After tracking my DFS baseball exploits all year, I left people hanging at the end of the regular season, in part because my last DFS weekend was so uneventful and in part because I had so much going on in NFL and MLB season-long. In the end I wound up netting minus $49.50 since I last posted, bringing my year-end bankroll to $1180.57. Because I bought in for $1,000, that means I made a small profit, or about 50 cents an hour for my work.
I was asked by RotoWire's Scott Jenstad over Twitter what my goal was in doing this blog and whether I felt I achieved it, and the answer to the second part is partially. One goal was to learn how to play MLB DFS, and I think I did that. That doesn't mean I didn't set hurried, lazy lineups at times, and I wasted some entries on rain-outs, lineup scratches and other avoidable errors in my haste. But I feel I get the idea now, and were I to devote the requisite time and effort, I could be profitable, though I might be mistaken about that.
My other goal was to get one big score - by that I mean a few thousand dollars or more - and I failed. My biggest payday was $750 on a Thursday lineup I set in five minutes while doing the Sirius XM show, and the next biggest was $300 or so. I set enough lineups during the year, I felt, to hit on one of those, but it never happened, and to be honest, I was only close a handful of times.
In the end, I liked playing in a compulsive sort of way, but if I were advising someone who was considering getting involved, I'd tell him not to sweat his lineups and simply check the scores at the end of the night. The minute to minute refreshing and hoping is compelling while it's going on, but it's also a kind of hell in which I don't want to spend much more of my time. I probably blew off Heather and Sasha a few times to "do work" when what I actually wound up doing was flipping from game to game. But hey, I pulled out a min-cash for $12.50!
The best part of the game, for me, was setting the lineups - solving the puzzle of the salary cap, the odds and the match-ups. There's a creative aspect to it where you think of plausible but non-obvious combinations of players that most people would pass up, though the algorithms might not. I also feel playing daily and sweating so many games helped my season-long MLB game. It could be a coincidence, but I had my best year ever.
In the end, I'm sure I'll play again next year, and I might even study up on NBA over the next few months. It's becoming part of my job at least to be conversant in it, and I like action as much or more than the next guy. I just have a nagging sense a really big score probably isn't in the cards for me - not only are the odds against it, but I'm honestly not willing to do what it takes to optimize my chances for it over the long term. Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong, but this strikes me as more of an entertaining distraction than something on which I ought to be spending serious time. Maybe I'm just burnt out after a long baseball season - and apparently I suck at DFS football - but I wouldn't trade my job as an analyst and business owner to be a DFS pro, even if I were positive I could make a living at it, which I'm not.