Friday, April 29, 2011

Dude, Identical Rosters Are Costing You Money!

There's a trend in large field daily fantasy contests of using IDENTICAL rosters. What this means is that a user will drop 2 or 3 entries using the exact same roster.

The rationale behind this strategy is that a winning (cashing) roster will produce multiple cashes. However, the flaw in this methodology is diminishing returns. The identical rosters will only chop prizes at (or below) the score achieved.

In other words, a 3x multiple entry finishing 10th would chop 10th, 11th & 12th place prizes.

In fact, the ONLY time multiple entries works out beneficially is when your identical entries take 1st place (along with the corresponding follow up prizes).

It would seem to me the players using this strategy are more confident in their ability to cash in a large field event, rather than actually win the event.

Here is how I view large field strategy (and why you shouldn't use identical entries):

-You should always enter large field events with the intention of winning them. If you drop 18 entries on an event, that should be 18 different shots at the 1st place prize. Using duplicate entries (2x each roster), you are only taking 9 shots at 1st place. While you might score a double cash sometimes, you are just padding the prize pool for the rest of us. Thank you.

-Even changing ONE player on your roster is much better than identical entries. It's most likely that changing that one player will still produce similar results as a duplicate entry. However, that one player may score enough to earn you a BETTER finish than the duplicate entry. It's much nicer to finish 9th & 7th (instead of 9th & 10th.)

The beauty of large field events is the large payoff for a small entry fee. If you are not shooting for the largest payoff with your entries, you're just donating with the duplicate entries. Think about it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more. Your 2nd entry, if identical to your first, is playing for:
(prize pool) - (first prize) instead of the entire prize pool
*Technically you should multiply this by (Total Entries - 1)/(Total Entries) to be fair
Basically, this 2nd entry is guaranteed to chop, so of all the possible outcomes you will get one place less (1/2 place less for both rosters) than you would if there was not already an identical roster (your first roster) in the contest. So, (1stprize - 2ndprize) + (2ndPrize - 3rdPrize) + (3rdprize - 4thprize) and so on... will add up 1stprize, which is what you miss out on if you go with an identical roster as your 2nd roster. First place is usually somewhere between 20-30% on DraftStreet, but even if it's only 10% of the prize pool this is way too much to be giving up. There is no way you can convince me that your first team is that much better than an alternative team you could create.