The first step is scraping data from various public resources online and plugging the numbers into his custom-built predictive models, which generate hundreds of lineups based on his forecasts. There are publicly available tools that do some of this work for daily fantasy players, but Sud created bespoke software to make sure no one else can access his data. “When people come and they see how simple and low commitment that first weekend of NFL is,” says DraftKings Chief Executive Jason Robins, “they are very apt to try the baseball game.” He's now the top-ranked daily fantasy sports player, according to Rotogrinders, a stats site for daily fantasy players. He says he's made more than $2 million so far this year.ĭoes the influx of new players in September make for easier money? Sud laughs at the question. “A lot easier,” he says. Sud's theory is that the NFL season even makes the action on daily fantasy baseball more lucrative for the sharks, since impatient players are often tempted to rewager money won on Sundays during the next week even if they don't follow MLB closely.ĭraftKings' promotional strategy echoes Sud's belief in a crossover effect, with a $2.5 million baseball tournament scheduled for the first Tuesday of NFL season. Sud studied math and economics at Amherst College and took a job in data science at a digital marketing firm before shifting to full-time fantasy. He claims to risk an average of $140,000 per day with a return of about 8 percent.
He enters hundreds of daily contests in baseball and football under the name "maxdalury," and he almost always trounces the field. Saahil Sud is a fake-sports apex predator. These ads never spell out a simple truth about daily fantasy competitions: While any player might get lucky on the back of a handful of entries, over time nearly all of the prize money flows to a tiny elite equipped with elaborate statistical modeling and automated tools that can manage hundreds of entries at once and identify the weakest opponents. Both companies raised huge new rounds of investment, bringing DraftKings’s total haul to $426 million and FanDuel’s to $363 million, and both are now valued at more than $1 billion. To get to the size their investors are expecting requires a continuous stream of new players lured by ever-increasing prize pools with the help of muscular advertising campaigns. The rival startups prospered in football's offseason.
Sports books in Las Vegas, by contrast, are expected to handle about $30 million. (Fantasy sports are exempted from the federal ban on sports gambling.) FanDuel and DraftKings, the two main services, will bring in a combined $60 million in entry fees in the first week of the NFL season, according to Adam Krejcik, a partner at Eilers Research. Each year in the history of daily fantasy sports has been bigger than the last, and September has become the biggest month for new fans trying the game, which combines the stats-jockeying of traditional fantasy contests with the thrills of old-fashioned sports betting.
But after 16 weeks of real football, most rookie fantasy players will have been separated from their money, just as certainly as the Cleveland Browns will be disabused of their playoff ambitions.ĭaily fantasy is getting ready to generate more losers in 2015 than ever before. Every first-time player of daily fantasy football begins the new season undefeated, just like even the most hopeless NFL teams.
0 kommentar(er)
