Hacker News Reader

Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

I never thought about it this way, and while you don't have to worry about brokerage accounts and minimum fees, you have to pay for accurate stats. Using a place like ProFootballFocus or StatsInc is going to cost you a pretty penny if you want to scrape an API with up-to-the-second accurate information.

View on HN

You don't need "up to the minute" information though. Data can be days old and still be viable as long as you're using twitter's streaming API to get injury updates from one of each 32 teams beat writers as they occur. If I'm setting an NFL lineup on Friday I know the stats haven't had an opportunity to change in 6 days.

Injury reports are serious wrinkles. Often time players will be scratched within a few hours before the game. If you are optimizing, you need to account for this because it sends the backups value much higher than his salary. For example, last night Rajon Rondo was scratched. His backup Darren Collison, was in over 80% of the lineups in a FanDuel 50/50 tournament. I didn't have him, and I lost $2.

It also depends on the data you want. Most data sources don't have all of the things you could want to use in order to create meaningful stats.

Monday night football! So not quite 6.

ESPN Boxscores -- or FanDuel/DraftKings themselves -- have this data available.

Or there are projects like https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb

Reply on news.ycombinator.com