So I got my results from my head to head weekly fantasy football games last week–I went 25 and 0, so my $25 has turned into $46. That’s a helluva nice ROI for my first week out, but I know that could easily be variance. I’m not confident that I’ll do that well ever week.
I read an interesting post about the $2.5 Million NFL Sunday Guarantee Tournament at Fanduel.com yesterday. The entry fee for that contest was $25, but the top prize was $300,000. I have not played in a tournament like that yet, but I have done some studying on how to win weekly fantasy football tournaments, as opposed to head to head and 50/50 games.
Look for Overlay Opportunities
The easiest way to maximize your ROI (return on investment) on weekly fantasy football tournaments is to look for overlay opportunities. An overlay is when the prize pool for the game is more than the combined entry fees for the game. That extra money in the prize pool increases your EV (expected value).
A site like Fanduel.com takes the entry fees for a tournament and uses that to make up the prize pool. Of course, they take out a 10% commission, too. So in a head to head match with a $1 buy-in, the prize is $1.80–the $2 in entry fees minus the 10% commission. That’s how the site makes money.
In a large tournament with a guaranteed prize pool, the prize money is provided by the website in the event that not enough players enter to make up the prize pool. In the $2.5 million guarantee, you’d need 100,000 players to make up the $2.5 million prize pool. If fewer than 100,000 players participate, then the value of your entry goes up.
Think about it this way. Suppose you’re involved in a tournament that costs $1 to enter, but the guaranteed prize pool is $20. If only 10 people sign up to play, then your chances of seeing a positive ROI increases correspondingly. This is true even if only the winner gets the $20 prize pool.
Expected value is based on your chances of winnings, but it’s also based on the amount you expect to win. If, for example, you’re in this hypothetical 10 person, $1 buy-in, $20 prize pool tournament, and if you’re an average player, then you would have a 10% chance of winning $20. You’d have a 90% chance of losing $1. You multiply the amount you win by the odds of winning, then multiply the amount you lose by the odds of losing. Add the two together, and you’ll have either a positive number or a negative number.
In this hypothetical tournament, you have $2 + -$.90. Your expected value on that bet is there $1.10. Since it’s a positive number, you’re going to win more money than you lose in the long run. If you keep putting yourself in positive expectation situations like this, over and over again, then you’ll be a profitable gambler.
That’s why the first and easiest strategy for winning large weekly fantasy football tournaments is to find overlay situations.
Entering Multiple Lineups
Another strategy for winning weekly fantasy football tournaments is to enter multiple times with different lineups. This is a way to hedge your bets. In any given week, anything can happen, so that optimal lineup you used in all 25 head to head matches might be worthless in the fantasy football tournament.
By entering multiple smart lineups, you increase your chances of placing in the money. Of course, you spend more to enter, and one of your lineups will probably under-perform. Some tournaments might not allow multiple entries; I’ll have to study on that some more to figure that out.
Big Tournaments Are All about the Ceiling
In the head to head and 50/50 contests, your goal is to raise your floor. That means that you want to have a team with an above average lowest probably score. You don’t want to play someone who has a 5% chance of scoring 40 points in a week. You want to play someone who has a 75% chance of scoring 20 points in a week.
But when you’re playing in a big tournament, where only the top 25% of the players get paid off, you want to do the opposite–you want to raise your ceiling. You’re looking for players who have the potential to do really well. You’re also looking for player combinations which have the potential to do really well, too.
One strategy that Jonathan Bales recommends in his book, Fantasy Football (and Baseball) for Smart People: How to Turn Your Hobby into a Forune, is to start running backs from opposing teams in a game with a probable high score if you’re playing in a head to head game or a 50/50 tournament. His suggestion in a large tournament is to stack a potentially high-scoring quarterback with his wide receiver. If the wide receiver has a big week, then the quarterback will, too.
The reason for this difference is the difference in the payout structure. In a head to head match, you don’t need a score of 200 points or more to beat most opponents. You just need a score that’s above average. Extra points are wasted, and your goal is to minimize volatility. But in a tournament where only the top 25% get paid, you need to maximize your volatility. You need a big week to win. As Bales writes in his book, you want “boom or bust” players.
One tool you can use to project ceilings for players is this one. That’s for quarterbacks, but they also have projections apps for the other positions in a dropdown menu at the top of the page, under the “Apps” menu in the top menu bar.
When using projections like this, you’re interested in the median and low projections when playing head to head and 50/50 contests, but you’re interested in the high projections in the larger tournaments.
Budgeting Your Salary Cap
Bales analyzed actual winning results to see what kind of budget winning players used. One of the differences between head to head and 50/50 winning players and big tournament winners was the amount of money that the tournament players spent on wide receivers. Running backs tend to be more consistent, but wide receivers tend to be the types of players who might have a really big week. They spend correspondingly less money on quarterbacks and running backs. Winning tournament players also tend to spend more money on defenses.
Conclusion
Over time, weekly fantasy football players can make big profits from large tournaments, but the strategy for winning is different from the strategy for head to head and 50/50 matches. To win big tournaments, you should embrace volatility, enter multiple lineups with different players, look for “boom or bust” players, and spend more of your salary cap on wide receivers. Most importantly, you should look for overlay situations whenever possible.
Do you play in large player pool weekly fantasy football tournaments? If so, is this your approach to winning, too, or do you have a different strategy?