Are Fantasy Football and Baseball More Based on Skill Than the Real Sports? | Hacker News Reader

Are Fantasy Football and Baseball More Based on Skill Than the Real Sports?

nautil.us

68 pointsprostoalex47 comments

I guess the reasoning behind the conclusion is here:

> When Hosoi compared the R values of FanDuel contests to actual professional sports teams, she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less skill and more randomness than

> their fantasy corollaries (with the exception of basketball, whose many opportunities to score reduce its randomness). In fantasy hockey, skilled contestants will succeed slightly more often than elite NHL teams will. In a real-world hockey game, a weird puck bounce can lead to a fluke goal.

> Because hockey games are relatively low-scoring, moments of randomness can have an outsized impact on the outcome of a matchup. To a lesser extent, the same is true in baseball and football, both games where scoring opportunities can be hard to come by.

But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example), every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly lopsided.

From the article

>laws in the United States tend to have the opposite opinion, and favor skill over chance

>FanDuel approached Anette Hosoi... to see if their offerings were more games of skill or of chance

>she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less skill and more randomness than their fantasy corollaries

That should tell you exactly why the conclusion is flawed. As the old line about lies and statistics implies, the numbers could be massaged to show numerous different results. I imagine it is just a coincidence that in this instance the numbers show exactly what the sponsor of the research wanted to show. Both this research and this article are nothing more than PR puff pieces for the daily fantasy sports industry.

But you can't tell the conclusion is flawed just from that. You're saying that funded research is by definition only valid if it yields results that are neutral or harmful to the interests of whoever funded it. That's blantantly, obviously false.

You can take that as one piece of data that should tend to raise your level of suspicion, but you still have to look at the actual study to evaluate it.

That's a critical thinking error. When an interested party funds research, they don't publish results that are misaligned with their interests.

In technology, you'll see shill "analysts" publish white papers that the FooCorp Model Bar Computer delivers 46% more ROI. This is similar bullshittery.

That's a separate problem. It's true that the selection bias around a lack of negative results is a problem, all that means is that you cannot interpret a lack of support in the literature as evidence one way or the other. I can't assume that a drug has no side effects based on a lack of documented research pointing out those effects. Such a study would likely be kept quiet, I know. When a study is actually published though, you can hopefully interpret the study on its own merits. There's still potential for fraud and misconduct, but that's why we'd ideally devote more time to replication studies.

That said, I was assuming from the article that there was an actual peer-reviewed study resulting from this research, but the only thing I can find online is an affadavit Hosoi filed on behalf of Fanduel. If there's no published study anywhere, there's nothing to really counteract the suspicion you assume based on funding.

Ben Goldacre - a British epidemiologist - has done a lot of work on this area, but focused on the Pharmaceutical industry and their practices in running/publishing the results of drug trials. He's got a great blog at http://www.badscience.net/ and a book called Bad Pharma.

When I said why its flawed I was providing the likely reason and not evidence of the flaw. Rereading my comment, I can certainly see how one might interpret otherwise. Sorry I wasn't clear on that.

When it comes to the specific evidence of the flaw, I think schwap's comment that I was replying to has it covered.

>But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example), every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly lopsided.

Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back

It's a completely ridiculous comparison. Imagine a high school team playing the Cleveland Cavaliers or Golden State Warriors.

Poker is probably a better example since it's far more likely for bad players to play in a game against a great player than it is a bad basketball player to play against Lebron James. In poker, the more skilled players there are at the table, the harder it is to tell who the bad players are. Even the highest cash games in the world rely on extremely wealthy gamblers who aren't skilled in order to remain lucrative to the professionals.

> Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back

Why?

If you really did that, then every single game would be considered a game of chance, even chess.

I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusions, but only comparing the top players isn't a legitimate thing to do -- if you take any distribution and zoom in at the extremes, it will look just like noise.

It's not as ridiculous as you think. To continue to abuse the hockey analogy, there are ~979000 registered hockey players in the US and Canada[1]. There are 30 NHL teams, each with a contract limit of 50, for a total of 1500 players. That's 0.153% of all hockey players in North America.

EDIT: Need to read better, that's an order of magnitude off so it is a bit ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registere...

I think you're missing what I'm saying.

The criticism is, 'I don't like the article's metric because it doesn't zoom in on the tail of the distribution'.

But if you do that with any game, the answer you will get is uniformly 0.5, even when comparing chess to tic tac toe.

I think schwap's point was that you can't draw the conclusion "Fantasy games are more games of skill than their professional counterparts" when you're comparing people self-selected to have close to even skill levels (elite athletes) to a random sampling of the population.

Of course there's more skill advantage in a random sampling than a sample biased by skill.

No I understand your argument, I'm just trying to illustrate how small a part of the tail professional sports really is (turns out it's small but not that small).

Depends on the sport. For NBA and NFL athletes in the US, it is close to 1 in 10k high school athletes in those sports that make it to the pros

They're basically saying that in RL sport, the skill level at that top level is so close that 'chance' has a significant impact on the outcomes. However, the skill gap between 2 random players of fantasy sport is so large that chance has very little impact.

If you read down the article it does say that games of skill between similarly skilled players will result in 'chance' having a bigger affect on the outcome. But lets not act like DFS are not a game of skill.

I suspect that the reason you'd see a stronger "skill" signal in the fantasy results than in the sport itself is that professional players are a hugely skewed sample. When a player starts doing noticeably badly, they get dropped. Face the professional hockey players off against non-professionals and you'd see the signal jump right out.

Fantasy sites, on the other hand, aren't filtering out people that play terribly nearly as aggressively. So I'm not sure if this is the right kind of test. It's comparing against a signal-expunging process.

> My plan quickly proved worthless. The luck of the cards wasn’t with me. My best hand was maybe a Jack High. Worse, the others at the table were betting aggressively and bluffing masterfully. Well, I assumed they were bluffing. I think I actually saw a player’s winning cards only once. I swiftly suffered the fate of fools with money. My opponents cleaned me out in five or six rounds. Poof! My 75 bucks were gone.

Hilarious. I'm going to assume he played 3/6 limit and voluntarily put money in the pot with substandard starting hands. Usually the blinds are 2/3 I think, so after 6 rounds he'd still have $35 if he didn't spend extra money on hands that were jack high.

Is this what they call knowing when to fold 'em?

I really liked that article, however I'm kind of biased as I'm in the data science world.

As for Draft Kings and the like, whether it's skill based or not they are just another engine that keeps those who struggle with impulse control from truly finding financial independence.

I don't believe in divine government to save the people from these sites, but at the same time I am saddened as the volunteer work I do to help people with their finances is filled with these kind of fantasy bills.

Well, ignoring the concerns about government intervention vs individual responsibility, the reality is daily fantasy companies advertise in such a way that it makes it appear anyone can be a winner, when in fact the vast majority of winnings go to the same set of elite players.

That's just flat out false advertising. At least Vegas is up-front about the fact that the odds are in their favour. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to have the government enforce basic standards about advertising and communication by companies to the public.

There are also ads that make it appear that if I drink a certain brand of beer then hot women will instantly flock to me. Should that be illegal too?

I think such an argument is reasonable. It does seem that putting restrictions on advertising cigarettes has contributed greatly to reduce the perception that smoking is badass.

There are also ads that make it appear that if I use a certain brand of deodorant then hot women will instantly flock to me. Should that be illegal too?

Well, I think I understand the point you're trying to make. And I agree that drawing a line on what is and what is not acceptable embellishment to promote a product is probably impossible to do in a way that is absolute.

But I believe that it should be possible to come up with a set of mandatory guidelines that would ultimately help consumers make more informed decisions when selecting a product. And I think this is a pretty reasonable thing to say, since so many governments enforce already some form of legislation to fight against deceptive advertising [0]. Actually, advertising of the very industry being discussed in this thread (gambling) is already being regulated by many countries [1], so I would be interested in hearing more about why you think this shouldn't be the case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_advertising

So, just to understand your position, is your claim that the government should play no role in regulating the messages corporations deliver to the public?

Do you feel it strengthens your argument to pivot to attacking a position you put in your opponent's mouth?

Beer ads generally don't come with testimonials of people saying they were mobbed by hot women after drinking that brand of beer.

> I don't believe in divine government to save the people from these sites

Me neither, which is why I think gambling, drugs, and many other things we have nanny laws for should be legal.

In order to play daily fantasy sports you need a credit card, computer, and internet connection, which are pretty high barriers to entry for people without means. I feel a lot worse about the ads for the lottery our "divine government" pays to plaster all over the subway stations, convenient stores, and other places where the poorest people in my city congregate.

One is a direct attempt to take advantage of the poor, the other is actually targeted at people with money.

I understand what you're saying but you can use these sites from smartphones, smartphones are given away for free through government programs and the internet is greatly reduced in price on these phones as mandated by the government. [1]

Sadly, credit cards are also extremely predatory and loose and also provide no barriers.

I worry at times that the idea that these fantasy sport games give in terms of skill and being 'better at it' is what keeps these people playing despite ample evidence they lose a lot.

[1] http://www.freegovernmentcellphones.net/states

In my experience, many of the people playing FanDuel/DraftKings are the same people who buy a lot of lottery tickets. They aren't playing these games in any skillful way.

If you're going to use those people to measure the impact of skill on the outcome, then you need to also group NFL players with Joe Schmoe weekend warrior 2-hand-touch football players as well.

Flagged because this is PR/covering-their-asses bullshit from FanDuel, rather than real research. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12226792

Plotting the first half of the season on the X with the second half on the Y seems very strange to me. If you were just trying to separate the win percentages of players, wouldn't an X axis for the win percentage with a count on the Y provide you with a proper distribution? Plotting win percentage in different time periods on the two axis serves to essentially double count hits within the distribution, provided people's win percentage did not change significantly across the season.

I also don't really understand how a large difference in win percentages means that something is significantly skill based. What's certainly true is that you cannot say with any confidence that a tighter distribution means something is less based on skill, which was the extremely bold claim in this article.

Having played FanDuel, I'd buy the argument about skill if they weren't pushing you so hard toward, and the app wasn't geared to, playing often. I seriously doubt one could play so frequently with any degree of skill, unless it was a full-time job.

For the most skilled players, it would certainly be worth it to them to treat it as a full time job. They make more doing that than most jobs.

I think that's true in the same sense that it makes sense for someone to quit their job and sell Mary Kay. The exceptions that have the big downlines and the pink Cadillacs don't disprove the reality of average performance. (per annum, average salesperson makes less than $100)

Have they truly stopped allowing bots? That's why I stopped playing last year.

http://www.espn.com/fantasy/baseball/story/_/id/13261582/are...

I see updated newflashes from both DraftKings and Fanduel in the google results, but they're flagged in our corp firewall blacklist. Does it explicitly say the companies themselves can't use bots anymore? Ironically, figuring out how to get the bots to bet in the most effective way in a few minutes was probably even more skill - what's that R-value?

Seems weird that this is considered a good thing. Usually it's celebrated as a highly competitive and mature game when the best players/teams are near each other in skill level. If you wanted the elite teams to accrue a lopsided number of victories you'd remove rules like the salary cap that many leagues impose.

So essentially the same fight we use to have over pinball, back when LaGuardia was in office?

Useless fact of the day: Prior to 1947 pinball machines didn't have flippers, making it a game of chance (and yes, people bet on it). Afterwards the flippers it became a game of skill. Just imagine the world if that never happened?

Not pure chance, because players could control how far to pull the plunger, and because players could nudge the machine. After the introduction of "tilt" mechanisms (eg: http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=383 ) nudging became an accepted part of the game. It takes great skill to nudge effectively without triggering a tilt.

How (& who) did one bet? Where were pinball machines located?

I was a King Kool master

This is the best article I found about the history of gambling with pinball:

http://www.pinballcollectorsresource.com/russ_files/gambling...

Answer: No.

The graph has 'NHL' listed twice. I'm guessing from the text that the far right one should read 'NFL' instead

Are oranges more flavorful than apples?

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