The Art of Daily Fantasy Sports – Bankroll Management

The Art of DFS – Bankroll Management

Hey everyone, welcome to a brand new series I will be starting here at FantasyCPR! Articles will be released once a week, on Wednesdays, until I run out of topics to cover. The goal of this series will be to break down some of the less talked about aspects of DFS, to try to maximize everybody’s profits. If you know me from my Love, Like, Leave series, I hope you enjoy this set as much as that one. The positive feedback I’ve gotten on those articles has been awesome to see, and it really motivates me to produce more content. If you’re new, welcome to you all the same. I hope to see you join the family.

The Art of DFS will choose one topic each week, and attempt to break it down in a way that allows you to get the most out of your lineups. The first topic will be bankroll management, which I’ve noticed is one of the two major problems that limit the amount of money one person can make playing DFS. I fall into this trap as often as many, but taking shots at GPP’s and not hedging your bets is an easy way to lose all your money very quickly.

I will be discussing the concept of bankroll, how to break it up, where to spend your money, and also providing some examples as to why this works. Let’s jump right in!

The Art of DFS – Bankroll Management

Bankroll, as I’m sure many of you know, is the amount of money you have in your DFS account that you don’t plan on withdrawing. That is to say, it is your baseline amount, not including any recent profits you plan to withdraw. I personally like to break up my bankroll into two different sections:

Weekly Bankroll: This is normally my entire bankroll, as I think playing DFS as a weekly game is much more feasible than counting profits day-to-day. There is far too much variance to put all your eggs into one basket, so dividing your bankroll up into a weekly amount can help minimize the losses you take on a singular bad day.

Daily Bankroll: Normally, I like to allot nearly the same amount of money to each day of the week. If I have a starting bankroll of $100 on Monday, that means I would like to play about $14 each day. However, not all lineups are created equally. What I mean by this that some lineups you create are ones that you are completely in love with, while others are still good, but not your favorites. If I am completely enamored with one of the my lineups, I may play an extra few dollars (normally in single entry GPP’s). The opposite holds true as well; on days where I don’t have the utmost confidence in my lineup, I may only play $11 instead of $14, if we continue to use the $100 budget. The most important thing is to never go over your weekly spending limit, and personally, I like to maximize a single days spending at around 18-20%, no matter how much I love the lineup.

Now that we’ve broken up how to spend your money, let’s start talking about where.

The Art of DFS – Bankroll Management

There are 1001 ways to divide your daily bankroll, and there isn’t one method anybody agrees on. What most people do agree on though, is that unless you have cash to burn, it is smart to play the majority of your money in cash games.

Cash games, meaning 50/50’s and double ups, are easily to win money in, but limit the amount you can win in a single sitting. If you are a Fanduel player, you have an even 50/50 chance to win, with your chances in a double up sitting around 44%.

GPP’s, meaning the big tournaments with front loaded prize structures, only offer odds of about 20% to win, and even then, you normally have to score in the second lowest cashing bracket to even double your money.

Let’s take a look today’s 100K MLB Rally on Fanduel. It is an entry fee of $9.99, and the top 2,650 people cash, out of a total pool of 11,916. That gives you a 22 percent chance of winning any money, but if you look at the prize structure, places 1001-2650 only win $18, and 501-1000 only win $20. That means you need to score in the top 4.2% to even more than double your money. Compare this to a double-up, where cashing means doubling your money for sure, and you have less than 10% of the same chance.

Sure, GPP’s are fun, and the prospect of winning $20,000 (today’s top prize) can be very alluring. I get the desire, and have fallen into the trap myself before, but GPP’s are the number one way you will go bust very fast. Playing only GPP’s is like shoving all in pre-flop in poker with unsuited 28. Sure, you might win, but your chances are ridiculously low, and you are likely to have doomed your money.

All hope is not lost though, keep reading for how to stop these losses!

The Art of DFS – Bankroll Management

Now that we’ve established the difference between GPP and cash game, and why one is so much safer than the other, what should you do with that information? Once again, there is no precise science to this, but I will be outlining the method I like to use to try to, for lack of a better term, “game” the system.

Using our weekly budget of $100, I will break down a regular day, a soft day, and a heavy day.

Regular: On a regular day, I will play as closely to 1/7th my weekly bankroll as possible, always rounding down to the nearest percentage. That means a regular day with a weekly bankroll of $100 is $14 in play. Here is how I would break it down:

$9 in 50/50/double-up: Some people have this number as high as 80%, while others, who usually have higher cash flows, may like to keep it closer to 40-50%.  Personally, I think 60-70% is good to strive for. If you play strictly in 50/50’s, where the payout is 1.8x, you will win 16.20 on a day where that is all you cash. Good to recoup any losses.

$2-3 in GPP: Depending on what the daily GPP’s are, I like to play between 15 and 20% of my daily cash there. This allows me to capitalize on any fantastic lineups, while also avoiding the massive collapses a full GPP allotment would give you. In MLB, I find the cashing line to be about 15-25 points higher on average on GPP than cash games, so there is far less margin for error.

$1-2 in Quintuple-Ups: Quintuple ups normally carry about a 19% chance of cashing, which is similar to a GPP. The difference is that you are also guaranteed to make 5x your investment if you cash. Compare this to GPP, where you need to be in the top 2% or less to make 5x your investment, and you’ll see why Quints have the allure they do. A small amount of money in Quints is a fantastic way to maximize your ROI.

$1-2 in 5-man contests: This only applies if you play on Fanduel, but my single favorite contest type is the 5 man contests. Obviously, only 1 in 5 people make any money, with 4.5x being the ROI. The difference here is that in such a small group of people, you increase the chances of the winning line being lower. On the flip side, there is also the possibility the winning line is higher, but I find that it usually isn’t close to what it would take to win this much money in a GPP. This gives you some variance, and can sometimes buoy your profit, or minimize your losses on a bad day. I think it’s a good way to hedge your bets.

There is much less that goes into my soft or heavy days. On a SOFT day, I will only play 10-12% of BR, and play only $1 of GPP, $1 of Quint, and $1 of 5-man. With $10 spent, that is $7 50/50.
On a HEAVY day, I will play closer to 20% of my BR. I’ll play on the lower end of cash games, which is 60%, and slightly increase my GPP and Quint usage. This means: $12 in 50/50, $4 in GPP, $3 in Quint, and $1 in 5-mans.

I can’t make any promises that this will work, but what it should do is ensure your good days are a little better, and ensure your bad days aren’t as bad.

The Art of DFS – Bankroll Management

I wouldn’t be writing any of this if I didn’t believe in it, and to prove this, I will be putting my money where my mouth is. I recently started playing FanDuel again, and since I am a college student, and don’t have a ton of disposable income (because, what college student does?), I am my own perfect test case.

I will be starting with a bankroll of $56, which is built from an initial deposit of $30 about 10 days ago, and should be higher, but I failed to take my own advice.

Using my own logic, this means I will play about $8 on an average day, with $5 being the lowest, and $11 being the highest. I will be checking in on these articles weekly with my results, as well as the contest breakdown.

You can also check out my twitter, @ZookDFS to see what lineups I will be playing, and how I do on a day-to-day basis. I’m not guaranteeing anything, but I am hoping that I can show how ideal a system like this can be.