🤓 The Best Ball Nerds Are Fighting

In this week's P.O. Box:

One of the things I love most about the best ball space is that we are very much still in its infancy as a game format. It's truly the wild west right now. Interest is at an all-time high and we're all trying to figure it out as fast as possible to gain an edge.

The fourth iteration of Best Ball Mania was just announced (we got 1.5 Kerranes up top for BBM4) and if you think about each best ball season as essentially one DFS slate, then you quickly realize how little information we have to work with when trying to "solve" it from a game theory optimal standpoint.

Compare that with poker and DFS, both of which have experienced massive leaps toward "solved" status in recent years because the amount of data available in those games is so much more robust.

I had multiple moments during this past DFS season where it became painfully clear to me how tough the games had gotten. Even in a sport like the NFL with a ton of variance, the gigabrain players in the field who leverage simulations, big data sets, and advanced tools are at a massive advantage compared to the less sophisticated handbuilders like me.

This is why it's so fun to work with best ball data right now. No one can definitively say that their strategies (or vibes) are the skeleton key to success, but we continue to chip away at this giant hunk of rock while trying to reveal the optimal ways to draft with the data we do currently have available to us.

I've recently seen lots of pushback and criticism to these best ball data explorations, though, whether in regards to advance rate data or more specifically, to Mike Leone's epic best ball manifesto piece...

"The sample size is too small"

"Correlation does not imply causation"

"There's simply too many variables to find anything actionable"

"Descriptive findings aren't predictive"

None of those criticisms are wrong, per se. But what do you want us to do? Wait 50 more years to start parsing best ball data?? Find God? Mulch full time? Ok, ya, we should do that (find God, not mulch), but still...

I've seen a lot of similar criticisms of Artificial Intelligence lately. Adam Conover, a comedian I like, called A.I. "bullshit" because tools like Chat GPT4 are half-baked and flawed.

Um...no shit?

I guess I'm confused why we are so quick to diminish progress solely because it's not a fully-formed, silver bullet. It would be like telling the Wright Brothers to get bent because their janky, little motor-operated airplane didn't have a drink cart and WiFi.

I'll admit that it's tough to separate what's actually real from the hyperbolic Twitter threads selling the latest and greatest A.I. tool and tech companies co-opting these buzzwords (another one of Conover's criticisms), but I've heard first hand from multiple people how ChatGPT4 has accelerated their coding abilities tenfold in less than a couple months.

A.I., whether you like it or not, is changing the world quickly. People are making entire businesses on the back of ChatGPT and simple tasks are being expedited at an insanely fast rate. And if you allow me to brush off the ol' NFT cliché...we're still so early.

In my newest video on the Deposit Kingdom YouTube (where I like to put my highly produced, non-live stream videos), I review two teams that won top prizes in Best Ball Mania III last year:

Knowing that a lot of the work here is at risk of being dismissed because the data isn't perfect and the sample size is small (I'm literally just reviewing two teams), I made sure to offer this disclaimer at the top of the video:

One quick disclaimer before we dive into the five strategic pillars that these lineups shared: what follows is not financial advice, just kidding, but seriously, let’s be clear that the goal is never to replicate exactly what someone did previously. Over the course of the offseason, we’ll review bigger data sets and find even more compelling macro trends to consider. The goal of this exercise is to identify the things that propelled these specific rosters to first place and give us a better idea of the types of levers we should consider pulling in our 2023 drafts...

The best ball data battles will continue this offseason (the discussion around the BBM4 structure has been lively, to say the least) and we will continue to see people outraged and triggered by "flawed" data analysis that is not providing them with a fully packaged skeleton key to drafting...but that doesn't mean that we should stop trying to put the puzzle together.

We can't let perfection be the enemy of progress. There are still plenty of valuable insights and use cases that can help make us better drafters. And based on the comments I receive, it is clear that the best ball masses are hungry for these morsels, even in their breadcrumb form.

While I'm not smart enough to parse this data myself, I am excited to have a front row seat to these explorations this summer via the Best Ball Data Bowl:

I'll be hosting and judging the competition along with my friends over at Fantasy Data Pros, who provide online coding courses for fantasy sports fans looking to level up their Excel skills by learning Python.

Anyone can enter the contest (there will be cash prizes, multiple winners, and a free UD/Data Bowl shirt for anyone who submits), but the submission must be a Jupyter or R notebook.

I'm excited to see what all you best ball nerds cook up, especially with the new, big shift toward regular season prizes potentially changing the EV calc for optimal BBM4 drafting.

For those who would like to compete but don't know Python, I've partnered with FDP to offer readers and anyone in the Deposit Kingdom a 25% discount off any FDP coding course with, yes, promo code Pete:

I look forward to seeing your submissions...and people telling you that you need a larger sample size before they take it seriously.

Round 1 NFL Draft stream. 4 hours of tipsy tilting and sweating with friends from the Ship Chasing universe.

5 rookies set to dominate in fantasy this year. Broke down the five prospects I think could crush in Year 1 over on Fantasy Life. At the very least you need to watch for this terrifying edit:

Snipes Galore: Best Ball Draft Battle. There was no tournaments available this week, so we battled the chat on Best Ball Breakfast. Check out those sweet new overlays, btw.

Best Ball Tips. Want to draft a superteam? Get ready to move quickly on Saturday night.

A DFS Pro cries "collusion" & then vanished. A classic LOLz episode.

The NBA Playoffs heat up & the Underdog binks are flowing. The Club is loving the playoffs.

Ideal landing spots for all the top rookies. The sharp Ron Stewart joined us on Splash Play this week to discuss.

The Definitive NFL Draft Preview. Normally a draft preview would be completely useless after the Draft starts, but this is the Swolecast which means it was useless in an evergreen sense.

Best Ball Mania 4 is dropping on Saturday night after the NFL Draft wraps up, so we are going to fire up a special evening edition of Best Ball Breakfast with the BBM3 champ, Pat Kerrane. Join us for some drinks and our first BBM4 drafts of the summer at 9pm ET:

I mentioned this on Best Ball Breakfast on Monday, but it's been really cool to see a bunch of you in the Deposit Kingdom tackling new projects and sharing your progress in the self promo channel.

I know a channel named #📣self-promotion feels vaguely icky, in the same way the word "content creator" or "networking" makes me want to shed this mortal coil and evaporate into the ether, but it is really a great place for you guys to drop your stuff so other kings can support.

Big ups specifically to Ori, #5 on the Deposit Kingdom leaderboard, who recently launched a blog to document and share his progress losing weight (unfortunately it sounds like we are also going to get his best ball takes, but can't win 'em all).

Good luck Ori, you got this...

A lot of people sent me this story about Pickleball courts being vandalized in Needham, MA...a town I may or may not live in close proximity to.

I need to reiterate that I have an airtight alibi for Sunday night when I was obviously watching Succession in the comfort of my own home...

Please don't believe the lies out there...

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