Head to Head Fantasy Football at Fanduel.com

I launched my daily/weekly fantasy football career this week with the head to head fantasy football contests at Fanduel.com. I’m a beginner, and I’m assuming that readers of this post are beginners, too–at least when it comes to the daily/weekly fantasy game. My plan is to explain how this particular contest works.

According to “Notorious”, a head to head game is the most basic type of contest in the hobby. You play one on one with an opponent, and the winner gets the prize pool. On Fanduel.com, these contests start at the $1 entry fee level. With two players, the prize pool is $2, but the site takes a 10% commission, so if you win, you get $1.80. If you lose, you’re out your $1 entry fee.

I don’t have a huge bankroll. I started by depositing just $25 via PayPal. Part of that is because I’m poor, and part of it is because I’m cheap. I’m also not sure how good at this I’m going to be. I’m an average poker player, and I’m an average manager in my more traditional leagues, so I don’t want to invest a lot of money until I’m confident that I can maintain a positive ROI (return on investment).

One of the fun aspects to Fanduel.com is that it’s easy to sign up for multiple contests. I signed up to play in 25 different head to head contests in a matter of moments. I’m writing this post on Monday morning, so the results aren’t in for the week, but I’m winning in 17 of my 25 contests. I have a running back playing tonight, and I’m projecting that he’ll produce 18 fantasy points for me, too, so I think I’ll come out ahead.

17 out of 25 is a win ratio of 68%, which is well above the 55.5% win ratio you need in order to break even in these contests. (If you only win 50% of your contests, you’ll lose money because of the site’s 10% commission.) That means I’ll have a total bankroll of $30.60 after the final results are in–if my numbers hold true.

A $5.60 profit doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that it’s a profit on a $25 investment, then it’s a little more impressive. That represents a 20% ROI. If I can accomplish that every week for 52 weeks per year, I can see a significant increase in my bankroll over time. Of course, one week’s results isn’t enough to predict how well I’m going to do over time, but I’m optimistic.

Strategy Tips

Before getting started, I read a great book by Jonathan Bales called Fantasy Football (and Baseball) for Smart People: How to Turn Your Hobby into a Fortune.  Bales emphasizes that in head to head contests, your goal when creating your team is consistency. You’re not looking for players who might have a huge week; you’re looking for players you can count on to have a good week.

Consistency and Lowering Variance

The example he gives is a theoretical player who sets up two rosters and uses each of them in 50% of his match-ups. One roster scores 100 points, and the other roster scores 200 points. If the average player scores 150 points, this hypothetical player would win half his matches and lose half his matches. But since there’s a 10% commission, this hypothetical player would actually lose money.

Assuming you played 100 heads up matches and won half of them, you’d win $40, but you’d also lose the $50 on the entries where you didn’t win, for a net loss of $10. That’s not profitable.

On the other hand, if you put together a single lineup that scores 155 points, and your opponents all score 150 points, then you’ll win all your contests for a clear profit.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it’s a good example to get you into the right mindset for this type of contest. You want consistency. You want to reduce variance.

Consistency by Position

Bales went on to analyze which positions in the NFL were most consistent when it comes to putting fantasy points on the board. If you play traditional fantasy football, you’ll probably already have a good idea of where that consistency comes from. In order, from most consistent to least consistent, here’s where the various positions rank:

1. Running Back
2. Quarterback
3. Wide Receiver
4. Tight End
5. Defense
6. Kicker

Since we know we’re looking for consistency, and since we know that we have a salary cap to think about, the correct strategy would be to use a proportionally larger amount of our salary cap on running backs, quarterbacks, and wide receivers, and a proportionally smaller amount of our salary cap on tight ends, defenses, and kickers, in that order.

In fact, running backs and quarterbacks are far and away more consistent and reliable than any other position, so those three choices are the most important when setting up your roster.

Bales analyzed the typical winning line-ups salary cap allocations for consistently winning players at DraftKings, and he found that winning players, on average, spent about 50% of their salary cap on running backs and wide receivers.

Player Combinations

I’ll never forget my first live fantasy football draft. I picked up the top wide receiver for a team, and I followed it up by picking up the quarterback for that team. An older grey-haired gentlemen (who I had just met) noticed that, and told me, “That never works.”

Of course, he was wrong. That combination works great–some of the time. If the wide receiver has a big week in that situation, then the quarterback does, too.

The problem, especially in a daily/weekly contest, is when those two players don’t have a good week. In that case you’ve got two roster spots scoring less than you’d expected.

That doesn’t mean you can’t combine players in an intelligent way to help improve your odds in the head to head contests. Another suggestion from Bales’s book was to look at the lines for the over/under on the various games that week. You want to draft players from the games that are expected to be high-scoring.

In particular, you might want to get the RB1 from both team in the highest-scoring match-up for the week. Vegas is good at setting lines, and when they predict that a game is going to be high-scoring, they’re usually right.

By drafting the RB1 from each of those teams, you maximize your chances that at least one of those players has a high-scoring week. His opponent might not do as well, but the points have got to come from somewhere on those two teams.

Finding Value

Since you’re working with a salary cap, you want to find value. In order to do this, you need to look at the ratio of salary to points. This involves creating projections for each player.

Here’s a video of Jonathan Bales discussing projections of fantasy points:

I used the data on FantasyPros.com to estimate how many dollars per point I’d be paying for each player. The site offers a table with various stats and projections for each player. You can put them in order, from smallest to largest, of dollars per point, which will give you a rough guide to how much value you can expect.