Jeff’s Hardcore Core- RSM Classic

Not very often do I discuss a facet of game theory and the route to implement it and have it play out so perfectly as it did last week.  If you read my column last week, I talked about the idea of strategically fading players that appear to be overwhelmingly popular in a given week.  Often times this enormous ownership spike is caused by a pricing error on the part of the DFS website.  This was the case last week as Luke List and Nick Taylor stood out to me as very  inefficiently priced and I felt their ownership would be inordinately large.  My hypothesis as to their ownership turned out to be correct as Luke List was owned by 31.74% in the $4, 36.68% in the $33, and 42.96% in the $333.  Nick Taylor’s ownership was less than I thought, but still significant at 18.36% in the $4, 17.52% in the $33, and 20.22% in the $333.

If you have been playing DFS golf for a while, you know how extremely volatile it can be and how players that we perceive to be virtual certainties, end up missing the cut.  For this reason, most every time I expect guys to be massively owned I am going to strongly consider strategically fade them.  This is especially true if they are among the highest priced guys, but regardless of price, it is nice to have an opportunity to shave off nearly half of the GPP field you are competing against if they miss the cut.  This played out perfectly as both List and Taylor missed the cut and gave us a monstrous edge over the field last week.  To add one more nugget to this strategy, other factors that make this even more effective is in events that are expected to be high scoring and events that are expected to be affected by weather. Both of those variables contribute to the unpredictably of an event to a certain extent.  I want you to file this away in your memory as it is one of the many strategies/game theory plays that we implement that contributes to the edge that Team FGI has over everybody else playing DFS Golf and specifically GPPs.  I am so glad it played out this way for Team FGI this week and in the Fall no less, to reward all the die-hard players like us.

This week we have the culmination of the Fall PGA season and nothing will be sweeter than ending it with a big week.  We will not have a PGA event next week although we will have the Hong Kong Open on the European Tour.  Then the Hero World Challenge the week after and although it is just an 18 player field, it is kind of a fun event and features the very best players in the world.  We will have a couple European Tour events in December, but nothing on the PGA Tour side.  You can definitely take the month off away from DFS golf and recharge the batteries, but we will still be grinding and would recommend you do some homework as well.

As I mentioned on our podcast, we will be collecting all our GPP data from the past season and Zach will present it in his three part GPP series of articles.  Friends, this is a must read.  The difference in the DFS golf landscape has changed so dramatically it is hard to even put it in perspective.  Each and every year trends develop, new touts appear from nowhere and gain followers who become mesmerized by the their hypnotic declarations. Don’t you love when certain people throw out a dozen names on Twitter each week and when one of their picks finally wins a tournament they capture their past tweet and retweet it saying look what I said. It is comical. In the past three years we have seen some folks take an adamant stance against the importance of course history and gain people following that foolishness. We have had massive changes in the contests that are offered through the DFS websites/ 20 max is now the common field size in lower dollar stakes, which is a whole other conversation that we will not get into right now. Bottom line is we need to stay on top of the current trends and landscape and adapt to it in order for us to stay ahead of everybody else playing.

We at FGI go beyond statistics alone (we offer those as well, but we need to factor in everything else that it takes to remain profitable year after year playing DFS golf and football. I have now been profitable four consecutive years playing DFS and I am certainly not saying that to brag because this year I only have a net profit of a couple thousand bucks so far and if you divide that by the amount of time I spend, it breaks down to about a nickel an hour. The reason I mention it and am proud of it is it speaks to my consistency, bankroll management, and ability to adapt to the ever changing industry. Playing fantasy sports is fun and is a hobby for 99.99% of us and how many hobbies are you able to turn a profit, no matter how little it might be. 2015 and 2016 were huge years for me as I had a net profit of $45k and $100k consecutively. You have the ability to do that, you just need to do things right.  Read the three part GPP series and really absorb it.  Put together a game plan going into 2018.  Do not be afraid to make a list of goals as if you were making New Year’s resolutions (although don’t desert them in late January, like most people do the gym).  Study the new players on Tour and see how they performed in the Fall.  Develop a hypothesis on who you think is going to have a good 2018.  I will be releasing my Crystal Ball Article for 2018 in December and hopefully that will be as successful as it has been in the past.  What I am trying to say is use December as your training camp and prepare for the upcoming season.  It may sound funny, but I truly believe that the extra time that I have away from grinding on weekly events allows me to do additional research and identify things that I might have missed when I am knee deep during the season.  Now, lets go kill the RSM.

Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core- RSM Classic-

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