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.
Does your personal life ever get in the way of your DFS play? Most people who enjoy this hobby struggle with family, life, and work challenges that interrupt or divert their full attention. As a high school teacher and father of two, my DFS play often is forced to take a back seat – hello, middle-of-the-night research parties! I am generally full of awareness and my mind is constantly reflecting so my life, work, and family give me plenty of opportunities to learn from it. In fact, my latest thoughts about bias come from my work experience leading 160 freshmen boys through a week of service.
It can be pretty annoying as a teacher to hear that stealing little zipper grips hooked onto another person’s backpack is trending, and it seems to be a perfectly good excuse for taking someone else’s property. During a Freshman service experience that I ran at my high school, I had to intervene a few times last week to return stolen grippers and discipline the kids doing it. Different behaviors are always trending at this age level, and as quickly as they consume 14-year-old boys, they also become inconsequential. We have begun to notice the trends developing in the NFL after three weeks. People refer to them as trends, but for DFS we want to know if the trend will become a new reality or if it will become like the zipper grips, and if so, why? It’s Week 4 of the season and it should be a good time to figure out how to act on these trends and examine them for the bias they could create in our decision making process.
Last week I speculated that the uptick in the use of cheap TEs was a result of recency bias against the elite TEs. In Week 1, only Isaiah Likely put up a separator score, as there were no other scores over 15. In Week 2, only two TEs scored over 20 points and they were both cheap. In Week 3, people spent UP on TEs and Goedert was the only one that made people any money. I do think there is a trend to pay down at TE, and giving into the trend in Week 4 is a clear result of recency bias.
Looking deeper at the top ten TEs in fantasy points this year, six are considered high end and will regularly cost you 4.5k and above. The separator score that is produced at TE is extremely valuable and will often come from this higher priced group. It still seems like a good idea to search for a ceiling score amongst the higher prices, but in Week 4 we have a few injuries to monitor with George Kittle, Evan Engram, Trey McBride, and David Njoku. On the healthy side, we have Kelce, Goedert, Bowers, and Kyle Pitts – these may be the only ones above 4.5k in which case paying down might be the appropriate decision as only four guys would be competing for a separator score and the likelihood that one hit goes down. We may need to wait for a week with more high priced TEs to take advantage of this trend to pay down at TE.
expires end of 12/2!
