Does anybody play daily fantasy hoops at FanDuel?

[KowboyKarl]

Thinking of starting to do this. Seems like pretty easy money in 50/50 leagues...

Think there's some sort of referral bonus for both of us if I sign up.

So anybody do this? Any feedback?

 

[KowboyKarl]

:rofl:

Fuck that.

 

[JumpOnBoard]

I mess around on draftstreet some but it's not as easy money as you'd think..

 

[KowboyKarl]

I mess around on draftstreet some but it's not as easy money as you'd think..

Really? How do you do? I still don't know much about it...just seen some other guys post a few lineups n stuff at a couple other sites. Seems like it would be pretty easy to come in the top 20 out of 40, etc in the 50/50 games. I'm no superstar, but, I consider myself pretty good at fantasy sports overall. I dunno, what's your success rate, Jump?

 

[bjorks]

How do these companies like FanDuel make money? I don't know much about it cuz you can't play in AZ, so are they keeping part of each price pool?

 

[KowboyKarl]

How do these companies like FanDuel make money? I don't know much about it cuz you can't play in AZ, so are they keeping part of each price pool?

SPORTSMONEY 6/08/2014 @ 12:08PM

FanDuel Provides Financial Information And Projects $40 Million In Revenue In 2014

One-day fantasy sports operator FanDuel has made its overall financial information public, with figures dating back to the first quarter of 2011. Its Investors page provides the amount of money FanDuel has received from users paying entry fees to participate in daily fantasy games and includes the money it has delivered to users in the form of prize pools to generate a total revenue for the company (before taking into consider other costs including maintenance of the website, employee salaries, etc.). The result reveals a company that appears to be quite healthy, with constantly expanding revenues.

In the first quarter of 2014, FanDuel received $5,376,644 in revenue based on $62,712,251 of entry fees subtracted by $57,335,607 in prize pool offerings. The company has revenue of $4,450,736 in April and May alone, and expects a final total of roughly $6.5 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2014. Its end-of-year projection is approximately $40 million in revenue.

FanDuel’s best quarter to date is Q4 2013, when the company brought in $7,411,137 in revenue. The logical reason for a spike in Q4 is that it is the heart of the National Football League season. According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, 70% of fantasy sports players pick football as their favorite fantasy sport. Football predominates fantasy and FanDuel is a benefactor of same. Thus, it is feasible that Q4 2014 will demonstrate even larger revenues for FanDuel, with continued growth of one-day fantasy sports and FanDuel as an operator.

FanDuel made it clear to FORBES that if the company has a tournament where the total entry fees are less than the prize pool, it accounts for the difference as negative revenues, and net it against its revenue figure. Thus, what one sees on the Investors page is what FanDuel truly takes in from its games alone (again, not including other costs the company may incur each quarter).

Separately, FanDuel has received a total of $18 million dollars from investors in return for allotments of equity. The largest raise of funds was delivered in January 2013 and led by Comcast Ventures, which provided $11 million in Series C financing along with Piton Capital, Pentech Ventures, Bullpen Capital and serial investor Richard Koch.

Investors are likely impressed by expanding revenue figures as well as the rapid growth of FanDuel’s user base. There were only 3,198 paid actives in Q1 2011. In Q4 2013, that number was up to more than 192,000.

 

[gsro]

[h=1]A fantasy sports wizard's winning formula[/h]<cite class="byline vcard" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(119, 119, 119); font-size: 12px; display: block; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; vertical-align: middle;">By Brad Reagan | The Wall Street Journal – <abbr title="2014-06-10T14:47:45Z" style="border: 0px;">8 hours ago</abbr></cite>

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  Getty Images/Getty Images for DraftStreet - LAS VEGAS, NV - DECEMBER 15: Competitors in the $1,000,000 Draftstreet Fantasy Football Championship 2013 react while watching games at Legasse's Stadium at The Palazzo Las Vegas on December 15, 2013 in …more

EARLY ON A Friday evening in South Bend, Ind., Cory Albertson is among the small subset of students on the University of Notre Dame campus not prepping for a party, a date or both. At 29 years old, he is past his partying phase—he even gave up beer as part of a gluten-free diet he recently adopted. A graduate student in the business school, he is fixated on other, more lucrative extracurricular activities. From a small table near the window in his fourth-floor apartment, the Catholic school's iconic Golden Dome visible in the distance, Albertson sits feeding numbers into tens of thousands of rows and columns that populate a spreadsheet on his laptop. A Bob Marley remix plays softly in the background.
With his close-cropped red hair, broad shoulders and easy grin, Albertson seems plucked from the Fighting Irish recruiting catalog. He is enjoying his return to campus life but increasingly finds it difficult to make time for his classes. He considers it hard to believe, though more plausible by the day, that the side business he started last year with $200 could actually make him rich. Even more incredible: His business is playing fantasy sports.
Using tactics more familiar to a hedge-fund manager than to your average sports enthusiast, Albertson is earning thousands of dollars almost every day. One NFL Sunday, he took home more than $100,000. "It is like securities trading," Albertson explains, "and athletes are the commodities."

Cory Albertson (Kevin Miyazaki for WSJ.Money)On this night, Albertson is making projections for how each player will perform in the evening's professional basketball games—12 games, involving a total of almost 300 players. It is painstaking, almost menial work. As fuel for his calculations, Albertson imports statistics from the Web into a complex algorithm he built over a period of months, and then tweaks the numbers to reflect injury updates, matchups and other factors. He adjusts for consistency—giving different weight to a player who scores 11 points almost every game than to one who is prone to going off for 20 points one night and recording a measly two points the next. He factors in potential fatigue if, for example, a player had multiple games in recent days, and accounts for trends in playing time.
[Graphic: The Fantastic World of Sports Fantasy]
Albertson also needs to ensure his information is up to the minute. As he calibrates, he clicks back and forth between the spreadsheet and his Twitter feed, where he pays special attention to the dispatches of the newspaper beat reporters for the teams playing that night. "If someone slips and falls in the locker room before the game, it's going to be the beat reporter who knows it first," Albertson says.
It is 5:30 p.m., about an hour and a half before the first game tips off. As Albertson speaks, Gordon Hayward, a Utah Jazz shooting guard, is downgraded to doubtful for that night's game because of a bad hip. Albertson adds the new information to the spreadsheet and updates the entry for Alec Burks, Hayward's backup. If Hayward sits out, Burks is likely to get more playing time. Eventually, Albertson punches the button to let the algorithm do its work. The pinwheel turns and the laptop whirs as the machine cycles through millions of calculations. Albertson waits.
More than 33 million Americans play fantasy sports, which has mushroomed into a $3.3 billion industry and become the purest expression of our sports-obsessed culture. (A primer for those whose interests run more toward "Real Housewives" and "Glee": In fantasy sports, as the name suggests, fans get to live out their dreams of owning and managing their own teams. They pick real professional athletes to form a roster, and then compete against other "owners" based on the statistical performance of the chosen players. In this world, Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning is a god.)
For most players—"addicts" may be a better word—fantasy sports is a hobby, albeit one that consumes their weekends and keeps them checking their smartphones in the middle of the night to get the final stats from the late games. It is the bane of many a spouse's existence.
Albertson is in a completely different league. In between attending business-school classes and cramming for exams, Albertson plays a new high-volume variety of fantasy sports that allows him to compete in hundreds of leagues each day. He may be the most consistently profitable fantasy sports enthusiast in the country. And the reason is that to him, fantasy sports isn't really about sports. It's about data. He doesn't trust his eyes to tell him who the best players are; he only trusts the numbers, which tell him who is overvalued and who is undervalued. Albertson's strategy is almost literally a formula, and it bears little resemblance to casual fandom. "It's all about having logical inputs that lead to logical outputs," he says.
The result of all this evening's research and effort is that Albertson's algorithm determined the optimal lineup for a fantasy basketball team. More precisely, on Albertson's command, it produced hundreds of lineups that collectively represent a diverse portfolio that will, he hopes, generate thousands of dollars in profits by the end of the night's games, in about six hours.
He doesn't make money every night, and in fact ends up in the red on a regular basis. But he wins more than he loses, the benchmark all good traders strive to meet. Last year, Albertson took home more than $200,000. This year, he projects his business will make almost a million dollars.
THE MONEY IS burning a hole in Albertson's pocket. On a snowy Chicago afternoon, he folds his 6-foot-5 frame into the driver's seat of a white Tesla Model S for a test drive. The salesman launches into his spiel for the $110,000 electric sedan as Albertson zips through the sludge of a side street and toward the wide open lanes of Interstate 90. "This is awesome, man. It's like driving a spaceship," Albertson mutters.
There is little about him, including the rented Hyundai he parked outside the dealership a few minutes earlier, to suggest he can afford to drop six figures on a car. You can hardly blame the salesman for asking: "What kind of business are you in?" Albertson guns it off the freeway entrance ramp, pushing the speedometer past 85 and the electric car toward the Windy City skyline in the distance. "I'm self-employed," he says. "I have a fantasy sports business." The salesman, not surprisingly, says most of his buddies are into fantasy sports. But he appears troubled by one thing. "Isn't that sorta like gambling?" he asks.
[More from WSJ: The Problem With American Soccer Fans]
Albertson hates that question—"I take it as an insult," he tells me later—but he hears it all the time, from classmates, prospective girlfriends and his parents. Albertson grew up in Warsaw, Ind., as part of a conservative, blue-collar family in which his father worked for an orthopedic-device manufacturer and his mother stayed home. He attended Ball State University, where he studied criminal justice, for a time anyway. When he started college, in 2004, the online-poker boom was in full roar and he spent as much time on the virtual felt as he did studying. But like a small number of online-poker aficionados, he was drawn more to the game's analytical components than to the gambling rush it provided. He became fascinated by data and its applications, keeping detailed records on his opponents and studying the mathematically correct choice in thousands of possible situations that can arise in a poker game.
Albertson doesn't like to gamble and says he hopes to never set foot in another casino. He is a health nut who practices yoga and is traveling to Haiti this summer to help train small-business owners. It pains him that anyone, much less his parents, might see him as some sort of degenerate. "They are pretty religious. To say we come from different worlds now would be an understatement. I think they worry a lot," he says.
Last year, Albertson saw a chance to return to mainstream culture. He applied and was admitted to Notre Dame's business school, where as part of the orientation he was required to take a career aptitude test. The software was astute: It said he should become a securities trader. As it happens, Albertson had recently been approached by an old poker buddy, a Chicago native named Taylor Caby, who was starting a fantasy sports website. Caby needed players to populate the games on his site and offered Albertson a rebate on some of his entry fees if he would try his hand at a few contests.
Albertson concluded that fantasy sports was like poker—a contest dominated in the long run by skill, not luck. He teamed up with a friend from the poker circuit, Ray Coburn of Jackson, N.J., to build the algorithm. Each man put in about $200, they recall. But they made a key observation early: With its use of vast reams of historical data, fantasy sports is similar to stock-market investing. And much like the top investors, they decided the way to get the most consistent results was to take as much chance out of the equation as possible. "It felt like a problem we could solve," Coburn says.
Instead of coming up with one ideal lineup, they built a system that designed a range of lineups that would create profits under a variety of scenarios. Sure, Peyton Manning may be the best play, but what if he gets hurt, or has a bad game? Better not to have Manning in every lineup. In investing terms, they opted for a diversified portfolio rather than a concentrated bet.
Until very recently, it wasn't possible to make a living playing fantasy sports. A league can be free, with only bragging rights on the line, but typically each owner puts up a modest entry fee, with the winner collecting the bulk of the prize pool at the end of the season. Given that the seasons for professional sports leagues last anywhere from four to seven months, the payout on an hourly basis for the average fantasy league doesn't even come close to the minimum wage. Albertson plays a new, faster version called daily fantasy, which compresses the typical season-long fantasy league into a single day. So, for example, instead of drafting a baseball team for the season and tracking the players over the course of six months and 162 games, a daily fantasy contest is decided based on who can pick the best players for a single night's worth of games. The people who drafted a traditional fantasy baseball team this March won't know the outcome of the league until the end of September. In daily fantasy, people can draft a team on any morning of the week and know the outcome by the end of the night—and then start over again the next day.
This version of the game popped up about five years ago, and a handful of startups have since drawn more than $100 million in venture capital. Comcast Ventures, the venture-capital arm of the cable conglomerate, is one of the backers of FanDuel, the biggest daily fantasy site at the moment. Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp put money into a site called DraftStreet. Daily fantasy "only really hit the mainstream in about the last 18 months," says Paul Charchian, chairman of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. "Charch," as he's known, says there has been more venture capital and other investor money allocated to daily fantasy websites in the past few years than in the history of fantasy sports. The appeal for players is twofold, he says: For one thing, many people simply like the shorter time frame. But it also provides a way for serious players to make big money. In traditional fantasy, people didn't try to make a living on it, because "it took too long getting a return on your money," Charchian says.
[More from WSJ: For Brazil, the Pressure Is Officially On]
Daily fantasy's emergence also coincides with the rise of sports analytics, a once-obscure, nerd-populated corner of the sports world that has revolutionized the industry in recent years. The trend got perhaps its most mainstream exposure with the Michael Lewis book (and subsequent movie starring Brad Pitt) "Moneyball," which showed how the Oakland Athletics baseball team used statistics to rigorously measure players, upending much of the conventional wisdom about the game. (The Boston Red Sox also embraced analytics, and the team won the World Series in 2013, its third championship in a decade.) But analytics have now been fully embraced by fans as well. In 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started an annual event, called the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which drew less than 200 people in its first year. ESPN columnist Bill Simmons dubbed it Dorkapalooza. This year, it drew nearly 3,000 attendees and sold out more than two months in advance.
Not surprisingly, gamblers are also embracing analytics. The winner of the Las Vegas Hilton's SuperContest, the most prestigious sports-betting event of the year, in which each participant picks five NFL games each week, was David Frohardt-Lane, who has a graduate degree in statistics from the University of Chicago and for eight years ran the equities desk at Getco, a multibillion-dollar investment firm that has since merged with Knight Capital to form KCG Holdings. His prize for winning the SuperContest: more than half a million dollars.
The man many consider the most successful basketball bettor in the world, a Canadian named Haralabos Voulgaris, compiles vast quantities of data and has a team of assistants to analyze NBA games. Voulgaris reportedly makes millions of dollars each year but declined to speak to WSJ.Money about his methodology.
Sports gambling is illegal in most of the country, and the top officials of the major sports leagues routinely denounce any suggestion of expanding sports betting. Fantasy sports, however, is legal in all but five states, and the leagues love it—they say it drives television viewership and overall engagement among fans, without introducing the unsavory aspects of full-fledged gambling. This is one reason why many analysts and investors think the daily fantasy industry is poised to explode, and why the sites that offer the games are aggressively marketing on sports radio and other mainstream outlets. Andrew Wiggins, a friend of Albertson's and the founder of Chicago-basedDraftDay, a daily fantasy site, says the future of the industry is based on attracting casual fans. "If this is going to get huge, we need the guys who are going to buy in for $20. They do it for fun," Wiggins says. But if that happens, number-crunching sharks like Albertson will be lying in wait. If casual players embrace daily fantasy in bigger numbers, Albertson says, "then we'll really be a printing press."
A FEW HOURS after the Tesla test drive, sitting about 20 rows from the court at Chicago's United Center and munching on a gluten-free hot dog, Albertson asks a question that is on no one else's mind in the arena: "How come D.J. Augustin is not in the game?"
The Chicago Bulls are playing the Philadelphia 76ers in a meaningless midseason game, and as the first quarter draws to a close, Augustin is sitting on the bench. Augustin until recently was almost washed up in professional basketball. At age 26, he had been cut by three teams before latching on with the Bulls when the team's starting point guard, Derrick Rose, went down with a knee injury. The Bulls also had recently traded their best remaining player, Luol Deng, in a move that most fans interpreted as raising the white flag on the season.
Albertson—or, rather, his algorithm—sees Augustin's stock beginning to rise. On this night, it identifies Augustin as one of its top picks, even though the player was chosen by only 2.4 percent of Albertson's competitors in one of his biggest contests. And the algorithm is right.
Augustin comes into the game late in the first quarter and goes on to lead the Bulls to a 103-78 victory. More important to Albertson, Augustin fills up the stat sheet, finishing with a total of 19 points, eight assists, three steals and four rebounds. Albertson and Coburn's business ends the night with a nice profit—almost $9,000. The algorithm isn't right all the time, and even loses money on many nights. But Albertson says he is thinking of pursuing investors, so he can invest outside money as well as his own—sort of like a fantasy sports hedge fund. "It's a big enough sample size, there is clearly something to it," says Albertson. "It's not going to be perfect, but it can be pretty damn good."
Write to Brad Reagan at Brad.Reagan@wsj.com

 

[bjorks]

SPORTSMONEY 6/08/2014 @ 12:08PM

FanDuel Provides Financial Information And Projects $40 Million In Revenue In 2014

One-day fantasy sports operator FanDuel has made its overall financial information public, with figures dating back to the first quarter of 2011. Its Investors page provides the amount of money FanDuel has received from users paying entry fees to participate in daily fantasy games and includes the money it has delivered to users in the form of prize pools to generate a total revenue for the company (before taking into consider other costs including maintenance of the website, employee salaries, etc.). The result reveals a company that appears to be quite healthy, with constantly expanding revenues.

In the first quarter of 2014, FanDuel received $5,376,644 in revenue based on $62,712,251 of entry fees subtracted by $57,335,607 in prize pool offerings. The company has revenue of $4,450,736 in April and May alone, and expects a final total of roughly $6.5 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2014. Its end-of-year projection is approximately $40 million in revenue.

FanDuel’s best quarter to date is Q4 2013, when the company brought in $7,411,137 in revenue. The logical reason for a spike in Q4 is that it is the heart of the National Football League season. According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, 70% of fantasy sports players pick football as their favorite fantasy sport. Football predominates fantasy and FanDuel is a benefactor of same. Thus, it is feasible that Q4 2014 will demonstrate even larger revenues for FanDuel, with continued growth of one-day fantasy sports and FanDuel as an operator.

FanDuel made it clear to FORBES that if the company has a tournament where the total entry fees are less than the prize pool, it accounts for the difference as negative revenues, and net it against its revenue figure. Thus, what one sees on the Investors page is what FanDuel truly takes in from its games alone (again, not including other costs the company may incur each quarter).

Separately, FanDuel has received a total of $18 million dollars from investors in return for allotments of equity. The largest raise of funds was delivered in January 2013 and led by Comcast Ventures, which provided $11 million in Series C financing along with Piton Capital, Pentech Ventures, Bullpen Capital and serial investor Richard Koch.

Investors are likely impressed by expanding revenue figures as well as the rapid growth of FanDuel’s user base. There were only 3,198 paid actives in Q1 2011. In Q4 2013, that number was up to more than 192,000.

I'm in the wrong business