Why play DFS at all?
I put a not insignificant amount of programming man hours into fantasy sports, and often get asked what the point is. This post is an attempt to answer why I think creating software-driven DFS strategies are worth the time.
My first reason is that I enjoy it. Doing what you like in my opinion is always a worthwhile enterprise.
The reason I think will resonate with more people is that making educated bets over a long period of time forces your mind into a continual state of learning. There is a simple reason for this; losing money hurts. We are hard-wired to be loss averse.
Losing is an incredible teacher. From a software perspective, it forces you to be skeptical of every line of your code and thus drives code quality. All software I write for DFS ultimately drives a prediction. How correct these predictions are determine whether I get paid.
From a general perspective, losing makes you ask the tough questions about yourself — mainly, “What am I doing wrong?” Too often in my own life, I don’t feel forced to ask this question and perhaps avoid it. The daily battles that happen every day in Daily Fantasy Sports (Which players are chalk? Who is overvalued? Does my model take into account Coaching Decision X or Injury Y?) force this level of self-reflection, so much so that I probably commit new code every day to at least one of my DFS projects.
Desire to not lose also forces skepticism of popular solutions and welcomeness to new solutions. DFS has forced me to debug decision trees with too many layers, reject projection sources that seem to be used by every player under the sun and accept that Bogdan Bogdanovic is a must-play until the numbers say otherwise . What has become clear to me after years of playing is that there are no experts, silver bullets or solved problems.
Sure, at the end of day, it’s a made-up game on top of other made-up games. But sometimes only games force you to ask important questions.
