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Comment by roldie | Hacker News Reader

Daily fantasy sports are like poker. There is an element of skill in each, and you'll see the same skilled players win consistently.

However, based on my anecdotal evidence of being a fantasy football player (but not DFS, admittedly) and having formerly spent lots of time in online poker rooms, poker involves more skill than DFS. In poker you "play the player, not the hand." But in DFS, there is no equivalent. So I would argue poker, a game classified as gambling, involves more skill than DFS.

There is also this article about games of skill. While not completely related, I find it interesting that casinos are trying to find games that people think they are more skilled at than the average joe, and can therefore think they can win. http://www.npr.org/2015/04/29/403094845/casinos-switch-out-s...

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From my own experience, poker and DFS involve about the same level of skill and study to be consistently profitable. DFS just scales more easily. You said, "In poker you play the player, not the hand. But in DFS, there is no equivalent." There actually is an equivalent. If you study DFS, you'll find that there's a cottage industry in figuring out what players will be most popularly owned in a given slate and then using that information to increase your own EV (e.g. in a tournament, if you projected Aaron Rodgers and Cam Newton to score the same number of points but 80% of people would play Rodgers then you would want to play Cam Newton because if he does go off big time then you now ahead of 80% of your competitors).

So it's kinda like betting against New York when playing a small market team?

DFS is more like the stock market: the skilled players take advantage of suckers and get richer, while the average schmuck only wins by not playing the game (and just investing in index funds).

The difference between them is that one provides an essential function to our economy, and the other is just a sports book. Hell, even the stock market has a definition of "professional investor" that means certain consumer protection rules don't apply to you because you should know better.

I disagree on this. Casual poker players will just play his hand as he's not that experienced with reading people.

While you are right that there is no DFS analogy to 'playing the player,' advanced DFS players build complex models, hedge their bets, and write (or hire people to write) scripts that update their bets as their beliefs about that day's games changes. Different kinds of skills than poker, but not less skill.

If OP meant to say that the average player plays poker with more skill than he plays DFS with, then I too disagree.

However, I think what he meant is that poker allows for more skill--it's a deeper game. I agree with that sentiment. Poker includes all of the things you mentioned, and more:

* Building complex models about the other player's strategy * Hedging bets in the form of pot-control, post-oak betting, bluff/fold situations * Scripting, of course. There's tons of scripting & mathematical work that can be done in both.

Then you've got bet sizing, psychology, bankroll management (in both), incomplete information, and the list goes on and on for some time.

Any given poker decision might weigh a thousand factors or more, in real-time, and that often happens several times per hand.

I've tried to explain this same point to people but haven't been able to articulate it well. I think you just hit the nail on the head with your explanation.

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