Multi-Fantasy Sports Challenge Begins Today

My challenge with Buffalo66 kicks off today with our first daily fantasy baseball match. I spent about a week getting used to the fantasy baseball on the site we will be playing at. My record so far is pretty poor. There are a few reasons for this. The first few days I was climbing a pretty steep learning curve and getting burned as a result. After that, I have simply been on the wrong end of variance (unlucky). Daily fantasy sports is a bit of a beast. Because you are playing another human it is a combination of how good your score is and how bad your opponent's score is. While I have won by huge margins in most of my wins, I have lost most of my matches by small margins. I just can't seem to line my score up against a slightly worse score, but that will start happening overtime. I developed a daily projection model that to me seems pretty solid, and should be able to beat daily fantasy baseball, and hopefully buffalo66 as well. One big issue I have is the cap values of the individual players at the site we will be playing at. Unlike www.fantasysportslive.com the players cap values are not proportional to their average fantasy points scored per game. They try to make some sort of adjustment for a players recent performance, and pitchers are grossly undervalued compared to hitters. Also, the range of values for hitters is way too flat and does not represent the fantasy scoring discrepancy between the best and worst fantasy players. All of this tends to reduce the level of skill you can apply to the game, which makes for more similar teams among good players and more of a crapshoot as a result.

Problems with Projection Based Caps

You simply should not try to adjust player salary cap values based on non-obvious factors. Lets say that you developed daily fantasy score projections for fantasy baseball and used them for your player cap values. Now lets say that you worked on them until they were so sophisticated that they became as accurate as any other projection system used. The fact that you are using the most accurate player projections for the player values, means that the game has become 100% luck based. Any and all fantasy teams selected that used the full amount of cap available would be of equal likely to win under as system like that. Results would be determined entirely by luck. It's almost like if there was some perfect way to play poker, and online sites automatically pointed out the perfect play to every user every time. The skill edge would be completely removed. Pricing your players based on accurate projections removes the skill edge, which is something you do not want unless you are at a skill disadvantage.