Q&A: I am a High-Stakes Professional Fantasy Football Player

Hi Monkeys,

Patrick gave me his blessing to do this, so figured now is a good time. I've followed this site for years, and I am also a high-stakes Fantasy Football player ($1,000+ Buy-in leagues) and Fantasy Football consultant (doing some pro bono work for friends and coworkers as well), although my day job is still working at a bulge bracket IB. I've played for the last 5 years professionally and have spent years writing up scouting reports, building Excel models, etc. I wanted to do a Q&A to let users ask any questions they might have, or use the forum for us to bounce ideas off of each other: Can Lamar Jackson repeat as QB1? (Probably not.) Can George Kittle wrestle the overall TE ranking from Kelce? (I think so). Who might surpise at running back this year? (Not who you think). Which Rams WR do you want? (Also not likely who you think) Any questions or concerns I'm happy to answer!
 

34 Comments
 

I'm no fantasy football expert, just a dedicated NFL Fan, but to compare an injury prone guy who threw 16-12 (TDs-Interceptions) in his second year to a guy who went 36-6 in his second year is a little whack. Not all running quarterbacks are the same haha.

There is more than one way to get there. I'd rather have 30 chapters than 3000 pages.
 

Sports betting is *way* harder - you're playing against the house.

Fantasy you're up against the average WallStreetBets forum member; all of the stats majors who used to dominate online poker moved over to fantasy for this very reason.

 

1) What's your edge compared to competitors / peers?

2) When you say writing scouting reports, these are for fellow fantasy players right? Let me know if you ever post these. 

3) Why haven't you gone full time into fantasy?

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Most Helpful

As a professional fantasy athlete, what are your thoughts on luck vs skill in winning fantasy leagues. For example, in a 10 person, standard scoring, snake draft league with 9 other average players, so let's say those who skim a few articles draft via an online cheatsheet, and roughly pay attention to the games/waivers each week, do you find that you can consistently outplay them? Out of 10 times, how many times do you think you could win this type of league? 

My feeling has always been that in fantasy football, there's a pretty healthy dose of luck involved. At the end of the day, unless you're in the locker room or talking to the coaches, there are so many tossups on a weekly basis overanalyzing actually doesn't do as much as you'd think. Completely open to being proven wrong on this though.

 
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How would you even find high stakes fantasy football games?

Every game I’m in is with friends and it’s a great way to stay in touch.  And their medium stakes by these standing $500 buy-ins.  I don’t see a lot of guys wanting to let acquaintances running analytics into their games. 

 

Surprised 1k is considered high-stakes, I'm wagering 1k or so per Sunday on games and never considered that high-stakes just more of a reason to watch shitty games like Browns vs Bengals.

My question to you (and anyone who wants to chime in) is how important do you think watching football games is versus just following data/spreedsheets? Over the last few years I've noticed a lot more focus on using more sophisticated data and models to draft and trade (ESPN has an IBM trade analyzer WTF?). Obviously data has always been a very important part of bookmaking but people are shifting over to fantasy football now. As a person who really likes watching football and enjoys the "X's and O's", I feel like theres a lot that is missed by just looking at numbers.

 

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