The Game Done Changed

In this week's P.O. Box:

It’s wild how quickly the DFS ecosystem has evolved in the past year or so.

Salary Cap contests on DraftKings and FanDuel used to dominate all of the conversations at the DFS watercooler, but things have shifted of late.

The rise of draft games on Underdog coupled with the expansion of sim products in the salary cap sphere have, dare I say, flipped the DFS world on its head.

The difference in the landscape isn’t necessarily where people spend their money—I’ve personally been playing a similar amount in weekly entry fees on DraftKings this year as I did in previous years—but rather how people are spending their time.

I used to spend all week tinkering with my tournament teams—seeing what fits, swapping out stacks, saving lineup “shells” like a detective with a cork board.

But now I spend most of my time throughout the week drafting teams on Underdog. Drafting teams is simply more entertaining and fun than fiddling with a lineup that doesn’t have to be submitted until 1pm ET.

It’s also completely unnecessary. Optimizers and sim products (I use The Solver) have provided a shortcut to building +EV lineups. That doesn’t mean there isn't entertainment value in building lineups—it’s just that it doesn’t take as long anymore to “get a feel for the slate” or build a solid lineup when a powerful sim can do all the legwork for you.

DFS players can easily wait until after inactives are released, optimize some teams around favorite stacks or core plays, and then sim them to see which ones grade out the best.

For me, this is the best of both worlds. I love drafting and I love the salary cap DFS puzzle, but there’s only so much time in a given week and spending the majority of that time on drafting is way more enjoyable…and profitable.