DFS was either my main or significant piece of my income for several years. I basically wrote a custom software suite that takes tons of projection sources and other parameters that I feed it, does some math, and spits out hundreds or thousands of optimal lineups per minute in the file type and formatting requested by the major DFS sites. I also worked with a small team of people who were better than me and we’d talk strategy in a Google sheet in real time before lock. The profit margins were quite large in the early days, but starting around 2018 or so the games became significantly more difficult and the edges shrank considerably. That’s because most of the good tools and information became public and available to everyone for about $30/month, and I stopped taking it seriously when pandemic paused pro sports.
I wrote that make you feel better about making the right decision by not playing. That said, I still consider MLB to be the GOAT DFS sport and lots of fun if you’re treating it like a lottery / NCAA bracket and not a business income you depend on where Rougned Odor scratching 30 seconds before lock costs you $43,000. The fun thing about baseball is that almost anyone is a viable play on any given day, and the correct strategy for tournaments is to stack players on teams and pray. It’s tough to win tournaments by making obvious plays which adds to the fun imo since you can funnel in your sleeper picks and it’s not a bad strategy, whereas in cash games it’s almost a guaranteed losing strategy.
BTW you have the wrong impression if you think a lot of the high volume players are spending tons of hours studying. It’s mostly about buying access to tools that do most of the heavy lifting and then optimizing the workflow. Managing hundreds to thousands of lineups across multiple sites is really the skill required there. You need to know what’s important to pay attention to and filter out the noise. My advice for DFS baseball is pick two teams you want to stack, at least one of them not totally obvious, and let it rip. Most of my big wins came from stacking teams that not too many people were on because they overreact and load up the teams on 5.5 run totals and dodge the 4.5 ones.
If not tons of hours, then they’re spending tons of something ($$$) that I’m not willing to do. I do still like it though. And you’ve nailed my team building format pretty well. I go with a 4-3-1 or 4-2-2 type stack most of the time. Two years ago I binked a 50c MLB gpp with 17,500 players for $750. Got a third place in a $5 MLB gpp for $400 and another $400 for winning a $3 NHL gpp. Those are my biggest wins. I really miss the step satellites on DK. Those were fun. Today I like the Rays, Blue Jays, and Braves for my main stacks. I’m doing three lineups which is about my max. It was my “C” team that won the $750. One of the bigger advances to me in terms of tools was simply listing the lineup positions of the players in the contests. DK has also started those tier contests, I guess for casual players, but I don’t like those as much as the classic format.
Other thing I forgot to mention is that you should be playing the single entry tournaments since non obvious stacks have an even bigger edge in those and pros get 1 lineup to your 1 instead of 150. People tend to stuff their cash lineups or obvious plays into those which makes finding unique plays that are still solid EV easier.
