Above the Field 🌤️ Week 15

Each week this NFL season, top MME player // Milly Maker winner SonicLibrarian will help you orient your GPP mind in Above The Field. And If you haven’t checked out his Marketplace Course “DFS Tournament Mastermind Training” the first 4 Lessons are Free.

Week 15 :: Who are YOU?

Who are YOU?

I say that a lot, huh? 

In this case I’m not being strictly rhetorical. I really want to know who my fellow OWS members are and what makes each one of you tick. 

Over the last 15 weeks, we’ve definitely established that MME success can be attained in a number of different ways. Figuring out our goals, our level of dominion over our emotions, our past experiences, strengths and weaknesses, help us define how to attack these tournaments in our own unique way. 

Has your game evolved this year? Has playing tournament DFS taught you anything about yourself? 

Play along with me. I’ll ask a bunch of questions in this article and I’d love it if you’d paste the question in the comment section at the bottom and then answer it with some anecdotes about yourself. Answer all of them…please! Let’s use this article to vent, opine and reveal some real stuff. I’ll poke the rest of the OWS contributors and make sure they read about you guys as well. 

Before I go any further, I’d like to pay homage to one of the best screen names I’ve come across. I managed to get two teams through to the next round on Underdog Best Ball and one of them is competing against this guy:

How awesome is that name? If I don’t take this tournament down, I hope he does. 

I signed up in a hurry a few years ago. I’m from New Hampshire and was in a band called Pain Society for a while so I just made my screen name nhpain. I wish I could go back and think of one cool name to use for everything. Instead I ended up with nhpain on the sites, @ElmerHelmet on twitter and SonicLibrarian (my business) in Discord. Shit gets confusing, man!

Have you come across any cool or funny names? What do you wish you used as yours but just didn’t think of at the time?

What do you wanna be when you grow up?

When I signed up for DraftKings, my goal was simple. Win a million dollars. I saw the ads on TV and eventually opened an account. P.T. Barnam once said “there’s a sucker born every minute.” I certainly had a huge hook in my mouth. I understood the odds and the ridiculous rake. I knew it was –EV, a losing proposition. Didn’t care. I was all-in. I messed around with playing cash a little but it just didn’t resonate with me. Same with poker. I didn’t like sitting at a table and playing for cash. I wanted the full strategic experience and the rush of the risk of ruin and playing for some life-altering money up top. 

I played the cheaper tournaments but always put at least a few lineups in the Milly. Much like the players I was choosing in my lineups, I was less concerned with floor, obsessed with ceiling. 

I’ve talked to other players who play DFS professionally or semi-professionally and are constantly looking for that edge that will lead them to a profit of 10% or better on a given year. They relentlessly hunt for games with potential overlay, less rake or softer fields. It can be a lot of work but has definitely proven valuable for those guys over time. 

Others play purely for a sweat. Some of those are fans that just want to add a bit of extra interest to Sunday’s games. Others are pure degenerate gamblers, just looking for any type of action they can find. 

Other folks are just super good with numbers and have found DFS to be a great way to “get their nerd on”.  

What are your goals in DFS? Why did you open an account? 

TILT!

I’m completely comfortable admitting that DFS (and poker) have led me to some dark places. There have even been times when the aftermath of a bad beat has affected my family. It’s unflattering and tough to admit but it’s the truth. We covered my bad beat at the WSOP Main Event in the Week 2 article. I wasn’t myself for a while after that but I eventually learned from it. One thing that I’ve successfully trained myself to do is to find the lesson in every situation. Sometimes it takes a while but there’s always something there that you can access later and benefit from. 

Full disclosure: I punched and destroyed a lamp when the Boston Celtics lost Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals. 

I look back at it now and it seems so silly. It happened though. I did that. 

Alright. Let’s hear it. 

Are you an emotional kind of cat? What was your worst beat?  Did you do anything you aren’t particularly proud of? What have you learned from these instances of bad beats and tilt?

I’m really looking forward to reading your comments below. 

Get Inside Of Sonic’s DFS Mind

An excellent, highly-recommended read!

Sonic’s DFS Q&A. This is awesome stuff if you’re looking to keep improving your DFS game!