tricks of the trade?
I think I have some. In any case I somehow was able to net a 1st place finish in my fantasy baseball league, and a 1st place and 3rd place finish in my two fantasy football leagues, despite not having participated in any kind of fantasy sports beforehand. Let me examine the situation:
In the fantasy baseball league I was a little worried that I would have no idea what I was doing. I mean, it was the first time I had paricipated in any kind of fantasy league, so I had no clue how things worked. Worse yet, I'm not much of a baseball fan (they lost me as a fan ever since the strike in the mid 90's), so I don't really know much about what players are good or bad. I did not prepare well for the draft, and I ended up with a fairly mediocre team. The good news - the baseball season is long, so I had a long time to get my act together. And eventually I did.
One of the nice things about the baseball league (and in case you were wondering, it was head-to-head points 5x5 catagories) was that the success in the season was determined more by strategy and activity than by having a great draft. What I ended up doing, to great effect, was use a large pitching staff rotation, and utilize cheap saves. By having a large pitching staff, and subsequently a limited or non-existent position player bench, I was able to rotate in starting pitchers constantly, something you can't do with bench postition players because the play every day. Pitchers don't play every day, so you can choose to start them only when it's their day to pitch. Then there are cheap saves, something I had to use because I only drafted one closer (oops). I went ahead and traded Smoltz for Delgado (somewhat of a bust), and then mined the free agent wires to obtain cheap saves. See, about 1/2 the teams in the major league change closers during the season. If you are paying close attention, you can nab the replacement closer before anyone else does. Since these scrubs are often available off the free agent wire, why bother drafting a closer high anyway? Saves are also one of the most unpredictable stats anyways year-to-year, so you can get great value frome a 'scrub' closer and poor value from a 'stud' closer.
The other main resource was the fact that there are so many decent players available on the waiver wires, ready to break out. You can literally build a good team straight off the waiver wires - if you can find and process the right information. My team was built off of solid players (A-rod and Abreu) and some waiver wire scrubs (Mesa, Lew Ford, Rollins, Pavano (picked up early in the season), Cliff Lee, etc.)
That was it. By using a large pitching rotation and cheap saves (and staying active), I had an advantage in Wins, K's, and saves every week. Despite average hitting, I easily coasted into third place and made the playoffs. I will admit, winning the playoffs was largely luck, but making the top 6 was by design.
Then came football season. I thought the fact that I am a rabid fan of the NFL might either hamper with my enjoyment of the game, or hurt me in the fantasy football world when I played the fantasy football leagues, but thankfully that was not the case. It seemed like the most important things for fantasy football success was having a good top end draft (top 4 to 6 picks, and I prepared much better for the draft this time around) and evaluating matchups. Since I already had a good sense of which teams were good and which teams were bad, I had a slight advantage at picking my matchups. Of course, I don't want to give away all my secrets since I care more about my fantasy football leagues, so I'll leave it at that.
In the end, thanks to some bad luck, I just missed a sweep of my leagues. But don't get me wrong - I can do much better next year. There is plenty of improvement left in me, particularly in the draft and the regular season. Also, the leagues were marred by some people being inactive. It felt like I was only playing against 6 or 8 people instead of 12. Hopefully I can recruit some more people I know - so I can get on them about staying active. In any case, I can't really complain about the results this year.
2 Comments:
Fantasy football comes down to statistics and luck. You don't need to watch games, know the player, or even know the rules. As long as you know your league's rules, the scoring system, and your set. You just research trends and follow them. All mathematics. The luck comes in when your number one draft decides he can't throw a ball anymore, then you trade him and he suddenly goes on a streak.
I don't follow football, and I only lost the championship by 3 points. 3 measly points. Goes to show that following the game isn't required, just being good with numbers.
All you said is true. I think following a particular game can help you make better decisions with less work involved. I can honestly say that I spent a much lower percentage of time on my football leagues because I didn't need to do nearly as much research, compared to my baseball league.
By the way, you probably should have won the league. I know hindsight is 20/20, but I definitely would have advised that you bench Ward against the Ravens because their DBs are very good, and the Steelers are very run-oriented. If you had played Bruce, you would have won. If you played Smith, you still would have lost. Nothing is guarenteed, but the probabilities favored Bruce in this case: Bruce - pass-oriented offense who scores lots of TDs in a must win game against the Eagles who had nothing to play for. Smith - Can't score in the redzone offense against up and down/average defense. Ward - doesn't run many deep routes in a run-oriented offense against the awesome Ravens secondary in a critical game for them. But you never know; the hard to predict TDs seems to have an unbalancing effect on calculating probabilities.
That being said, I agree with you. Fantasy sports is more about mathematics (probabilities) and information gathering (research) than anything else. Okay, luck (or clairvoyance?) helps too.
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