DFS, by nature, is a difficult and frustrating endeavor. If you are playing in tournaments (GPPs), most of them will have a payout structure where somewhere between 15-25% of players get paid. From that standpoint, the most likely outcome in a given week or for a given lineup is that it will lose. Most people who play DFS are naturally competitive, so if your preferred area of play is in tournaments, like mine is, then you are going to have to learn to deal with losing at times, and sometimes for long stretches.
I have had a wealth of success playing DFS over the last 10 years, and for the most part, I had consistently winning seasons during that time. In 2019 through 2021 specifically, I had profit totals of $70k+, $200k+, and $35k+. In 2021, despite it being my “least profitable” of the three seasons, I had five top-8 finishes in large field (2,000+ entries) GPP (Guaranteed Prize Pool) tournaments over the 20 effective “normal” slate weeks (Week 1 through 18 of the regular season plus the Wild Card and Divisional Rounds of the NFL Playoffs). I had a couple of close calls where I narrowly missed taking first place and instead took 5th or 8th or something where it was a great week but not a “game changer”.
For instance, in Week 14 I would have won $100k if Robbie Gould made a 40-yard field goal to beat the Bengals at the end of regulation. He missed, five people passed me during overtime, and $100k turned into $7,500. I had joined One Week Season as a contributor in 2021 and considering my recent string of success and all the close calls that most recent year, I felt on top of the world and like I would/should continue that level of success.
Then, 2022 happened. I only had one top-10 finish and that was a 9th-place finish that didn’t really move the needle for my bottom line over the course of a losing season. This was my first significant losing season of my career and it came in my second year at OWS, when my role and the amount of content I was producing had grown. It was a bit deflating and I also didn’t really understand how/why it had happened. I had won consistently for years while maintaining a full-time “day job” and now my “job” itself was NFL DFS – how did my performance get worse?
This course is an outline of the reflection and important things that helped me bounce back from that down year financially and psychologically. In 2023 I profited over $50,000 over the course of the NFL season, thanks to a renewed focus on the things that matter and finding ways to battle mental clutter and give myself clarity with my strategies and processes.
While a lot of my issues simply had to do with adjusting to my new role (writing the NFL Edge puts your mind in the “what is likeliest to happen” box, which I found made it harder for me to shift into lineup-building mode and think how I always had from a DFS perspective when the time came), there are a lot of things that I found through self-evaluation and big-picture reflection which are highly applicable and valuable to basically any DFS player.
As I said before, losing is naturally a part of this game. If you can’t handle losing the right way, you’re unlikely to find a way to win. This course will help you approach things the right way and keep a level head through the inevitable losing streaks. “Tough times don’t build character, they reveal it.”
