Experts, Legends And Profitablility

I'm going to bounce around a little today as I've had a few things on my mind.

One of the most grating issues to me is the notion of a daily fantasy "expert". There is no criteria or certification of any kind to assign expert status to anyone. Two of the long time players, Tippy and Zoobird, have been designated experts in a previous article. Yet when you search their contest history, they play rarely (if at all) for large periods of time.

I will admit when they do play, they seem to put up good results.

Another user, Mitchdog, is a self-proclaimed "legend" via the Fan Duel chat box. He was previously selling "packages" of lineups for Fan Duel users. I don't begrudge him for that - as I have sold subscriptions to Daily Fantasy Projections.

What irks me is that Mitchdog doesn't play contests much at all, and when he does, they are very small buy-ins.

Whomever the experts really are, they should be crushing due to the highest level of daily fantasy traffic we've had in its short history.

Another item that strikes me odd is the continued re-hashing of the same topics over and over again on the forums.

-How much do you research before a contest?
-Is a diverse or lopsided lineup best for baseball contests?
-Is daily fantasy sports profitable long term?

One explanation for the redundancy is that some forums offer nominal cash prizes for quality strategy posts. Is it worth my time to make my opponents better for $25-$50 bucks?

Nope.

On to the profitability issue. Just like poker, DFS has variance. But most of the players have blinders on, they only usually see the short term results. Also, many players are not multi-sport skilled, they can rake at one sport and just dabble in others.

This is like a NLHE poker player that is lost at an 8-game table.

My point is you need YEARS of results to determine profitability. If you play all sports, that will help fight some variance but you will still experience some long losing streaks. I have, I readily admit that. However, I have maintained profitability for four straight years.

Because of that, I do think it is beatable long-term. (Tippy doesn't think the rake can be beat, so perhaps that's why he doesn't play much anymore.)

I do know what it takes to be profitable. So someone tell me, what does it takes to be an expert?

(IMO, legends are associated with mythology. Who wants to be a myth?)