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.
It is always refreshing to hear a sharp player (I consider myself that) admit that they haven’t had a profitable NFL season so far. I usually play a SE, a 3-max, and 150 MME lineups on the main slate. I play “Afternoon Only” 3-max or SE lineups. I play all the Showdowns and usually enter one lineup or 75 MME lineups. I put in plenty of +EV lineups and haven’t had a top finish yet. If you don’t get top finishes in DFS, you are going to lose money over time. This is why playing for first is such an important mentality in DFS. To get there, we must ultimately recognize that bias controls our decision making and sometimes we don’t realize it until it’s too late.
“Sounds like a great offensive battle” were my words in the DFS Interpretations for the MIN-GB game last week, as I was too busy looking for confirmation bias for another stack I had touted, the popular ARI stack. If I tilted in favor of one game early in the week, it was WAS-ARI. Throughout the week, I heard so much about it being a good spot that my confidence in it increased. Our brains love a good hit of confirmation bias. That is likely happening to a great many people in any given week and it does two things: it naturally raises ownership on a play that shouldn’t be so heavily owned AND it distracts you from keeping an open mind to other spots. It sounds like I need to be on the offensive, battling primarily against bias this week.
This is my fifth week of writing this article and I am realizing more and more the importance of it, but it requires some explanation. The purpose of this section is to call out things that are in the news this week as far as the NFL goes, especially in the DFS world. News items create bias because they focus our brains on a particular topic and draw our attention. Often the news item is full of open-ended questions about an injury situation, trade target, hot or cold team, etc. We will either be prone to confirmation bias, hearing the things our brain wants us to hear about a particular situation, or we will simply be distracted by any clarifying information about these situations that keeps us from thinking for ourselves and distracts us from other spots. A great example is the situation with Jordan Love from last week. Many people wrote off that game as if Love would not play, but sharp DFS players got back onto the game late in the week. It was the bias that never let us imagine how the game would play out if Love was healthy. What biases do we need to recognize this week as we work our way around the industry?
