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.
I track all my buy-ins and cashouts though, and as a freebie poker lesson to apply in fantasy football, I highly recommend keeping a budget and tracking your results. 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! Without further ado, here is the first installment of my top 10 poker lessons to apply in fantasy football:
10) Variance plays out in one evening instead of one season – If you run really bad at poker one night, chances are you’ll do better the next night. Even within one long session, if you play your cards right, more times than not you will see variance begin to swing in your favor. In dynasty fantasy football, playing your cards right might mean it takes a couple of seasons before variance fully swings around. Even redraft is a remarkably slower timescale in terms of payout turnaround than poker, where you can get paid daily. Did I say ‘daily’? There is a reason daily FF has exploded and it has everything to do with variance and getting paid off quickly, not once every twelve months.
Don’t fret, season-long league owners (like me) just have to understand this is how it works. Playing poker can help sharpen your mind to withstand a bad beat within the context of the fantasy football season because we all know that even the sharpest fantasy players take it on the chin once in a while.
9) The landscape can completely change with one flip of the card – If you’ve got red pocket rockets (that is a pair of Aces in poker, specifically the heart and diamond) and then the flop comes 8, 9, 10 – all spades, and there is a lot of action from at least a couple other betters, you might want to consider folding or at least acknowledging that what you thought the landscape was consists of something totally different now. Like when Travis Etienne (RB – JAX) got drafted by the Urban Meyer regime, it completely shifted my James Robinson (RB – JAX) value. Or when Gabriel Davis (WR – BUF) earned over an 80% snap share last season from Week 14 on, it is possible that the new landscape is such that he is the new #2 outside receiver there behind Diggs. Perhaps the dynasty analogy with Davis is more like hitting a big hand with suited connectors to crack Aces. Technically, 6-7 suited is the hand with the best odds in a heads-up matchup vs Aces, and in the example above it would have flopped a straight, easily rendering the Aces (nearly) cracked.
8) Sunk Cost Fallacy – We talk about it in fantasy football all the dang time, and for good reason. You have to be able to pivot when the landscape does shift, and to develop an instinct for when that is happening, or when it might happen. This principle is up in your face most of the time at the poker table. It is a very regular thing that you will invest poker chips into pots that you end up losing. Obviously, you want to minimize these situations as much as possible and the internalization of the wisdom of the sunk cost fallacy is a Poker 101 prerequisite if one is to ever win consistently. And I would argue the same principle applies in fantasy football, but crucially because of the slower timescale of news and information. There are times you simply have to cut bait and trade a player for less than you acquired them for. Or drop them outright.
7) Using your wallet as a weapon – At a cash game poker table, it is imperative to play within your limits and budget. I’m not a rich man so I play at the $1-2 tables when I go to Vegas (and if I’m not busy playing in the World Series of Poker or some other big tourney). This means that I will buy in for something like $100-300 and perhaps my budget is to lose no more than $1000. It is highly unlikely that would happen but I play in a style that allows me to play my game because I know I can afford it. You can sense when people are playing above or below their level. $1/2 is the cheapest stakes you can find for most poker rooms but you will often find rich tourists that have no idea what they’re doing and don’t care. They like to flash money around and don’t care what happens in a pot because it is all entertaining. I love trapping those kinds of players when and if I get the chance. But it also means there are sharks that can afford to play super loose styles that I sometimes personally struggle against at the table. I tend to prefer tournament poker partly due to the reason that everyone’s wallet is removed from the equation.
What does that have to do with fantasy football? How many big tournament entries can any of us afford? Enough to compete with people that are maxing out? The Underdog Puppy best-ball tourneys allow many of us to potentially max out but that is a lot of drafting. I play mid to high-stakes fantasy tourneys but still have a limit to how much I can spend. There are certainly competitors with bigger wallets and they can afford to do wilder things in drafts.
6) Pot odds are everything – You’ve probably heard people say something along the lines of 3rd and 4th round rookie picks being a crapshoot at best and not really worth anything. The thing is it is all about the price relative to the odds of winning. This is a basic maxim in any kind of betting, and yet people somehow don’t apply it to fantasy football when it comes to these rookie picks, or when it comes to trying to predict outliers.
If you’re a 5:1 underdog but you’re getting 10:1 on your money if you win, then that is a profitable bet. Many fantasy analysts see the 5:1 underdog probability and run for the hills. “Because analytics,” they’ll say. Third and fourth-round picks hit all the time but not if you don’t roster them. If you want to get better at fantasy football, study the concept of pot odds in poker a little more. It just might open up the way you think about your rookie drafts and even the way you manage your teams. It is that powerful of a concept and I am continually blown away by how few poker players don’t understand it, let alone FF.
Thanks for reading! Look for my top-5 Lessons From Poker To Apply in Fantasy Football soon…
Stay sharp out there and remember, you only have to be better than half your league mates 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
