Fantasy Football Game Theory
Article Link: https://www.fantasylabs.com/articles/using-game-theory-in-daily-fantasy-tournaments/
As the NFL season has started it has got me thinking about how game theory takes effect in the decisions people make when constructing their daily fantasy lineups. Often times in the past my goal has always been to maximize my total points for the week in any daily competitions, so I end up choosing the players that are projected to do the best, which end up being the players that are also most commonly chosen. This is often a common mistake made my many competitors in daily fantasy, but the goal of these contests is not to maximize pints, it is to beat you opponent and that could be done by maximizing points, but that is not always the best way. Thus, the article talks more about how it is not always the right thing to select players based on maximizing points, but on maximizing probability of winning. The author says that often times it is more important to choose a player based on the probability of winning given they have a great game. This is because if they have a great game, you are now only competing against 1 in 100 opponents who choose that player as well, rather than 1 in 10 players that choose the more consistent player. It speaks to the point that when comparing two players, we can create a game board where we list the probability that a player hits their ceiling value times the probability your team wins because of that.
This article is very similar to what we did in class when we studies game theory and game boards. We can create a rough estimate of a game board for every two players when comparing the strategies of choosing each player vs. the strategy of an opponent choosing each player. We know there will never be a dominant strategy that always works, since each time we base our decision off of our opponents’ choices, in order to gain the highest probability of winning. One large difference than some of the board we created in class is that, in daily fantasy contests, you are often going against hundreds of players rather than just one, so you have more opponents and can’t simply use a 2-dimensional game board. Instead we must create a multidimensional game board that can compare strategies of multiple players in order to accurately determine which player to choose. In theory this seems plausible, but when actually attempting to create such a board it can become very tricky and computing the probabilities will be very inaccurate since everything depends on chance. This is why the fantasy games are so interesting making it nearly impossible for someone to win every contest they enter.