This course will serve as an update to The Anatomy of a Winner – Milly Maker Edition, which was released prior to the 2022 season. To that end, we’ll focus on the data from the previous three NFL seasons (2022-2024), using the same backward induction and causality approach, with the aim of updating our process for the industry’s largest tournament. As a quick refresher (or for those who have not read the previous course), backward induction can be summarized as the process of starting with an end result and working backward to establish an optimal approach moving forward. Causality deals with the relationship between cause and effect. Put the two together, and we’re left with the process of developing a game plan based on previous results, paying particular attention to why a certain decision-making process worked and why others didn’t.
This course will be focused on the Milly Maker on DraftKings, meaning a tournament with immense variance. As such, the findings in this course will not be applicable to small field contests, single-entry and three-max contests, or other contests with flatter pay tables. That is exceptionally important to understand before we continue, as these findings involve more variance than we would otherwise be willing to accept in other contests. We’ll start by looking at the data before analyzing and interpreting it, discuss leverage and ownership through an exploration of field tendencies, explain range of outcomes as they pertain to roster construction, and wrap it up with a section on game plan development with an aim at generating repeatable habit patterns for success.
