These ads never spell out a simple truth about daily fantasy competitions: While any player might get lucky on the back of a handful of entries, over time nearly all of the prize money flows to a tiny elite equipped with elaborate statistical modeling and automated tools that can manage hundreds of entries at once and identify the weakest opponents.
What Sud does each day doesn’t seem much like sports fandom—or even like much fun. He spends between eight and 15 hours working from his two-bedroom apartment in downtown Boston; the range reflects his uncertainly over whether to count the time watching games as work. During baseball season he puts about 200 entries into tournaments each night, and he can play more than 1,000 times in the weekly contests during NFL season.
The first step is scraping data from various public resources online and plugging the numbers into his custom-built predictive models, which generate hundreds of lineups based on his forecasts. There are publicly available tools that do some of this work for daily fantasy players, but Sud created bespoke software to make sure no one else can access his data. He also has a technique for identifying athletes who arenÂ’t going to end up on a lot of other teamÂ’s rosters, which is important, because thereÂ’s a particular advantage in choosing players no one else has noticed.
Analysis from Rotogrinders conducted for Bloomberg shows that the top 100 ranked players enter 330 winning lineups per day, and the top 10 players combine to win an average of 873 times daily. The remaining field of approximately 20,000 players tracked by Rotogrinders wins just 13 times per day, on average.