Larejo is a mid-stakes tournament mastermind who specializes in outmaneuvering 150-max players with a small number of entries
For anyone out there who has been a loyal reader, you know I like data. I think you’d be a fool not to like data at this point in 2024. Data gives us signals, tells us stories, and informs our decision-making. Where I draw the line, however, is that I do not blindly follow data. To me, there’s a data threshold, where it reaches its limitations. And if we take data points or patterns, and we stretch them too far, we are only stretching the probabilities of what we think the data is telling us. Data has levels, and those levels don’t go on in infinite ways. Data should inform our decisions, but it shouldn’t dictate or cripple our decisions. Data is an input, just as our brains are an input, our instincts are an input, and things we experience in our environment are an input into our decision-making.
So I like data. I just wouldn’t say I love data. There are people out there who can go way deeper than I can on specifics, and bring data into second, third, and fourth level thinking. But when you start telling me that this defense runs this personnel package this percent of the time, and this receiver has this success rate against that same personnel package when he lines up in this position in the formation, and on this specific down and distance, you simply lose me. You did have me at personnel groups and specific matchups, but with each passing point, the sample size usually grows smaller and smaller. So for my brain at least, the more data levels, the more I tune out.
This gets me into problems when it comes to making predictions about sports. But that’s ok because I am comfortable with describing myself as a generalist. I don’t enjoy going deeply vertical into a topic but I do enjoy trying to understand a broad scope of things at a relatively deep level. I like seeing how things relate to one another and why they interact the way they do. But at the end of the day, when it comes to “seeing how the world works,” I try to keep things as simple as possible in my head so I can put together a sensible approach.
One of the coolest generalists ever was a famous Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi. He was a member of the Manhattan Project and rose to fame for his contributions to the United States in World War II. He’s also well-known for a style of thinking referred to as Fermi Thinking or Fermi Estimates which are essentially solving complex problems with classic “back-of-the-napkin estimates.” This is a long way of saying this is one of the smartest dudes ever who wasn’t great at getting the answers precisely correct. Rather, he knew if he could arrive at the right rationale to formulate a solution, the answer would present itself, or he’d be close enough.
So as Week 5 steps into vision, don’t worry about getting it precisely right. Just worry about building a lineup better than your competition. It’s not about being optimal, it’s about thinking through things in the right fashion and arriving at an optimally put together lineup. Good luck!
