Challenge Accepted!

Fellow poker blogger Buffalo66, and longtime customer of FantasySportsLive issued a challenge a while back to the Daily Fantasy Sports community. He challenged any takers to a series of Heads-Up matches across all of the different fantasy sports disciplines (Football, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, and NASCAR). This is kind of similar to HORSE in poker. While some people are good at some of the poker games, the best all around poker player would be the one who is best at HORSE or a combination of all of them. So his challenge was to see if he was the best all around daily fantasy sports player around. He has had no takers up until now. I was reminded of his challenge when reading his interview over at RotoGrinders which just launched earlier this week. Rotogrinders is to Daily Fantasy Sports what PocketFives is to online poker. They were created by the same people, and we are hoping the extra buzz around daily fantasy sports will finally push it into the mainstream. For example you can check out Kaiseroll13 winnings at RotoGrinders and see that he has won close to 100k on Fantasy Sports Live alone since March. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the challenge. I figured that I have me some salary cap based daily fantasy sports skillz. I mean I practically invented (correction - invented) salary cap based daily fantasy sports for money. So since he had no takers, and I feel it is a worthy challenge, I decided to take him up on his offer.

Challenge Details

Total Heads-Up Matches: 48
Matches Per Sport: 12
Buy-in Per Match: $25
Total Buy-in amount: $1200
Fantasy Sports: Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, and Football

NASCAR was dropped because there are not many good offerings outside of FSL and this challenge will not be held at FSL so I can keep my winnings.

Whoever has the best W/L record over the challenge is deemed the current best all around daily fantasy sports player in the world.

Handicapping the Challenge

This one is probably going to go down to the wire, but I obviously would not have taken the challenge unless I thought I had a good chance. On the surface, many will be wondering what I am smoking. Buffalo66 is #2 on the FSL all-time leaderboard with over 3500 cashes in Fantasy Sports Leagues at FSL. He most likely is sitting second overall in cashes in the history of fantasy sports, as thousands of cashes really was not possible before daily fantasy sports started. He is going to have a pretty healthy edge on me in fantasy hockey, and I should have a decent edge in fantasy basketball. The dropping of Fantasy NASCAR works to my advantage, because he would have held an edge on me there as well. So that leaves fantasy football and fantasy baseball. If you go back and read this post you can see that I attempted to take over all of the fantasy football action at a competing site, and crushed all takers including the #1 player all-time at FSL for a 71-10 heads up record over weeks 11-12 last year. I did not continue to win at that pace, and gave up my quest shortly after getting frustrated with the looseness of the cap structure and the tendency of teams to be nearly identical for the best players on the site. The fact that I was arriving at the nearly the same but slightly better optimal team as the best players reinforced that my system is solid for Fantasy Football. I believe that I will have a decent edge in the fantasy football part of the challenge as a result. That leaves fantasy baseball. Buffalo66 has an edge there as of today. I am not familiar with the structure details on the competing site, and have never played it before. I have some solid ideas on what to do having written daily fantasy baseball strategy guides for FSL, but I am lacking in experience, and that will be a disadvantage. I really think it will come down to if I can hold my own through the baseball portion, and then really run my numbers up at basketball and football enough to make up for hockey where there is no way I can hold my own. Now if you ask Buffalo66, he probably thinks he has me in baseball, hockey and possible football, but is probably a bit concerned about basketball. It's his challenge, and he went for the max stakes, so he has to feel confident going in. Should be fun, and I will pop some updates here along the way.