
Are Fantasy Football and Baseball More Based on Skill Than the Real Sports? - prostoalex
http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/are-fantasy-sports-really-gambling
======
schwap
I guess the reasoning behind the conclusion is here:

> When Hosoi compared the R values of FanDuel contests to actual professional
> sports teams, she found that the outcomes of real-life sports involved less
> skill and more randomness than

> their fantasy corollaries (with the exception of basketball, whose many
> opportunities to score reduce its randomness). In fantasy hockey, skilled
> contestants will succeed slightly more often than elite NHL teams will. In a
> real-world hockey game, a weird puck bounce can lead to a fluke goal.

> Because hockey games are relatively low-scoring, moments of randomness can
> have an outsized impact on the outcome of a matchup. To a lesser extent, the
> same is true in baseball and football, both games where scoring
> opportunities can be hard to come by.

But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled
players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example),
every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL
teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly
lopsided.

~~~
simplemath
>But I think that's a flawed conclusion. The article notes that many unskilled
players play daily fantasy as well. In the NHL (to continue the example),
every single player and team is elite compared to all hockey players. If NHL
teams played minor and rec league teams, their records would be stunningly
lopsided.

Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players
against each other and report back

~~~
smallnamespace
> Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players
> against each other and report back

Why?

If you really did that, then every single game would be considered a game of
chance, even chess.

I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusions, but only comparing
the top players isn't a legitimate thing to do -- if you take _any_
distribution and zoom in at the extremes, it will look just like noise.

~~~
schwap
It's not as ridiculous as you think. To continue to abuse the hockey analogy,
there are ~979000 registered hockey players in the US and Canada[1]. There are
30 NHL teams, each with a contract limit of 50, for a total of 1500 players.
That's 0.153% of all hockey players in North America.

EDIT: Need to read better, that's an order of magnitude off so it is a bit
ridiculous.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registere...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registered_players_by_country)

~~~
smallnamespace
I think you're missing what I'm saying.

The criticism is, 'I don't like the article's metric because it doesn't zoom
in on the tail of the distribution'.

But if you do that with _any_ game, the answer you will get is uniformly 0.5,
even when comparing chess to tic tac toe.

~~~
schwap
No I understand your argument, I'm just trying to illustrate how small a part
of the tail professional sports really is (turns out it's small but not that
small).

~~~
simplemath
Depends on the sport. For NBA and NFL athletes in the US, it is close to 1 in
10k high school athletes in those sports that make it to the pros

------
Strilanc
I suspect that the reason you'd see a stronger "skill" signal in the fantasy
results than in the sport itself is that professional players are a hugely
skewed sample. When a player starts doing noticeably badly, they get dropped.
Face the professional hockey players off against non-professionals and you'd
see the signal jump right out.

Fantasy sites, on the other hand, aren't filtering out people that play
terribly nearly as aggressively. So I'm not sure if this is the right kind of
test. It's comparing against a signal-expunging process.

------
iopq
> My plan quickly proved worthless. The luck of the cards wasn’t with me. My
> best hand was maybe a Jack High. Worse, the others at the table were betting
> aggressively and bluffing masterfully. Well, I assumed they were bluffing. I
> think I actually saw a player’s winning cards only once. I swiftly suffered
> the fate of fools with money. My opponents cleaned me out in five or six
> rounds. Poof! My 75 bucks were gone.

Hilarious. I'm going to assume he played 3/6 limit and voluntarily put money
in the pot with substandard starting hands. Usually the blinds are 2/3 I
think, so after 6 rounds he'd still have $35 if he didn't spend extra money on
hands that were jack high.

~~~
oxide
Is this what they call knowing when to fold 'em?

------
carlmcqueen
I really liked that article, however I'm kind of biased as I'm in the data
science world.

As for Draft Kings and the like, whether it's skill based or not they are just
another engine that keeps those who struggle with impulse control from truly
finding financial independence.

I don't believe in divine government to save the people from these sites, but
at the same time I am saddened as the volunteer work I do to help people with
their finances is filled with these kind of fantasy bills.

~~~
zzalpha
Well, ignoring the concerns about government intervention vs individual
responsibility, the reality is daily fantasy companies advertise in such a way
that it makes it appear anyone can be a winner, when in fact the vast majority
of winnings go to the same set of elite players.

That's just flat out false advertising. At least Vegas is up-front about the
fact that the odds are in their favour. And I think it's perfectly reasonable
to have the government enforce basic standards about advertising and
communication by companies to the public.

~~~
harryh
There are also ads that make it appear that if I drink a certain brand of beer
then hot women will instantly flock to me. Should that be illegal too?

~~~
landhar
I think such an argument is reasonable. It does seem that putting restrictions
on advertising cigarettes has contributed greatly to reduce the perception
that smoking is badass.

~~~
harryh
There are also ads that make it appear that if I use a certain brand of
deodorant then hot women will instantly flock to me. Should that be illegal
too?

~~~
zzalpha
So, just to understand your position, is your claim that the government should
play no role in regulating the messages corporations deliver to the public?

~~~
oldmanjay
Do you feel it strengthens your argument to pivot to attacking a position you
put in your opponent's mouth?

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wtf_is_up
In my experience, many of the people playing FanDuel/DraftKings are the same
people who buy a lot of lottery tickets. They aren't playing these games in
any skillful way.

If you're going to use those people to measure the impact of skill on the
outcome, then you need to also group NFL players with Joe Schmoe weekend
warrior 2-hand-touch football players as well.

------
smt88
Flagged because this is PR/covering-their-asses bullshit from FanDuel, rather
than real research. See this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12226792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12226792)

------
cline6
Plotting the first half of the season on the X with the second half on the Y
seems very strange to me. If you were just trying to separate the win
percentages of players, wouldn't an X axis for the win percentage with a count
on the Y provide you with a proper distribution? Plotting win percentage in
different time periods on the two axis serves to essentially double count hits
within the distribution, provided people's win percentage did not change
significantly across the season.

I also don't really understand how a large difference in win percentages means
that something is significantly skill based. What's certainly true is that you
cannot say with any confidence that a tighter distribution means something is
less based on skill, which was the extremely bold claim in this article.

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bdcravens
Having played FanDuel, I'd buy the argument about skill if they weren't
pushing you so hard toward, and the app wasn't geared to, playing often. I
seriously doubt one could play so frequently with any degree of skill, unless
it was a full-time job.

~~~
jeffasinger
For the most skilled players, it would certainly be worth it to them to treat
it as a full time job. They make more doing that than most jobs.

~~~
bdcravens
I think that's true in the same sense that it makes sense for someone to quit
their job and sell Mary Kay. The exceptions that have the big downlines and
the pink Cadillacs don't disprove the reality of average performance. (per
annum, average salesperson makes less than $100)

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mholmes680
Have they truly stopped allowing bots? That's why I stopped playing last year.

[http://www.espn.com/fantasy/baseball/story/_/id/13261582/are...](http://www.espn.com/fantasy/baseball/story/_/id/13261582/are-
computer-scripts-bad-daily-fantasy-sports)

I see updated newflashes from both DraftKings and Fanduel in the google
results, but they're flagged in our corp firewall blacklist. Does it
explicitly say the companies themselves can't use bots anymore? Ironically,
figuring out how to get the bots to bet in the most effective way in a few
minutes was probably even more skill - what's that R-value?

------
bagacrap
Seems weird that this is considered a good thing. Usually it's celebrated as a
highly competitive and mature game when the best players/teams are near each
other in skill level. If you wanted the elite teams to accrue a lopsided
number of victories you'd remove rules like the salary cap that many leagues
impose.

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steauengeglase
So essentially the same fight we use to have over pinball, back when LaGuardia
was in office?

Useless fact of the day: Prior to 1947 pinball machines didn't have flippers,
making it a game of chance (and yes, people bet on it). Afterwards the
flippers it became a game of skill. Just imagine the world if that never
happened?

~~~
mrob
Not pure chance, because players could control how far to pull the plunger,
and because players could nudge the machine. After the introduction of "tilt"
mechanisms (eg:
[http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=383](http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=383)
) nudging became an accepted part of the game. It takes great skill to nudge
effectively without triggering a tilt.

~~~
losteverything
How (& who) did one bet? Where were pinball machines located?

I was a King Kool master

~~~
mrob
This is the best article I found about the history of gambling with pinball:

[http://www.pinballcollectorsresource.com/russ_files/gambling...](http://www.pinballcollectorsresource.com/russ_files/gambling.html)

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Spooky23
Answer: No.

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arprocter
The graph has 'NHL' listed twice. I'm guessing from the text that the far
right one should read 'NFL' instead

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SandersAK
Are oranges more flavorful than apples?

