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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

I've spent more time than any sane person should trying to model fantasy sports for the purpose of making money as a psuedo hobby/second job.

My day job is essentially practical applications of simulation and machine learning so this was a natural way to broaden my modelling capabilities.

I'd love to chat with anyone who has any specific insight as to what the raptors are doing. If you're in Toronto I'll buy lunch!! Contact info in my profile.

Specifically a focus on methods applicable to selecting teams for Fantasy Hockey and Football with applications to weekly/daily fantasy is mostly what I'm concerned with.

I've spent alot of time/money figuring out what doesn't work very well so I can offer 3 years of failed experiments as a trade:)

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They are using the "Watson Tradeoff Analytics" product as the underpinning [1]

As others have mentioned, "Watson" is a brandname/pillar at IBM, similar to Infosphere (anything information management), Websphere (anything middleware-y), etc. It's a bunch of simple and complex, in-house-built and bought products, some of which play together well some of which don't, some of which were pretty impressive and some of which aren't.

To play with Watson Tradeoff Analytics, you can check out the documentation or get a free account with Bluemix [2]. They used to have a subset-of-functionality demo for Raptors on Bluemix as well. It seemed nifty but not groud-breaking.

My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit, i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on paper.

[disclosure: I work for IBM... nowhere NEAR Watson, in the plain-ol'-ERP department, but I've been curious myself to figure out what the hoopla is or isn't all about]

[1] http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

[2] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff-ana...

Do you know of any more public information about Watson's ability to determine the cultural fit if an individual within an organization?

> My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit, i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on paper.

This seems reeeeally unlikely, considering both the inaccuracy of Watson sentiment analysis, and that one would need to collect a rather substantial personal writing sample from each candidate.

The article mentions that they mine social media accounts of the players for the text. That could easily qualify as a substantial personal writing sample :)

That's great for college players, but not necessarily good for pro players, many of which don't control their twitter output (or have to sensor themselves much more than a college player would).

Well at least Watson will pick players who have complimentary PR firms...

Have you heard the story of Vugar Huseynzade, a kid who got so good at the game Football Manager that a legit club took him on?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2340324/Fo...

How about some blog posts? I'd be interested in seeing what you tried and the results.

I do some analytical work for a high school football team as well as play a good amount of fantasy football. What would be a good first step to actually making money on fantasy football?

Create an account on Fan Duel or Draft Kings. Incidentally, this is also a good first step to actually losing money on fantasy football.

If it's your thing, you could look up Haralabos Voulgaris - he takes on people doing advanced sports stats for betting purposes. He is straight gambling ($1m/day I think he's mentioned) rather than fantasy sports though. From following him for a while, I've had the impression that he has a team of programmers working for him at various points.

He does and he's a very smart person. He would pretty much be the go to guy I'd talk to about anything related to applied analytics and sports betting. It's fun to see him debate sports books that claim they will take "any bets". The biggest problem seems to be getting volume once your model works. You're basically limited to the NFL, NBA and soccer. I believe there are good/winning models for college basketball for example but you can't wager enough money to make it worthwhile.

Personally I think the juice is so high that I won't bother with anything sports betting related other than having a fun exercise/data to play with. Daily sports is way too scummy an industry (used to be a semi-pro online poker player so been there, done that) and the juice is very high as well but I suppose there could be some temporary money in it as there's enough amateurs around. If you want to do that from an ethical POV is another question (one of the reasons I quit poker) but either way the field will get more competitive rather quickly and/or regulated/legislated away.

tl;dr: Don't invest too much time in sports betting other than as a fun hobby with a nice dataset.

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