Biases 10.24

Prich has won over $300k the past 3 years and has found an edge in understanding the field biases and more importantly his own biases when building rosters.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” I lived in a college dorm for four years while my wife and I, and eventually our daughter, served as Resident Heads. Beyond the main role of trying to establish community between individuals living in a shared space, we were also responsible for responding to emergencies or activities that upset the communal rules. The rules were not as strict as those I was expected to follow during my Freshman Year at Boston College, but to allow for sleep and studying we had to cut down on noise complaints that were usually associated with parties being held during quiet hours or parties that got too large. During our training, the question was asked, “How do I identify if it’s a party or just students hanging out?” That is when the phrase was uttered, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a party.” If we didn’t all know intuitively what a party was, we would figure it out pretty quickly.

It is now week 10 of the NFL season and we need to start trusting the obvious indicators that are telling us which teams, players and matchups are good for DFS in 2024 and which ones are not. For some teams and spots (i.e. Dallas) if it looks like a really bad team, it’s okay to finally label that as a bad team. On his weekly “Winner’s Circle” podcast, JM quoted a former DFS genius, Saahil Sud, who said something to the effect of, “It’s DFS so we don’t know exactly what will happen, but we kinda do.” Look at how I started my DFS interpretation of DAL last week with the following paragraph:

It did look and quack like a bad team, and I wanted to first recognize that before trying to add any analysis. Week 10 is the time when we need to start trusting the data and stop trying to capture the remote chances that a team may “snap out of it” or “finally put it all together.” It doesn’t mean that outlier circumstances won’t happen but the people we need to beat at the top of the leaderboards are not taking wild swings trying to hit home runs. They are focusing on the data and what they know, and trying to build the best lineups to take advantage of that data. It’s time to let go of the hopeful biases and dig deeper into what we do know. 

“Are you really winning?”