In my hunt to try to get one those Brady NFTs had some money on DraftKings so played a few 1 to 3$ Premier league ones and it’s really fun. I like a lot better than normal fantasy because no big loss if make one bad lineup. I know it’s a -EV proposition with VIG and folks with high end simulation stuff, but trying to make my money last.
Ive found the optimizer type websites, but trying to find out a kinda basic question.
Historically for soccer has OPRK (opponent rank vs position) or FPPG (points per game) been the stronger predictor of outcomes assuming at least a minimum baseline “decent”threshold of FPPG. Seems like that would be a pretty basic easily known correlation factor but some quick googling didn’t show results.
I don’t get the Q and I don’t think you are approaching it correctly. I don’t play DFS soccer, but as any sport it’s all about lineup construction.
I think Awesemo.com has a promo for soccer now. You can also get a free two months RotoGrinders subscription if you deposit any amount to PrizePicks.com or MonekyKnightFight.com via their affiliation link.
If you do MLB/NFL/NBA dfs i can give you decent answers.
oprk are noisy and will give you more false data than anything useful.
just because those are two data point DK showing you don’t mean they have meaning. OPRK vs position is especially pointless because “position” is not a real life term, but a DK term.
and again, lineup construction matters a lot more. you are not building a GPP team for a median outcome. Therefore stacking and ownership are far more important.
Baseball is an easy example. In a full slate there is literally 0% anyone will have the optimal lineup. You can go with 9 one-offs and hope all of them will hit home runs, but that will fail 99.infinite9% of the times.
What you should do is stack a team with 4-5 hitters and hope that team goes off. In most sports points are correlated.
In Football you correlate your QB with at least one receiver. Going with Aaron Rodgers as your QB and no GB receivers makes no sense, but it will show up if you just look at median projections.
Basketball is probably the only big sport where median projections kinda rule supreme because it has so little variance compared to other sports.
The answer to your question is FPPG by a wide margin. Think about it this way: if you were building a statistical model, the outcome variable would most likely be FPPG. That conceptual model might look something like this:
FPPG = intercept + [predictor variables] + error
The OPRK is just one of potentially many predictor variables you might include. In addition to this, the problem with rank is it says nothing of magnitude which is what we really care about for winning fantasy contests. If the difference between ranks you’re comparing is relatively small in actual fantasy points then it’s very deceiving (and this is often the case in for fantasy sports). I never got into EPL but in the other sports that I played for years, an exceedingly large matchup differential might lead to a 20% predicted increase or decrease in predicted FPPG and often far less.
As well in the PL, the gap between the elite guys like bruno, kdb, salah etc vs random midtable dudes is huge. It’s like basketball. There’s a reason to own Giannis in a tough game over towns vs a bad one.
When I was writing solvers for this I used to include something called “fish optimal” which was the optimal lineup based on current FPPG in the Fanduel csv for lulz because it took an extra 0.2 seconds. I also did not want to run a lineup that looked anything like it in a tournament. However, I’ve seen several articles / simulations that show such a lineup is not trivial to beat, and I think this is likely correct as long as there are no obvious small sample shenanigans going on.
I was listening to a baseball dfs show today and the host was talking about their soccer product and he said “Premier League” in a way that made my ears bleed. I wonder if that’s how North Americans pronounce it.
Hockey and NFL are sports I’d take more matchup flyers. Hockey is basically random, matchups matter more in football. For epl/nba, you just see super high ownership of the elite guys for a reason. An average midtable striker might get like 8 goals/3 assists or so. An elite one will get double 2-2.5x that. It’s obviously taken into the price, but a strategy of a lot of mid tier guys usually doesn’t win.
That’s still not the right way to look at DFS GPPs.
Not being condescending, it’s a learning curve (I’m also a winning player in only one sport over a pretty large sample size)
Trying to do your own projections is a really bad idea if you are just playing recreationally, which is basically what you are attempting to do here but in a way overly simplified way.
Even if you felt you had reasonable projections, that is just the beginning of the process. If Chelsea players projects dramatically better than Man City, they will also be dramatically more owned. If Timo Werner is 4x as owned than Torres, is he still a better play? Is he 4x as likely to outscore him? Now that’s only individual play, you have to look at it in terms of total ownership and how your lineup shapes up.
For soccer I would look way more at home vs away then opponent.
A team like Pool playing Norwich at home you can pencil in a 3-0 win with Salah getting at least one. If it was an away match, you might expect only a 1-0 win or tie.
The Chelsea match was a home game vs the team that allowed the most shots last season.
The City game was an away game vs a top half defense/side.
I would have expected more from Chelsea every time, but probably would have gone mount/Alonso if I was picking guys.
I don’t know much about soccer dfs so it makes the conversation a bit difficult, but if you take MLB it’s easily the game where ownership matters the most. Since variance is super high with hitters, the daily process goes a bit something like this:
“Oh the Yankees are playing in a favorable park against a terrible pitcher in good hitting condition and have the highest projected total runs on the slate? Great, I will play far less of them than the general public”. There’s clearly a balancing act here too. I will not play much of the current Cubs going vs DeGrom in Citi Field even if they are getting near 0% ownership.
If Chelsea are playing Crystal Palace and getting tons of ownership but Man City are playing Tottenham and getting 1/4th, they are a far better play than Chelsea. Sure, you will cash more often when Chelsea win 3-0, but you are extremely unlikely to make the top 10, which is where all the money is at.
Touting sites like Awesemo have projected ownership. You can use that as a baseline. You will also get a feel for it after a while. A good thing to remember is to always look at the ownership percentage of slates and not just see how you score.
I also have to emphasis that I assumed you are playing GPPs. If you are playing cash games ownership doesn’t matter in this regard. You actually want to choose the option with more ownership given identically projected options.