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    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports
    Ebook189 pages2 hours

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports

    By Jonathan Bales

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    About this ebook

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports is the ultimate assortment of daily fantasy advice, tips, strategies, and league-winning data. A collection of the best daily fantasy football content from the Fantasy Football for Smart People book series, A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports will teach you in-depth tactics you can employ to win on DraftKings and other daily fantasy sports sites.

    You’ll learn how to:

    •Project players with the greatest accuracy
    •Use the Vegas lines to make money in fantasy sports
    •Make better decisions based on matchups
    •Incorporate weather into your lineup decisions
    •Lots More

    As with all Fantasy Football for Smart People books, A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports approaches fantasy football from a “Moneyball” perspective, using data to test assumptions that we think we know to be true. This book is perfect for any fantasy football owner who wants to take a more analytical, scientific approach to daily fantasy sports.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJonathan Bales
    Release dateNov 20, 2014
    ISBN9781310485008
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports
    Author

    Jonathan Bales

    Jonathan Bales is the author of the Fantasy Football for Smart People series and founder of RotoAcademy. He's a regular contributor to the New York Times, where he posts both "real" and fantasy football content, as well as NBC, Dallas Morning News, RotoWorld, 4for4, and rotoViz. He was a finalist for the FSWA's Fantasy Football Series of the Year award.

    Read more from Jonathan Bales

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    • 4/5
      Very informative information, would have rather the book been all football and no baseball but it was nice to see the small correlation.

    Book preview

    Fantasy Football for Smart People - Jonathan Bales

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports

    Jonathan Bales

    Copyright Jonathan Bales 2014

    Published at Smashwords

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    All Rights Reserved ©2014

    Jonathan Bales. First Printing: 2014. The editorial arrangement, analysis, and professional commentary are subject to this copyright notice. No portion of this book may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated, or otherwise used without the express written approval of the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

    United States laws and regulations are public domain and not subject to copyright. Any unauthorized copying, reproduction, translation, or distribution of any part of this material without permission by the author is prohibited and against the law.

    Disclaimer and Terms of Use: Your reliance upon information and content obtained by you at or through this publication is solely at your own risk. The author assumes no liability or responsibility for damage or injury to you, other persons, or property arising from any use of any product, information, idea, or instruction contained in the content or services provided to you through this book. Reliance upon information contained in this material is solely at the reader's own risk. The authors have no financial interest in and receive no compensation from manufacturers of products or websites mentioned in this book.

    Table of Contents

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: A Guide to Winning at Daily Fantasy Sports

    Section I: Chapters from Daily Fantasy Pros Reveal Their Money-Making Secrets

    The Vegas Lines with Mirage88

    Projecting Players with MrTuttle05 and Dinkpiece

    Section II: Chapters from Fantasy Football (and Baseball) for Smart People

    One-on-One: How to Win Heads-Up Leagues (and 50/50s)

    The Final Piece of the Puzzle: Creating Projections and Lineups

    An Appendix of Extra Data

    Section III: Chapters from The Ultimate In-Season Weekly Guide

    How much do matchups matter?

    The Fourth Quarter, Vegas Lines, and Passing Stats

    How to Treat Backup Running Backs Who Become Starters

    Does playing in a dome help an offense?

    Demaryius Thomas, Andre Johnson, and Opportunities to Score

    A Bunch of Fantasy Football Data

    Preface

    A couple years ago, I was playing daily fantasy football semi-seriously (but still more as a hobby than a full-time job) and I was in position for a major cash. With one game left in the NFL slate, I was the favorite to win a huge tournament on DraftKings with a prize of $100,000 to first place.

    And I blew it.

    About 15 minutes before kickoff, I swapped out Eric Decker and put in Keenan Allen. Knowing that I had a serious shot at some big-time cash, I was doing as much research as possible to project these two players. Right before the game began, I second-guessed my swap to Allen and pivoted back to Decker. The pretty boy went on to catch two of his five targets for 32 yards, dropping a touchdown and literally falling down in the open-field while running for another. Allen went for 6/142/2.

    I won $1,500—roughly $98,500 less than I thought I was going to win—and I didn’t sleep for days.

    At that point, I realized that the difference between the elite daily fantasy players—the guys making literally hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars per year playing fantasy sports—and average players is the sum of a bunch of small edges. Had I known more about the progression of rookie wide receivers (something I studied literally a week later), I would have stuck with Allen (which I now believe was the right move). I set out to take daily fantasy sports more seriously, doing as much research as possible and talking to as many pros as I could to see if I could do this for a living.

    Fast-forward to the present day and, well, I’m getting there. I scored my first six-figure cash in a DraftKings fantasy baseball tournament (through a combination of getting lucky and swapping equity with a few players who performed rather well) and I’m grinding it out every day to continue my success.

    The way that I got started in the fantasy sports industry, though, was through education—teaching players how to become better and even profit from their hobby, and that’s something I’ll continue to do as long as I can. My Fantasy Football for Smart People book series has seen multiple books become the #1 football book in the world at one point or another.

    I’m also now a sponsored DraftKings Pro. I produce content on the site and help spread the word that DraftKings is the best daily fantasy sports site in the world (it really is).

    As a full-time fantasy sports player and writer, I’ve had a ton of time to dick around, research weird topics, and write a whole bunch about stuff I love. I expanded my book series quite a bit in the last 12 months—so much so that I wanted to create a Best Of book. That’s what this is: the best of my daily fantasy football content from the past year. My hope is that you’ll find some of the advice interesting and actionable as you play on DraftKings this season.

    Note that I also sell a season-long draft guide and in-season package (complete with weekly projections and values for daily fantasy sports sites). The goal is to help you become a profitable fantasy sports player over the long run. All of my packages and books are available at FantasyFootballDrafting.com.

    Thanks so much for your continued support of this series. Best of luck this year.

    Jonathan Bales

    Some Free Fantasy Football Stuff for You

    I like giving things away, so here’s some stuff for you. The first freebie is 10 percent off anything you purchase on my site—all books, all rankings, all draft packages, and even past issues of RotoAcademy—my fantasy football school. Just go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com and use the code Smart10 at checkout to get the savings.

    The second freebie is a download of my book Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0). Yes, the entire book for free. Here you go.

    Finally, I’ve partnered with DraftKings to give you a 100 percent deposit bonus when you sign up there. Deposit $500 and then bam! you got $1,000. DraftKings is the main site where I play daily fantasy football. Deposit there through one of my links (or use https://www.draftkings.com/r/Bales) to get the bonus, use the Smart10 code to buy my in-season package at FantasyFootballDrafting.com (complete with DraftKings values all year long), and start cashing in on your hobby.

    A whole lot of readers profited since I set this up, and we now have five six-figure weekend profits by subscribers since purchasing my in-season package. Yes, over $100,000 in one weekend of football—on five occasions! There’s an outstanding investment opportunity in daily fantasy sports right now, and there’s really no reason for you not to get involved.

    Section I: Sample from Daily Fantasy Pros Reveal Their Money-Making Secrets

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Daily Fantasy Pros Reveal Their Money-Making Secrets is the first book to truly dig deep inside the minds of daily fantasy football’s most lucrative players—the ones raking in full-time salaries playing the game you love. With interviews from headchopper, Al_Smizzle, PrimeTime420, dinkpiece, naapstermaan, MrTuttle05, and others, you’ll learn exactly how the experts go about researching, projecting players, and creating their daily fantasy sports lineups each week.

    In addition, Daily Fantasy Pros Reveal Their Money-Making Secrets contains chapter-by-chapter commentary and analysis from author Jonathan Bales and Top-10-ranked daily fantasy pro Peter Jennings, a.k.a. CSURAM88. With unprecedented access to the strategies used by the world’s top players, you’ll learn how professional daily fantasy footballers are really cashing in…and how you can too.

    The Vegas Lines with Mirage88

    I’m a huge proponent of stealing research from Vegas by looking at their game lines, spreads, totals, prop bets, and so on. These are people who have millions of dollars on the line with each game, so creating an accurate line is important to them. It’s not that we can’t know that the Broncos are going to score a lot of points without looking to Vegas, but rather that the lines allow us to 1) quantify the effect and 2) do it in a really efficient way so we can spend precious research time elsewhere.

    I spoke with Mirage88—one of daily fantasy’s up-and-coming players—about his use of Vegas. Mirage88 is one of the smartest people I’ve spoken to about daily fantasy sports. He’s also my favorite daily fantasy success story.

    Within two weeks of learning about daily fantasy, Mirage88 qualified for a daily fantasy football championship and then won $25,000 just one month after that. A few months later, he went on a two-week heater that included a six-figure profit.

    Currently ranked in the top 30 in NFL and top 12 in TPOY, I’d argue that Mirage88 is one of the top 10 daily fantasy players in the world.

    First, talk to me about the Vegas lines and how they’re created.

    I think it’s important to understand how the Vegas lines are created, which then aids us in figuring out how useful they are. There’s a perception that Vegas sets lines solely to get 50/50 action on each side of the bet. And to some degree they probably want that in many situations since they’ll guarantee themselves profit just from the juice (the commission they charge to play). But what happens is people will sometimes use that as a reason that Vegas shouldn’t be used in projections, saying something like Oh, they just care about whatever popular opinion might be and just getting in the middle of that.

    The problem with that is that there are a lot of sharp bettors out there with a lot of money, so if Vegas indeed produces a line to equalize bets but it’s weak, those sharps are just going to pound that bet and Vegas will be in a really poor situation in terms of expected value.

    So the way I like to think about Vegas is that it’s really where the most risk is in terms of projecting any player results—at least the most financial risk from one entity making projections, anyway. So if Vegas posts a poor line—let’s say they post a total that’s way too low—then all of a sudden anyone who can bet on that who is relatively sharp will just start hitting the over, and Vegas will realize that the bet isn’t really balanced.

    Vegas will compensate for that by moving the total up to get more action on the under. That’s fine, but then there’s this area in the middle which was over the initial line but under the new line movement bet that’s now a really bad place for Vegas. If the game ends up in that spot, they could theoretically lose a whole lot of bets to sharps who bet the original over, but at the

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