DFS Bankroll Management - A Healthy Look Over the years we’ve received a great many questions about bankroll and bankroll management in DFS. I suspect the nuts and bolts of numbers I’m going to offer are already out there in the DFS internet ether. This subject’s been tackled a bunch and in detail. Here’s the short, somewhat industry standard, look at bankroll management. It’s quick, easy and leaves some wiggle room depending on how risk tolerant you are. 5-8% of total bankroll in play on a given night. Of that 5-8% you should diversify your game type in such a way: 30-50% Double ups (Larger pools, cheaper buy-ins) 30-50% H2Hs (selected somewhat carefully to avoid sharks) 10-15% Multipliers (3x, 4x, etc), 3-mans, 100 per person tournaments etc 5-10% Large Gpps That’s the easy look at it and what I basically follow on a given night. Personally, I put in less than 5% my dedicated bankroll because that’s just how I operate. Those are the numbers, they leave room for upside and if using a solid projection system, will yield steady, long term growth. But the truth to bankroll management is a little more complicated than the numbers I spit out above. And forgive me if I get didactic for a moment. There is no tried and true system for managing your bankroll because it’s so case-specific. It’s your bank, it’s your roll. What you choose to do with it is largely dependent on how you view your time and energy playing DFS, how you view money, how comfortable you are in life in general. Are you only interested in winning a big tournament? Then you are going to commit your resources to GPPs. Are you a slow and steady guy like me? Then you might follow more of the strategy outlined above. I suspect you, dear reader fall somewhere in between. The biggest piece to bankroll management is managing your emotions. This is literally the number one rule and it goes above any macro look at percentage breakdowns. If you have an enormous emotional buy-in for a given slate or even a given player, it’s somewhat likely that you’ve over-committed your bankroll to a very hyper-specific outcome. In layman’s terms: you put too much in for your own health. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. DFS has its own form of tilt. While harder to tilt off all of your money as it is in say, poker when a bad run could mean you kept chasing and chasing until down to zero, DFS helps manage this in some way because you simply can’t play all of the time. But, one can chase by playing less-than-advantageous slates, hedging...

Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy for FanDuel and DraftKings - Platoon Splits Can you believe it? Baseball season is almost here and with it comes months of waiting for that Coors lineup to post, sweating out weather reports, watching some nameless rookie ruin your dreams when you stack against him, and everything else that makes the summer great. At DFSR we're going to lead into baseball season with some strategy articles to get your mind spinning on all the nuances that comes with daily fantasy baseball lineups. If you want a lot of these ideas condensed into one place, make sure to download a copy of our free baseball eBook. There's a nice shiny link below. And while you wait for MLB, you can get a jump start on our membership package. Right now we've got projections for NBA and NHL running everyday and FanDuel and DraftKings NBA Optimal Lineups in our DFSR Pro package. Click here to start a free 3 day trial. Now let's start looking at the baseball season. The deal with platoon splits If you have any experience whatsoever with daily fantasy baseball, you'll know that paying attention to righty/lefty match-ups is one of the principle backbones of setting an MLB DFS lineup. Almost all players in baseball are better when hitting against pitchers of the opposite handedness (though there are a few notable exceptions, like Adam Jones), and some players have an absolutely enormous split. But wading through this information isn't as easy as just taking right handed hitters against left handed pitchers and calling it a day. Let's get to it. First of all, not all platoon splits are created equally, and this should dramatically change how we look at each player. Let's look at a couple of examples. The relatively normal case of David Ortiz Ortiz had a 1.008 OPS against right handed pitchers last year, and a .703 OPS against lefties. This means that he had a better line against right handed pitching than Mike Trout has had for his career, but was about as good as David Eckstein's career line against lefties. Naturally, this meant Ortiz was unplayable against left handed pitching at basically any price, and very attractive against right handed pitching. But it also meant a little bit more. Wide platoon splits are a blessing and a curse So, yes, in general David Ortiz was a great play when he was up against right handed pitching. But there was more to this than first meets the eye. First of all, there was Ortiz's price. Ortiz's absolutely pathetic approach to lefties last year actually made him a better value against right handed pitching, because the various daily fantasy baseball sites...

Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy for FanDuel and DraftKings - Pitcher Wins Can you believe it? Baseball season is almost here and with it comes months of waiting for that Coors lineup to post, sweating out weather reports, stacking against David Holmberg and everything else that makes the summer great. At DFSR we're going to lead into baseball season with some strategy articles to get your mind spinning on all the nuances that comes with daily fantasy baseball lineups. If you want a lot of these ideas condensed into one place, make sure to download a copy of our free baseball eBook. There's a nice shiny link below. And while you wait for MLB, you can get a jump start on our membership package. Right now we've got projections for NBA and NHL running everyday and FanDuel and DraftKings NBA Optimal Lineups in our DFSR Pro package. Click here to get started. Now let's start looking at the baseball season. Calculating a Pitchers Expected Win The ever-elusive win. Many sites have it weighted in such a way that the simple W can swing your team in and out of the money quickly (I suppose the HR has the same effect). So we need a functional and realistic way to determine pitcher win expectancy. The Vegas money line gives us some indication of how much the nerds in Sin City think a certain team will win the game. And Vegas being smart and all, I think we can trust money lines almost as much as any other predictive measurement. A -200 line for a dude like Clayton Kershaw against say the Giants tells us roughly that the Dodgers are a 66% favorite to win the game. But unfortunately can’t just give the whole win to the blonde beauty Clayton. A team’s win, while likely to go to a starting pitcher, isn’t his to own. The Hardball Times did some research back in 2009 into how often a starting pitcher accounts for a team’s win. With this in mind we went and looked at the trends over the last two years. In that last two seasons we’ve seen (via FanGraphs) that in a given game, a starting pitcher will get the win about 75% of the time. A single starting pitcher, if all things are equal, can expect to get a win about 37.5% of the time. That means in an evenly matched scenario on FanDuel, a pitcher walks into a game with only 4.5 expected win points.  Just getting started with MLB DFS? Click the banner below to get rolling   But seeing as how not all starting pitchers are created equally (I’m looking at you Nick Martinez) and games are...