The game of poker, and more specifically No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, offers many lessons and insights that can be applied in fantasy football. I have occasionally considered myself a professional poker player at various times over the last ~20 years, which is to say that I have occasionally had a big enough victory to have to report it. I have cashed twice at bracelet events of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada. I played a lot of online poker in the heyday of the internet poker boom in the mid to late 2000s. I believe I have played perhaps as many as two million hands in my life to this point. There was a time that I tracked it but I don’t really care anymore. At least I’m on the all-time leaderboard.
Each year I have several redraft teams and several dynasty teams and now this year I will have at least a couple hundred best ball teams as well (where I have typically had maybe only a dozen or so in years past). As we approach training camps opening and August and September draft season nearly upon us, I can almost feel that familiar butterfly feeling in my stomach that I get when I sit down to play a big poker tourney. The season is almost here! Recently I came out with #6-10 and so without further ado here are my top 5 lessons from poker to apply in fantasy:
5) Getting blinded out in a tournament is similar to a dynasty franchise getting old – you need to try to be active, even when you’re not getting good cards. You can’t just sit and get blinded down and down until you’re forced to make drastic moves. At least hopefully. I think you need to be churning your dynasty rosters as much as you can. It is absolutely possible to go too wild with it, just as playing too loose with your poker chips will bust you to the rail. It is difficult to find a successful balance between aggressive and passive approaches, but that is the challenge. Dynasty rosters can become stale surprisingly fast.
4) You’re not unluckier than your leaguemates just like you’re not unluckier than the poker players sucking out on you – To the extent that either of these hobbies are games of skill versus luck, there is an incredibly powerful psychological phenomenon that occurs with players “that are good.” In poker, if you are consistently making good decisions, then it is likely that you will experience more big contested hands where somebody sucks out on you than big hands where you suck out on somebody else.
This can be incredibly frustrating and even though the player may be good, they may not be able to take their game to the next level until they internalize the truth that the reason they are losing (in an unlucky fashion) more often than they are doing it to others – is because they are good and making good decisions. It should be considered a confirmation that they are in fact better than the scrub that sucked out on them. But of course, it is still very frustrating to lose pots and it can be easy to slide down a slippery slope of thinking you are unlucky.
How many FF teams have you had that crushed fools during the regular season and then lost to some tool that didn’t even set his lineup one week, bitched about the IR rules, and then squeaked into the playoffs with a 6-7 record and got hot to take down the title. It just happens and you need to not let it bother you. Mindset is important.
3) Never ever ever ever f#$king give up. Did you hear me?!!! – Both of these hobbies are unbelievably fickle. No Limit Hold Em is infamously insane in terms of the swings that can occur. I have seen and/or experienced countless examples of either going from the penthouse to the outhouse in a matter of one or two hands or from coming back from a chip and a chair as they say. In tournament poker, all you have to do is stay alive. You don’t always have to stay super far ahead of the blinds as most players might say you have to. If you can grind and play disciplined, a short-stacked poker player can go from the outhouse to the penthouse in the matter of a couple of hands as well.
This is not unlike managing a fantasy football dynasty team. Last season I had an FFPC $250 SuperFlex dynasty team that was absolutely loaded and coming off a championship in the league’s first season in 2020. Fast forward to week eight of 2021. I was 7-0 with 27 out of a possible 28 Victory Points and well on my way to a title defense.
I didn’t even make the playoffs. Brutal. I also had a team that started 0-5 and somehow squeaked into the playoffs and won the ship so I think the lesson is don’t give up and don’t lose sight of the bigger picture while you’re knee-deep in it.
2) Pot odds are everything (part 2) – Ever heard of implied odds? It may be an example of galaxy-braining oneself into giving money away. The idea is that when you calculate the pot odds and win probabilities for a given decision in a poker hand and are thinking about what to do, implied pot odds are what you can expect to win from future bets in that hand if you stay in and win.
I think it is a great analog to these large season-long bestball tournaments, whether FFPC, Underdog, DraftKing, or others that have become so popular. Part of the calculus that many sharp players and analysts have been talking about is stacking for week 17. Those of us that are heavily invested in these tourneys, both in terms of dollars and volume of entries, are building squads that we hope to advance through each round of the tournament (similar to the singular pot odds of a given decision in poker), but ultimately it is the implied pot odds of the big week 17 prize money that drives us to our decisions. Like when we reach and sacrifice a little value (like chasing a flush) to build a correlated week 17 stack that can win a million dollars in Best Ball Mania III. We will gladly sacrifice a little bit of advance rate for the presumably better chance to hit big if we do get through.
1) Good process gives you opportunities to get lucky – That is the idea. In tournament poker, you are trying to make smart and largely undangerous decisions for two purposes. One is simply to survive. The other is to buy time with that survival to get lucky. The more good decisions you make the more chances you have to get lucky, which can take the form of hitting a big hand or draft pick, or of avoiding a bad beat or busted pick. Anytime you can avoid a landmine that is a lucky break, even if it costs a little. We want the path that gives us the most luck surface area (credit to the tweet below).
Thanks for reading! Look for my FFPC-themed dynasty articles and others soon! Stay sharp out there and remember, you only have to be better than half your leaguemates on average to be a perennial playoff team. Let’s keep balling! Look for more of my articles soon. Feel free to reach out to me to chat about fantasy football on Twitter @Ship_Chaser and follow along with me on my journey as I chase six-figure paydays! #DFFArmy #FantasyFootball #AlwaysBeBuilding #NFL #NFLTransactions #NFLTrades #AlwaysBeScouting
