Please talk me off a DFS ledge

[Driver Love]

I dabble in DFS games just for fun. I much prefer the season long leagues and the preparation, strategy and season long team management experience, etc. I also didn't like how some of the DFS leagues have professionals who enter the same contest a zillion times with countless lineups making it very hard for someone to hit it big with the lineup they pick (which to me, seems to be how the game ideally should be played) without making a huge investment with countless lineup variations. I usually play in a 50/50 leagues and single entry contests and if the roster I come up with has more upside than usual I will enter a low entry fee tournament where I could hit a big payday if I have a huge game.

last night I entered a 50/50 game and since the pitcher I chose wasn't the highest salary chalk I entered the same lineup in the $2 entry "Grand Slam" contest. I was rushing to do this as my kids were fighting over the tablet and I needed to go beat someone and also get them ready for bed (wife away traveling). When I finally come back down to settle in for my evening, I see that though I clicked "enter" for this grand slam contest I didn't hit it the second time to confirm the entry as I had walked away from the computer.

My team exploded last night... finishing 1st out of 100 in the 50/50 contest and scoring 78 points. Easily enough to win the $10,000 first prize had I clicked my entry the second time. I am headed to go trout fishing in a little while and there is a 40% chance I throw self into the river...

[Bronx Yankees]

Ouch! Awful story. Hug your kids, have a few cold ones, and try to purge the episode from your memory. Continuing to think about it will not do you any good. Sorry.

Mike

[jariax]

I'm confused as to how a $2 entry into a contest with 100 people in it can award a $10,000 first prize.

[the icon]

Probably just qualifiers that get you to the big tournament.

[Top Dawg]

I'm confused as to how a $2 entry into a contest with 100 people in it can award a $10,000 first prize.

He entered a 50-50 contest and then "thought" he copied and entered the $10,000 contest. Later he found out he never confirmed the second contest. All he won was his 50-50 game. Ouch.

[Driver Love]

I'm confused as to how a $2 entry into a contest with 100 people in it can award a $10,000 first prize.

He entered a 50-50 contest and then "thought" he copied and entered the $10,000 contest. Later he found out he never confirmed the second contest. All he won was his 50-50 game. Ouch.

Exactly... I clicked "enter" to enter the same lineup. But it then asks you to click enter again to confirm the lineup so no one accidentally enters a contests. I walked away from the computer between those two clicks. The event I didn't enter has 1000's of entries. I just had one of those miracle nights where every single guy on the team had a good or great night.

[mlbbug]

I'm confused as to how a $2 entry into a contest with 100 people in it can award a $10,000 first prize.

He entered a 50-50 contest and then "thought" he copied and entered the $10,000 contest. Later he found out he never confirmed the second contest. All he won was his 50-50 game. Ouch.

Exactly... I clicked "enter" to enter the same lineup. But it then asks you to click enter again to confirm the lineup so no one accidentally enters a contests. I walked away from the computer between those two clicks. The event I didn't enter has 1000's of entries. I just had one of those miracle nights where every single guy on the team had a good or great night.

Sorry to hear that story.You have my sympathy FWIW . Had a similar issue in a DFS league last year when I tried to copy my lineup to another league and the damn computer locked up for some reason and missed the deadline to enter the other DFS game. That team would have won a $1000 prize had I been able to copy that lineup into that league.Never came that close again. Like others have said, go hug your kids , have a cold brew and move on. Can't let it eat you up.

[TOXIC ASSETS]

Sorry to hear about the bad luck for you.

DFS is a joke. You're not going to beat the pros over the long run with DFS especially when you count the big cut that the operator takes.

Give me NFBC / NFFC any day.

[GetALife]

There must be some big money behind that business. Everytime I turn the channel it's a new Draft Kings or FanDuel commercial. I don't see Stats all over the T.V. I'd rather go with Stats. Since I have to donate somewhere that is.........

And to win at DFS on a continual basis it seems like it would have to be your life. I just don't have close to enough time to research in-depth for single games like that. And if you don't spend an ample amount of time each day, then I'd be surprised if you win consistently. Season-long is fine.

[Greg Ambrosius]

There must be some big money behind that business. Everytime I turn the channel it's a new Draft Kings or FanDuel commercial. I don't see Stats all over the T.V. I'd rather go with Stats. Since I have to donate somewhere that is.........

And to win at DFS on a continual basis it seems like it would have to be your life. I just don't have close to enough time to research in-depth for single games like that. And if you don't spend an ample amount of time each day, then I'd be surprised if you win consistently. Season-long is fine.

Sports Illustrated wrote a 7-page article on Fanduel's $2 million fantasy football championship a few months ago and stated that Draft Kings and Fanduel are the Nos. 3 and 4 largest advertisers on sports TV these days. They are both raising tens of millions of dollars to increase the values of their companies. It's definitely a different business model from the normal pay-to-play model we've seen in this industry, but then again nothing is moving the needle in our industry like DFS. Kudos to those companies for getting the leagues and pro teams involved in our industry.

SportsBusinessJournal reported today that Fanduel has signed exclusive deals with 15 NFL teams. Here's the story:

FanDuel Signs Multiyear Sponsorship Deals With 15 NFL Teams
By Terry Lefton, Editor-at-Large

Weeks after Disney/ESPN reached an industry-redefining advertising and equity agreement with daily fantasy site DraftKings worth hundreds of millions, rival FanDuel today will announce that it has signed exclusive multiyear sponsorships with 15 NFL teams (see chart below). Since Yahoo has an exclusive deal with the 49ers and three NFL teams are in states where paid fantasy games are illegal (Arizona, Louisiana, and Washington), that means FanDuel has 15 of the 28 eligible NFL clubs locked up.

Last Friday, the NFL released to its teams new marketing regulations governing their deals with paid fantasy sites. The new rules essentially make daily paid fantasy sites equivalent to gambling casinos in ways clubs could market with them.

NFL TEAMS WITH FANDUEL DEALS
Bengals Colts Packers
Bills Eagles Rams
Browns Jaguars Ravens
Buccaneers Jets Redskins
Chargers Lions Texans

And yesterday it was reported on a quarterly business call that Yahoo plans on joining the DFS market soon. Who they are partnering with is still the question that needs to be answered, but here we go again. This is really getting to be a crowded field for sure.

[DOUGHBOYS]

A previous poster asked about and wanted a weekly game.
I think it's a good idea. Especially for a site like this.
Players here are vested in year long teams. Most see FAAB and injury as the largest detriments to the game.
At the same time, a lot of these players do not have the time or inclination to study for a daily game.

A weekly game falls in line with what we are already doing each week. We set our lineups every Monday and tweak them on Friday for optimal results. In effect, we are already playing 26 weekly games and rolling it into a season-long ball.
Doing a weekly game, with or without the Friday tweaks is a game that I would enter.
It employs the 'win now' that daily gamers like while taking away the luck factor that keeps folks from playing the daily game.
The thought of having a weekly team while our Main Event team is dying on the vine in August would be worthwhile for NFBC'ers as well.
A good idea and perfect for folks in our neck of the fantasy woods.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Here's an interesting take on Yahoo's entrance into Daily Fantasy Football:

http://www.legalsportsreport.com/1112/y ... -industry/

Mayer: Yahoo “Can And Should Compete” In Daily Fantasy Sports, Will Launch “This Summer”

Dustin Gouker, April 21, 2015 14:57 PDT@DustinGouker
yahoo daily fantasy sports

The news came out of Yahoo’s earnings call for the first quarter of 2015 and was first reported by Eric Fisher.

CEO Melissa Mayer’s comments on the call, courtesy of Seeking Alpha:

Finally on digital content, let’s turn to sports. For more than 16 years we’ve built the best fantasy sports experiences for our fans. Our users spend nearly 30 billion minutes a year playing fantasy sports on Yahoo!. And nearly all of those experiences have involved traditional season-long fantasy games.

Recently there was a rising trend around daily fantasy games. We believe this is an area where Yahoo! can and should compete. Over the past year, we have been working hard to create our daily fantasy offering, a unique take on this game genre to bolster our leadership in fantasy sports.

Normally we do not announce products before launch but this has been such an area of interest for our fantasy players and our investors that we wanted to announce that we have a new daily fantasy offering in the works that will launch this summer.

Interestingly, Mayer was not asked a single question about DFS during the Q&A session that followed the call.

The news comes as somewhat of a surprise, as earlier this year, Yahoo seemed to be pivoting out of the real-money seasonlong fantasy contest market. But to many, Yahoo’s DFS entry makes sense.

Yahoo will provide an interesting test case regarding the viability of transitioning season-long fantasy players to DFS.

According to data from Adam Krejcik, Managing Director of Digital & Interactive Gaming at Eilers Research, there are nearly 41 million seasonlong fantasy sports players.

But DFS has little penetration in that market, at about 2.5 percent of all fantasy sports play.

In addition to its seasonlong pedigree, Yahoo has some distinct advantages over its competitors, despite getting a late start:

A convenient player base. Considered the leader in seasonlong fantasy, Yahoo already has a huge number of potential DFS players it can target, which could allow it to compete with FanDuel and DraftKings right off the bat.
“Free” advertising. None of the other major DFS sites have this luxury. Yahoo can endlessly promote its DFS product on its own platform, which includes dedicated sports and fantasy portals already.
Quick transition to mobile. Yahoo already has a pretty dialed in mobile app for both iOS and Android, complete with live scoring. Taking that product to DFS seems, on the surface, to be an easy transition.

The Yahoo news could have wide-ranging ramifications for the DFS industry:

The marketplace is getting crowded even more quickly than before. Amaya Gaming — the parent company of PokerStars — recently announced its intention of offering DFS for fantasy sports later this year, in time for football season. Two new huge players could mean difficulties for new and small DFS sites trying to carve out market share.
No one seems to be content to allow DraftKings or FanDuel to run away with the market. The new entrants into the market make it clear that no one thinks the top two’s current status is insurmountable.
FanDuel and DraftKings take a hit in an advertising capacity. Yahoo’s fantasy players are a ready-made target for the two DFS giants, but it seems safe to say their advertising at Yahoo will be going away. DraftKings and ESPN reportedly have a deal that includes a half a billion dollars in ad buys, but that deal has not yet been made official.
What will sites do to attract/retain players? Clearly, Yahoo and Amaya can afford to offer absolutely huge guaranteed prize pools, if they want to, when the NFL season starts. There’s also a possibility the entrance of two new DFS sites will force down rake across the industry. Clearly, the cost of player acquisition is going up.

[Greg Ambrosius]

A previous poster asked about and wanted a weekly game.
I think it's a good idea. Especially for a site like this.
Players here are vested in year long teams. Most see FAAB and injury as the largest detriments to the game.
At the same time, a lot of these players do not have the time or inclination to study for a daily game.

A weekly game falls in line with what we are already doing each week. We set our lineups every Monday and tweak them on Friday for optimal results. In effect, we are already playing 26 weekly games and rolling it into a season-long ball.
Doing a weekly game, with or without the Friday tweaks is a game that I would enter.
It employs the 'win now' that daily gamers like while taking away the luck factor that keeps folks from playing the daily game.
The thought of having a weekly team while our Main Event team is dying on the vine in August would be worthwhile for NFBC'ers as well.
A good idea and perfect for folks in our neck of the fantasy woods.

I talked with a lot of people in Las Vegas about offering in-season games mainly to our players and the first feedback was to do the Fanduel weekly game on a Tuesday. That was a good suggestion and I like the way things are going so far.

The next step is to program our NFBC Cutline Championship scoring system so that we can use a points based scoring system in multiple formats. We are in the process of that now and will be testing this out during the regular season. It's interesting that this week one of our NFBC veterans said he changed his home league to our NFBC Cutline Championship scoring system and he's running that league on Yahoo.com. He said it's far more enjoyable than he imagined and the scoring is very fair. We will get this set up and ready to go for our debut NFBC Post-Season Hold 'Em Contest, which I think will be well received. And if we get it done in advance of that maybe we can run some short-season contests to test it out.

A weekly contest has some merit, but it's a lot of work for the players as you obviously need to look for two-start SPs and you can't run it Monday-Sunday. That would conflict with too much that everyone has going on with their NFBC teams. We'd have to consider a different timeframe and I'm open to suggestions for what that is. I think there's a better solution and we may pursue that later in the season if all goes well. But I agree, there's probably something here that can be done for our players once we get the points based format finished. Stay tuned.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Oh, what the heck: One more major player in the DFS space starting with football:

http://www.legalsportsreport.com/809/po ... dfs-plans/

PokerStars / Amaya To Launch Daily Fantasy Sports Product By “Start Of NFL Season”
Chris Grove, March 31, 2015 07:14 PDT


Home / Daily Fantasy Sports / PokerStars / Amaya To Launch Daily Fantasy Sports Product By “Start Of NFL Season”
PokerStars / Amaya To Launch Daily Fantasy Sports Product By “Start Of NFL Season”
Chris Grove, March 31, 2015 07:14 PDT@OPReport
Amaya's plans for DFS

Contents [show]
DraftKings and FanDuel could soon face the most credible test to their market dominance to date, as PokerStars and Full Tilt are aiming squarely for a quick entrance into the DFS market.

That’s per comments from Amaya CEO David Baazov on today’s earnings call.

We have also taken the strategic decision to enter the daily fantasy sports category and are pursuing parallel tracks of internal development and strategic acquisition.

We expect to provide more details on this strategy in the second half of 2015 but see a clear crossover from poker and daily fantasy sports.

Amaya acquired PokerStars and FTP in August 2014.

While DFS had certainly been in the strategic conversation for Amaya prior to today’s call, Baazov’s comments mark the first definitive signal of Amaya’s intentions.
Timeline for launch: 2015 NFL season

Amaya will waste no time pursuing the segment.

“The goal is to be up before the NFL season starts,” said Baazov, appearing to refer to the 2015 NFL season.

“We clearly see a strong demand for it … a lot of the U.S. players that were formerly PokerStars players would like to see us launch fantasy sports,” Baazov added.
Amaya’s entry could reshape the way DFS is viewed by regulators

The entry of PokerStars has obvious implications for the competitive landscape in the daily fantasy sports industry.

But the more significant ramifications could appear on the regulatory landscape.

The presence of the PokerStars brand will impact the way that policymakers perceive daily fantasy sports, most significantly on the matter of how close the activity is – or isn’t – to a state’s definition of gambling.

More directly, Amaya’s entrance would mark a first in the North American DFS market: a DFS operator that is also licensed by a U.S. gaming regulator.

Amaya is licensed by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement as a platform and content supplier in that state’s regulated online gambling market. The company also holds licenses from various other U.S. jurisdictions as a result of its land-based business, although that business is quickly being wound down in the wake of the PokerStars acquisition.

And Amaya holds a broad portfolio of international licenses, including a recently-granted license from the UK Gambling Commission.
What DFS acquisition makes sense – if any?

The question most likely to be asked most often in the wake of the call: who are the likely targets for acquisition?

Both FanDuel and DraftKings are thought to be working with billion-dollar-plus valuations, a price tag that might prove a bit steep for Amaya – especially given the debt that the company is still working off following its acquisition of PokerStars.

And one of the primary assets of both companies – their existing liquidity – would not be worth the same premium to Amaya (with some 91mm total registrations across their products) that it might be worth to others valuing DraftKings or FanDuel.

Nor would the leading platforms necessarily hold much appeal for Amaya, as Baazov noted: “Nobody’s software that we’ve seen can currently support our volume that we would have if we launched fantasy sports.”

Of course, he may have some ulterior motives for comments like that.

Even still, I suspect Amaya would likely acquire for specific technology and / or talent, and not brand or user base, making DraftKings and FanDuel unlikely targets.

But that prediction comes with a big caveat.

If either FanDuel or DraftKings recognize the potential to (i) turbocharge the global growth of DFS and (ii) effectively catapult to the position of undisputed leader of that expanded market via a partnership with PokerStars, then a price could emerge that make sense on both sides.
How competitive would PokerStars be if they went it alone?

I have little doubt that PokerStars could establish itself as the leading DFS operator within two NFL seasons.

The DFS market is littered with platforms that have tried – and failed – to grab a toehold in the incredibly competitive space.

But I’d submit that Amaya is fundamentally superior to any company that has entered the space to date in terms of financial resources, technological know-how and acquisition acumen.

And the global scale and deposit base of PokerStars – not to mention the lingering strength of its brand in the U.S. – gives Amaya a potentially explosive launchpad for daily fantasy sports.

Given the relatively small size of the DFS industry at this stage – likely shy of 2 million unique customers industry-wide in 2014 – it wouldn’t take much of a number in absolute terms for Amaya to leapfrog to the lead.
DFS a natural fit for PokerStars

The ability to expand a user base in the United States outside of the barriers of regulation via DFS – in advance of the rollout of state-regulated poker and casino – is no doubt extremely appealing to Amaya.

But the inherent similarities between DFS and poker makes DFS an uniquely attractive product for PokerStars. Like online poker, DFS:

Is liquidity-driven.
Involves the management of a sensitive, skill-divided player ecosystem.
Requires the development and maintenance of systems capable of performing under intense short-term loads involving simultaneous, parallel connections.

And the list goes on.

That’s not to say PokerStars can simply move a few buttons around and transform their poker client into a daily fantasy sports client.

But on a spectrum spanning from (i) starting from scratch to (ii) the FanDuel platform as it stands today, I’d argue that PokerStars is sitting far closer to the latter than the former.
Sports betting now in beta at PokerStars

Baazov also announced that PokerStars had taken the first sports bet in the history of company that morning, marking the poker titan’s entry into another vertical with significant overlap with DFS.

The sports product is still in limited release in select markets, with a broader rollout scheduled for the next two quarters to come.

But simply moving into sports will benefit any foray into DFS, as many of the same challenges – market making and risk management, to name but two – that PokerStars will staff and develop to meet on the sports side will also naturally serve as a DFS resource.