in. Some parks are hitters parks, some pitchers walk batters more often, most batters have a better average depending on the handedness of the pitcher, etc. There are thousands of things you can factor in.

If I'm being honest, it didn't make a whole lot of money before I shelved it myself. The most important factor is that the lineups are rarely submitted early enough for me to bet on a full day. Usually I found myself being able to only play the late games, which is typically 4-6 total teams. It really limits the creativity of the lineups.

In the future I'd like to try it with some other sports (NBA is a big one, because the lineup issue shouldn't be as big of a factor, same with hockey). But I don't expect to make millions, it's just a programming problem that's a ton of fun to solve for.

That sounds pretty fun. Despite not having played fantasy baseball for about ten years, I still have dreams (not aspirational dreams, the sleep kind) about playing, at least monthly. Maybe it is time.

Yeah, it's very hard for it to be a completely "hands-off" process. Just some warning though, NBA is actually one of the worst offenders in having incomplete lineup information until right before games start because NBA teams are not required to list their inactives (NFL teams are with at least one hour notice before kickoff).

I liked playing NBA last year, but you have to basically block off 6-7pm EST to just track injury news, late scratches, and changes to the starting lineups :(

I still find it hard to understand why fantasy sports that pays money to winners is different from bookmaking. Betting on players instead of teams is hardly different; all you are doing is narrowing the odds a little. You are still betting money for a chance to win money. Maybe people think it's more like playing Powerball.

Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other.

Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun.

Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time!

I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).

In betting exchanges you also bet against other people (with the house taking a cut, as with DFS), but those are banned under gambling regulation.

Some online sports books used to operate betting markets where you'd essentially buy options on teams, with the price of the option being determined by the demand. The house would make money on the spread.

The fundamental difference between why that's illegal and betting on daily fantasy football is not, is simply that the anti-online gambling laws of the U.S. specifically allowed for betting on fantasy football and outlawed other types of gambling. When that law came about, I believe in 2007, daily fantasy football either didn't exist or was extremely niche. It really took a few years before big players like Draft Kings and Fan Duel got substantial traffic. When the law came about, there were a lot of small players who came and went.

Its actually more specialized than that. When the gambling law was written fantasy sports was given a specific exemption because traditional fantasy was so popular.

The daily sites saw this exemption and developed games that push the envelope as closely as they possibly can. They've even added rules about not picking too many players from the same team as they are worried about that being perceived as a violation. The entire industry has been 1 jump ahead of legislation its whole short existence. In some ways they have been incredibly savvy, for instance they have financial backing from some of the biggest players in the US sports markets. That they allowed this idiotic behavior by the employees to go on for so long is boneheaded on an epic scale.

I'm not going to disagree, but...we are chemically-driven machines. Gambling triggers addictive releases of pleasure/pain that aren't equivalent to most other forms of entertainment. Most forms of gambling are successful because they are excellent at delivering random reinforcement to players, which is key to many addictive behaviors. But the games themselves are not intrinsically interesting to most people.

DFS takes applies the same principles of gambling and couples it with the most popular sport in the country.

I agree with your general assessment. I think one sane area for regulation is tracking large losers and having mechanisms to help addicts create self-enforcement (banning themselves effectively).

However, I think the mobile gaming industry is probably just as responsible in this way. Clash of clans has people spending 50k+ per year (outliers of course) on the game and also tries to trigger a similar gambling-style positive feeling. They also are some of the most effective mobile advertisers tracking individual customers all over the internet. Do you think these "whales" get enough control on how they're targeted by companies?

It's because bookmaking is a game of chance while fantasy sports (daily or not) is considered a game of skill. Ironically bookmaking is much more fair for the average person than daily fantasy, but that's not how the government sees it.

Thats what they used to justify the difference in the law, but any other form of sports gambling seems to meet the same standard. For that matter, the daily sites have devolved into a sort of prop bet parlay.

My own personal subjective opinion is that blackjack, craps and especially poker all have higher skill to luck ratios than the daily fantasy games. Especially with the rake set the way it currently is.

Fully agree with you on poker. Mild agreement on blackjack.

Complete disagreement on craps. Could you describe the "skill-based winning strategy" for craps? (Other than "don't play")

Craps has negative ev but it is pretty small playing the no-pass line. My hypothesis is that the rake is so high on daily fantasy that any "skill based" positive ev is more than swamped by the cost of playing. So the daily fantasy sites are essentially lotteries where you need very abnormal winnings to make up for the rake.

There are still people who can statistically make money betting sports, so I'd be hard-pressed to call that any less of a game of skill than daily fantasy sports or poker.

For a long time, professional sports leagues in the US were extremely anti-gambling because they didn't want to be associated with it and they were worried about integrity.

However, the NFL got in bed early-on with fantasy sports, so they didn't fight things when it became clear that daily fantasy sports were becoming more popular, despite clearly being gambling.

Now, the NBA has come out in support of bookmaking. They were an interesting league to do that since one of their refs was caught tampering with games a few years ago. However, analytics in the NBA have become extremely sophisticated (they have tech that tracks every step each player makes), and looking back at the data, they could have caught that ref much earlier based on data. So I'm assuming they are confident enough in the analysis to thwart any tampering and are now trying to get into bed with the sports books in efforts to increase their revenue.

I've had decent success at buying this kind of "edge". There is a ton of free information out there, but if you are willing to shell out a little money upfront, you can get pretty close to the same tools the "pros" are using. $50-100 for a season can get you access to algorithmic/machine-learning backed predictions (with secret sauce) and $20/month for high quality lineup optimization tools and automated entry scripts. The vast majority will not pay for tools/projections but for an outlay of ~$100, I won around 10x that on NBA games last season (plus had a lot of fun).

Would you mind sharing a few links? I've been interested in the prediction engines for NBA games for a few years now.

Sure, here is what I used for last season:

https://basketballmonster.com/ for projections (terrible website, but really good). Don't have much information on their approach, but the common wisdom for NBA is to project fantasy points per minute and then predict how many minutes each player will get. Factors also include pace (how many possessions each team will get) and DVP (defense vs position).

https://twitter.com/baskmonster the best twitter account for posting injury/lineup news

https://www.fantasycruncher.com/ lineup optimizer and scripting auto-entry. Also has a really nice free feature called "Lineup Rewind" that you can use to "back test" previously days/weeks data.

Fantasy Cruncher comes with their own projections, but I didn't use them; you can import the BasketballMonster projections into the tool instead.

On Wednesday, he posted his story on Reddit.com. Twenty minutes later, the DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish called him. On Friday, Robins, Kalish and Liberman — the founders — sent an email intended to mollify their customers, many of whom are concerned.

Can anyone find this Reddit discussion? I'd like to see what the public thinks of all this.

No one is forced to bet on fantasy sports, so I hope the government does not get involved trying to make it "fair".

Does anyone know why American headlines are written in this way? It would sound more natural if it was "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports"

I've seen this a few times before, so I'm guessing it must be a cultural thing.

My only guess would be that it more quickly gets you to the subject. If you don't care about fantasy sports, you're unlikely to care regardless of the predicate used.

It might be a New York Times thing, or at least one that has perhaps spread to other American journalists: [0][1][2]

"The new-style headlines are a far cry from stereotypical Times headlines, which have been mocked for the prepositional phrases that often introduce them, like this one from last Monday’s paper, “After 8 Shots, a Quiet Officer Now Scorned.” Their frequency years ago once led to a Twitter meme in which book titles were rewritten in that style. (Among them: “Of Oz, the Wizard.”)"

0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-c...

1. http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book...

2. Yes, the irony is that this is also a New York Times article.

Yes, it's to grab your attention with the broad subject, and then tell you something interesting about it. This ensures that you click on the headline.

In your version of the headline "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports", your typical American reader has already lost interest by "Signs of Insiders' Edge" which is kind of an obscure metaphor.

Whereas the paper one grabs the attention with "Fantasy Sports". You like fantasy sports, you play fantasy football at your cubicle job every day. "Insiders' Edge"? Oh shit, there must be something wrong with it. Better click on the headline and check that out.

Boom, NYTimes serves you 200 ad impressions (or sells a paper copy).

You already received a solid and accurate reply, but consider it as the headline equivalent of how you would structure a lengthy email you actually want the recipients to read. Firstly, you know the subject line is critical, but people will almost always glance at an email regardless. Secondly, you know you need short paragraphs or the wall of text will scare them away. Thirdly, you need to explicitly structure each paragraph with a strong subject -- either an easily parsable complete sentence or a bullet. Fourth, don't write it like you would a novel. Focus on facts and eliminate editorialization.

Finally, close it with a call to action. Frankly, with the advent of Google Drive/Docs, I've started getting in the habit of putting all the meat of an email in a separate linked document and just placing the subject, intro and call-to-action in the body of the message itself.

This is roughly how newspapers work, too.

Just as with sports betting in general, there will be a very small cabal of bookmakers and pro punters who absolutely clean up and everyone else who funds them.

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