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Welcome to the 2016 version of The Daily Grind, a look at Daily Fantasy Football from several vantage points.  Together we will look at many different topics this season – from managing expectations and bankroll to what Footballguys has in store for 2016 and how to best use what this site has to offer to maximize both your enjoyment and your bankroll by Super Bowl LI.  So let’s jump right in with some thoughts on both expectations for playing this year and also a first take at a guided tour for Footballguys’ DFS coverage this season:

This week, we'll touch on the following topics:

• Managing Expectations
• A Guided Tour to Footballguys' DFS 2016 Coverage 

Managing Expectations

Everyone is always excited for Week 1 and Opening Night in the NFL.  Everyone team has dreams of winning the Super Bowl, and lots of DFS players share in dreams of a big winning season as well.  But how big can one really expect?  What is a reasonable goal for your bankroll over the course of an NFL season?  Let’s take a look at some of the normal rules of thumb for playing DFS when it comes to managing risk and exposure to your bankroll and see what a typical above-average DFS player should expect.

First, we have to discuss the rules of thumb.  While many DFS articles discuss how to win and play sadly only a few sites even discuss bankroll management.  Make no mistake – managing your bankroll is one of the biggest, if not THE most important, things that a DFS player can learn.  It is one thing to be able to make winning lineups that win more than they lose – it is quite another to make sure you have the ability to enter contests and win all season long with those lineups.  The good news is that Footballguys has covered this topic several times, from our book on Cracking FanDuel to helpful articles from Steve Buzzard and John Mamula, all the way to two blogs this year from David Dodds and Devin Knotts, plus another series from Steve Buzzard (Building Bankroll) – just to name a few.  The point is, every DFS player needs to learn how to manage their money to stay in the game.  You can’t win if you don’t play.

Now, to those “rules” – and I use quotes around rules because they are more of guidelines than hard and fast rules – but they need to be mentioned.  So here are the general thoughts for managing bankroll each NFL week:

1. Do not use more than 20% of your bankroll in a given week
2. Split your play between cash games and tournaments (GPPs) to 80% cash, 20% GPP

I understand that some of you may not agree with either of these rules, and that is OK.  Part of knowing the rules (or guidelines, as I will now call them) is to know when you are deviating from these two statements.  If you love your lineup one week and want to play it more, or if you want to play more tournaments one week instead of cash – that is perfectly acceptable, but you have to understand the risk and reward of deviating from the standard plan.   That’s why we are about to discuss what a season of NFL play using these two guidelines would likely result in for your end bankroll.

I will keep the math to a minimum, but I wanted to give all players an idea of what to expect if you stick with this type of play all year long.  To simplify the discussion, I took the NFL season down to 15 weeks instead of 17, which makes sense as you are likely going to skip Week 17 with all the inherent variability in the league with teams resting players, and there may be another week you cannot play due to personal schedule.  So baseline #1 is 15 NFL weeks are in play here.   The next assumption is that we are going to win more than we lose – and that’s a fair assumption, given that Footballguys has all these tools and articles to guide you along the process. 

The chart below shows how a bankroll starting with $1,000 grows over 15 weeks at various winning week rates.  The win rate is for cash games only, so winning at a 60% clip (nine winning weeks, six losing) is our starting point. 

Table 1:  Bankroll Expecations and ROI (Starting with $1,000)

To understand the table, here is what I did.  I used 20% of bankroll each week ($200 in this example) and split it 80% cash ($160) and 20% GPP ($40).  A typical winning week results in winning your cash games (returning 1.8x your investment) but losing the tournament plays.  Losing weeks are pretty self-explanatory.  So even a 9-6 record (60%) has you with a winning season - but just a 3.4% ROI.  To improve on that, you need to play tournaments, as just one week where you hit it reasonably big and earn 10x on your $20 played in tournaments can really turn around your season.  As shown by the last line, a barrely winning record of 8-7 can have a positive return if you just hit big once all season.

Now these numbers are just examples, and clearly results can vary.  For example, your cash game wins could be 2x instead of 1.8x if you are playing double-ups instead of 50/50s.  Double-ups are slightly harder to win, but that extra 0.2x return can really add up.  Also, tournament wins can vary greatly, just as you might expect.  A 10x return may seem like a lot, but there are prizes even larger than that available in most tournaments.  Once again, the numbers in the chart are to give you an idea of what expectations to have if you play by the rules of thumb.  Knowing this baseline gives a DFS player several insights:

1. It is imperative that a cash game player learn to play GPPs for long term success and achieving significant growth to bankroll while minimizing risk and exposure.
2. The opposite of Point #1 is also true.  A tournament player should learn to play cash games well to increase chances of bankroll growth while minimizing risk.
3. Deviation from the rules of thumb (10% of bankroll each week, 80/20 split between cash and GPP play) is permissible (of course), but it is always best to know what the baseline of play is before you wander from it.   You can play 90%/10% cash/GPP in a given week or play more tournaments one week, depending on how you feel about the given slate.  You can also increase (or decrease) your bankroll percentage each week – but just understand the impact to your bankroll if you fall short that particular weekend.

There is no one path to DFS success and growing your bankroll.  I know many players that win consistently at cash games and never touch tournaments, while others exclusively stick to GPPs.  Both paths can be successful, but it never hurts to have a good understanding of the rules of thumb and what the implications and baseline outcome to your bankroll would be if you stick to that basic plan.

Best of luck this season.

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A Guided Tour to Footballguys’ DFS 2016 Coverage

I thought about postponing this until Week 2 given that several features are not launching until then, but with all the excitement for football being back, I decided that I would hedge my bets and publish this guided tour of our coverage in Week 1, then come back and add to it in Week 2.  (So if you think you might be seeing this section again next week with some updates, you would be right.) 

Starting with our DFS Landing Page in Week 1, we have plenty of great articles to get you on the path of a winning DFS week.  (Please note, I will add links to the articles for Week 2 if the Week 1 version is not yet live as I write this Friday morning, so be sure to keep checking our DFS Landing Page).   Let’s start with some of the articles I mentioned earlier about bankroll management.  There are not one but two blogs this year on bankrolls, first by Devin Knotts (“Growing the FanDuel Bankroll”) and the always entertaining David Dodds’ thoughts (“The Bestest FanDuel Blog Evah”).  Adding to that is a great new column by Steve Buzzard, who is telling us his thoughts every week this year on how to build the best cash game lineups in “Bankroll Building”. 

So what about the games?  Where do we start each week?  Well, in addition to the Thursday Spotlight game breakdown by Andrew Katz, we have every game from the week broken down by the Las Vegas lines in John Lee’s Vegas Value Charts.  Don’t forget to check the latest on injuries too from our Dr. Jene Bramel on Saturdays.

But wait – there’s more.  There are several additional articles to help find the best value plays for your cash games, starting with David Dodds’ “Cost/Value Chart” for FanDuel and Justin Howe’s “Cost Efficiency” for DraftKings.  The Footballguys’ staff is also sharing their collective thoughts in many ways (and formats) this season, highlighted by not just one but two video shows.  The “Footballguys’ Daily Fantasy Hour” is a collaboration with Rotogrinders, and it features both Austin Lee and John Lee along with host Dan Back to discuss what to expect in the coming games along with lessons learned from the prior week.  Footballguys also has their own version of a DFS show entitled “Power Grid”, which had a soft opening in Week 1 but expect even more in the coming weeks.  Here host Cecil Lammey directs the traffic between (at least) four of the Footballguys’ staff and a guest or two can be expected each week for additional thoughts. 

Bridging the gap from video shows back to the main site is Phil Alexander, who had some fantastic videos on how to get the best out of the Footballguys’ tools in the preseason (see the videos on “Targets” and “Game Log Dominator”).  Phil continues the great tool breakdowns in his series “Exploiting FBG Tools for DFS Success” this season, and it is definitely worth the time to help in your own player research.

The staff adds more thoughts throughout the week with a large question and answer session directed by Alex Miglio in the “Wisdom of the Staff” in both a FanDuel version and one for DraftKings to help with cash game and GPP lineup building.  Ryan Hester adds to the mix by hosting the DFS Roundtable each week as well where several staff members share their thoughts on hot DFS topics.

General DFS discussion continues with “Narrative Street” by Will Grant, where he points out the various motivational factors beyond the gridiron for the coming set of games.  Aaron Rudnicki, one of our best IDP staff members, adds his own unique viewpoint with “Exposed” where he highlights both good and bad receiver / defender matchups.  Justin Howe takes a look at goal line players in “Redzone / Short-Yardage”, while Ryan Hester brings it home with “Trendspotting” for a look at the top recent trends around the league.

So now you have a good foundation of the upcoming week and games.  What about some articles that focus on each DFS site?  We have two answers for that question.  First, we have five features that highlight the best plays for those sites as a marquee piece for each of those contest hosts, so if you want to dig into FanDuel, start with “Cracking FanDuel” by David Dodds.  John Lee does an extensive piece for DraftKings called “Tips and Picks”, which is a must read each week.  We have added three more similar articles for 2016 for FantasyDraft (“FantasyDraft Dominator” by Dan Hindery), Yahoo! (“Exclamation Point!”) and FantasyAces (“Acing Aces”).  Those features are must reads for anyone playing on those sites each and every week.

I promised a second answer to that question, and it is from Maurile Tremblay’s Interactive Value Charts, or “IVCs” as we have come to know and love these tools.  The IVCs allow you to click on players and build lineups right on the site, where you can sort players by price, value, H-value, stacks and many other ways.  You can even use one of three sets of projections to fill out the blanks in your lineup, or the average of all three sets.  The IVCs are all linked from one page to the other on the right side of the page – here is the FanDuel IVC as an example.  All of the five sites that are featured are represented, and as more sites come online for NFL play more and more IVCs will be added.

Last but certainly not least, we have tournaments to consider.  That’s right, chasing the big money.  As I mentioned about bankrolls, play, but don’t go crazy.  The articles that will help you here start with “The Chalk” by Chris Feery and “Projecting Ownership” by Chad Parsons.  FanDuel has recently changed their publication of ownership for Thursday night contests, so projecting which players will be high or low owned is much trickier, so you need to read up on this and find those diamonds in the rough.  

Tournament talk continues with three stack articles for 2016 – one for FanDuel (“Starting Stacks” - FanDuel) by Scott Bischoff and one for DraftKings (“Starting Stacks” – DraftKings) by John Mamula.  James Brimacombe throws in a third opinion with “The Other Stack” for a look at some different approaches to stacking players each week.  More GPP pivot plays are offered by both Chris Feery and Justin Bonnema in a version of “The Contrarian” for both major sites (“The Contrarian” - FanDuel, “The Contrarian” - DraftKings).  Justin goes further with “The Fade” for players on FanDuel, highlighting highly owned players for both cash games and tournaments and what decisions to make based on those ownership levels.

One last article on tournaments wraps up the week with “Bink, Inc.” by BJ Vanderwoude.  For those not familiar with the term “bink”, it means to take down a GPP – so if you are looking to win a tournament this week, especially on DraftKings, give this one a good read.

Phew!  I think I hit on everything – or at least the articles we have for Week 1.  Believe it or not, we have even more coming in Week 2, so expect an update here next week.  If there’s any questions or comments about an article or if you just want a little more understanding behind each one, reach out to myself or (better yet) the author and we will get back to you.  If it isn’t clear how each article is trying to help you win each week, we need to know so that both Footballguys and your bankroll improves next time.

Starting Next week we will have even more, and I’ll highlight those here as I mentioned earlier.

Now start reading and building some lineups, and enjoy NFL Week 1!

Questions, suggestions and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

Follow @JeffPasquino