Yes, skill in this hobby can only take you so far. Coincidently, I also had the Cardinals Defense. Had them all year just waiting for them to come alive. If not for the my gut wrenching loss in the first round I would have won in week 15 thanks to those two scores against the Lions. I also would have easily won our Championship game. Funny how the Fantasy Gods love to rub salt in your wounds.
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Fantasy football takes no skill (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter xander756
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I agree with your on this point. In larger leagues you do get owners that throw more stuff against the wall and hope that it sticks. I was burned by a fluke performance (play) because of this. My opponent had to decide between Heyward Bey, Davon Bess or Brandon Lloyd. Not what you would call consistent performers. In larger leagues I think the skill part comes into play when finding those lesser known players that become fantasy relevant during the course of a season.
squistion
Footballguy
:IBTL: The constant pimping of your blog is getting rather tiresome.
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DropKick
Footballguy
If you tend to lose, luck is sure to be the first thing you credit. Skill is cited by those that tend to win.
I win a lot more than I lose. And it is skill. Or hard work... Or maybe those things are one and the same. But, regardless, I draft better than most teams, seem to find more sleepers, make better line-up decisions, and usually finish the season with a deep, competitive team. People won't trade with me... they think I "know" something. I just have to show the slightest interest in a player... and they'll hold them tighter than a duck's ####.
I'm not a rocket scientist, or a surgeon, and I can't play a musical instrument beyond the first three notes of "Jingle Bells". But playing any game well takes some skill.
Sure, injuries and the randomness of head to head competition play a big part. And the internet has put rankings and projections at the fingertips of every team. The game has changed a lot since the days of combing through newspaper box scores. God bless the USA today! But in my leagues, certain teams tend to be successful while others routinely struggle. Does that suggest luck or skill?
I win a lot more than I lose. And it is skill. Or hard work... Or maybe those things are one and the same. But, regardless, I draft better than most teams, seem to find more sleepers, make better line-up decisions, and usually finish the season with a deep, competitive team. People won't trade with me... they think I "know" something. I just have to show the slightest interest in a player... and they'll hold them tighter than a duck's ####.
I'm not a rocket scientist, or a surgeon, and I can't play a musical instrument beyond the first three notes of "Jingle Bells". But playing any game well takes some skill.
Sure, injuries and the randomness of head to head competition play a big part. And the internet has put rankings and projections at the fingertips of every team. The game has changed a lot since the days of combing through newspaper box scores. God bless the USA today! But in my leagues, certain teams tend to be successful while others routinely struggle. Does that suggest luck or skill?
Neil Beaufort Zod
Footballguy
Look, I respect that fact that you want to be a writer. But everyone knows that Examiner doesn't pay for their content-- you get a weak ad sharing system while they encourage you to "get your blog out there." But spamming a forum isn't the way to go about it. If you like writing, go for it. But they're not paying you, and you're not gaining anything by annoying the entire forum. If, for example, your dream would be to get on the Footballguys payroll, I'm guessing you're going about it in the worst possible way. I got paid just as much to write this post as you did to write your blog. But I'm not spamming everyone and begging them to read it. Sprinkle in a little dignity to go along with your creativity.'xander756 said:
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Neil Beaufort Zod
Footballguy
If the successful teams are the ones whose owners follow it the closest...I would suggest it's neither luck nor skill. It's just paying attention and out-working the competition. Still a credit to those owners, but not what I would call a skill.
Please See Mine
Footballguy
well-put.'WisWolvrns said:
This week: http://penguinrungames.com/images/examiner.pngThis month: http://penguinrungames.com/images/examiner2.png
Yeah you are right I totally don't make a living as a writer.
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DropKick
Footballguy
You're missing the point, hard work and thought equate to skill. Go read the post about "players I'll never draft again"... It is absolutely littered with over emotional owners who had a bad season with a player. I guarantee that these blind spots will affect their team management.
DropKick
Footballguy
The infamous "small sample size" perspective.
DropKick
Footballguy
I would have guessed that a professional writer could use punctuation properly.
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Neil Beaufort Zod
Footballguy
Writing isn't easy, so I try not to knock those who make the attempt. But I think his behavior here is a good indicator why he spams football sites instead of writing for them. I kindly advised him to sprinkle a little dignity with his creativity...and his response made it clear he's unfamiliar with the term. Oh, well. We got through pop-ups. We can get through his annoying spam as well.
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Neil Beaufort Zod
Footballguy
No, I get it. I just don't consider that "skill," since anyone can do it. The fact that some owners are over-emotional, or don't follow the league as closely, or developing trends, or whatever else...just means a hard-working, enthusiastic owner can put themselves in a position to beat the other owners. Others could, but they don't.Not knocking the dedication it takes to win, or saying they didn't earn it. Just saying that if anyone can do it, it's not really much of a skill. But I understand that others disagree.
cobalt_27
Footballguy
I have a few questions. Removed from the fantasy football world, just the broader scope of human behavior and activity in general:a. Would you say that there is a skill in negotiating transactions with others?
b. Would you say there is a skill in analyzing data; more specifically teasing apart signal from noise?
c. On a related matter, would you say there is a skill in knowing which sources provide meaningful information versus those that provide useless information?
If you answer no to all of these, then I believe you when you say that you would not call fantasy football a skill. But, I have to believe that, when you really sit down and consider these factors, you have to come to the conclusion that there is at least a skill component.
By definition, you cannot improve luck. But, I firmly believe you can improve on all three of those items above in predictable ways. By definition, that is a skill. Some people have it, some don't.
Nate Silver didn't invent the phrases "signal" and "noise" but he sure slam-dunked the argument in his recent book about how critical it is that we get better on items b. and c. and teasing apart the signal from the noise. To me, that is so much a part of FF. Luck is always a factor and cannot be ignored. But, it can be controlled by how well we attend to items a, b, and c above.
JohnnyU
Footballguy
So where do these estimated earnings come from? Also, you can live on $7000 a year?
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It clearly says "This Month" on the screenshot, buddy.
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JohnnyU
Footballguy
Seems hokey to me. Why would anyone advertise earnings like this anyway? I make a good living, but I don't feel compelled to advertise it, or brag about it and certainly not post what I make on the internet. Seems weird to me.
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CalBear
Footballguy
I had a friend who blogged for PC World. He was paid for the traffic he generated, up to $500 per post for ones that got a lot of hits. The sure-fire way to get a lot of hits was to say something negative about Apple. Spamming fantasy football message boards with negative comments about fantasy football to drive traffic to your site is a good example of something which does not require skill; a much better example than fantasy football.And, frankly, it's against the rules here. So while this thread has had some interesting discussion (not the parts involving xander756), I think it's time to lock this pimping expedition.
squistion
Footballguy
Exactly. It is against the rules here. I think one of the moderators should step in so we don't "enrich" Xander any further.
Backside Pursuit
Footballguy
This thread is moving too fast for me to digest. I'm still attempting to respond to posts from at least two or three days ago and I have not read any of page 9 or page 10 yet. This may have to be my last word on the subject.
Ah, sorry about that. I quoted that earlier post but I just don't think about luck in those terms. You want me to quantify the amount of luck involved in fantasy football. Fair enough, but before I might even attempt to do that I would need to reiterate that I believe success in fantasy football is predicated upon three major factors: skill, effort, and luck. If you wish to combine skill and effort as one thing, that's perfectly valid and fine with me. But if I say that success in fantasy football is "about 60% non-luck," it is most certainly not the same thing (to me anyway) as saying that it is about 60% skill. In terms of addressing this, I think we can come back to your "randomly selected" criterion. But we would not be just drawing names out of a hat; that would introduce an unrealistic (and unhelpful, for these purposes) level of randomness. Instead, let's talk about a team that is auto-selected. Take the most brilliant fantasy football prognosticator walking the planet and match him up against my grandmother's lineup which was auto-selected during the draft. For Week 1 only, I am saying that my grandmother's team has a 50% chance of defeating the expert's team. In fact, I believe that if my grandmother plays against the expert 100,000 times (in Week 1 only), she will win very close to 50,000 games. The expert will not enjoy a 70-30 advantage; it won't be 60-40; it won't be 55-45; and it won't even be 51-49. The difference will be no greater than chance.As the season moves forward and attrition sets in, and assuming that my grandmother follows the advice of FBG (with perhaps the exception of FAAB values
), we would likely see a change in this 50-50 split. But here is yet another example where I imagine that you and I differ: I imagine that the split would eventually grow by Week 16 to, at most, 52-48. And even that seems overly generous to me.A little further down in this thread (as quoted above), SSOG intelligently points out that the overall skill involved in this hypothetical scenario that I have described remains unchanged; my grandmother has simply "outsourced" the skill component. This is an excellent point. (But I question whether we are actually outsourcing "skill" or simply aggregating perception. My grandmother isn't purchasing a skill; she is purchasing a diversification of perspectives. But more on that in a moment.) I certainly think that we are all overestimating and overvaluing the "expertise" involved in the forecasting of complex future events. And the more I think about this (thanks to this thread), the more ridiculous I think the veneration we give to forecasters has become. At the root of this is an evolutionarily-driven need to make predictions about our future in order to increase our odds for survival. And this very real need begets some pretty absurd practices – the most absurd of which might be our delusional efforts at control. Mythology and superstition are born from this need for control of events entirely beyond our control. We deify anyone who demonstrates – in the short term because nobody and I mean nobody can do it in the long term – an ability to predict future events.
Humans are endlessly forecasting and endlessly categorizing. It's what we do. Possessing an ability to predict future events and an ability to differentiate between characteristics held by another organism (such as the level of "skill" someone else possesses) are excellent survival tools. But complex events are not simply an aggregate of many simple events. We can predict the future when the pool cue strikes the ball; we cannot predict the future when events become increasingly complex. We exaggerate the ability of forecasters because we very much want to believe in the myth. We repeat pithy little vomit-inducing gems such as "luck is the residue of design" (the real world equivalent of "my thoughts create my reality") because it gives us the illusion of control while simultaneously reaffirming the same egocentric perspective that manifests as the attribution bias.
So Warren Buffett is hailed as "the Oracle from Omaha." And you imagine that – in relative terms – the gap that exists between Warren Buffett's ability to predict future events and my ability to predict future events is as vast as the gap that exists between Calvin Johnson's ability to catch a football and my ability to catch a football. And what I'm saying is this: neither in absolute terms nor in relative terms are these two gaps ANYWHERE NEAR comparable.
One may hold the opinion that people can forecast complex multiparty events about which they have no specific foreknowledge (e.g., confidential intentions of key participants) and that this is a skill that can be developed. So stipulated. I say that someone can string together a few well-timed "heads" or "tails" and then leverage those correct calls in ways moving forward that allow for continued success, under significantly more favorable conditions, that has very little to do with that same individual making more correct calls (or at least not more correct calls made from the same position of ignorance as the original calls). So be it. I use the stock analyst analogy because, as has been pointed out repeatedly by people much smarter than myself, (here, for just one example) stock experts are notoriously awful at predicting the future and are easily outperformed by index funds tied to a stock index rather than the analysis of individual "experts." (But some of us are aware of this fact and choose to gamble on the jackpot rather than the safe play.) In fantasy football terms, I am rejecting the Malcolm Gladwell point of view and asserting that a non-complex algorithm applied without variation will statistically outperform the human intuition of experts and the reason for this is that the domain in question is inherently unpredictable.
I don't want this to become a referendum on whether stock experts are legitimate or not. Believe what you want to believe. Nor do I want this to become a referendum about how foolish I am for "not believing in" forecasting. I acknowledge my foolishness and am quite prepared to live with it. I've never been a fan of comic books or religion but I obviously recognize that stories about superheroes and gods hold widespread appeal. I'd just rather we stop looking up for answers. We vastly overestimate the abilities of forecasters. And we do this because we need to convince ourselves that if we develop certain skills we too can predict future outcomes. This is not to say that Warren Buffett and David Dodds do not possess skills superior to mine. They do. (But forecasting future events is not one of them.)
There are no oracles. Wait long enough (collect a large enough sample size) and when it comes to predicting complex events of the future, we are all at 50%. (And I apologize for making an unfalsifiable assertion. But there you go.) The course of human history is littered with the catastrophically incorrect forecasts of experts.
Let me shift gears here for a minute and maybe we can come back to this. Here's another hypothetical I want to think about. Imagine that there is a website that compiles and measures the forecasting abilities of 100 fantasy football experts. (Fantasypros for example.) Now imagine that there is a website that compiles the forecasts of 12,000 football fans. Here's what I'm saying: I would wager that the forecasts of the 12,000 football fans would prove to be slightly more accurate than the forecasts of the experts. And the reason that I believe this would be true is not because the non-experts are superior to the experts, but instead because, in this scenario, the non-experts far outnumber the experts. Call it a preference for the wisdom of crowds or a deep love for the demos or an affinity for diversification, but I believe more in the perspectives of the many (skilled or unskilled) than I do in the perspectives of the few (skilled or unskilled). In fact, I believe that openness to a diversity of perspectives is exactly what leads to my fantasy football success. I believe that you and posters like you are more responsible for my success at fantasy football than any experts and any skill that I possess. I've been playing this game for 20 years and I used to believe that I possessed a skill that others possibly did not possess. I no longer believe that. My ability at evaluating talent is no better than a coin toss. I am wrong as often as I am right. What separates me, possibly, is that I am a tireless worker. I don't work harder than other people; I just refuse to quit or slow down. This isn't false modesty: I am not a shark. I am just a guppy who keeps his ears open and who keeps his mind open to alternative perspectives. I compile perspectives and play the mean. It's not a skill; it's just a really joyful effort.
So if forecasting is a comforting illusion, how can the wisdom of crowds be slightly superior to the wisdom of experts? More data points. Perspectives about events already witnessed are not quite the same as predictions about future events. The crowds cannot predict the future any better than the experts but the larger the sample size the less tainted it becomes by biases and outliers. In short, the crowds are not more accurate; the experts – due to fewer data points – simply appear to be less accurate. Get 12,000 experts together and the difference is nullified.
For those of you who possess the ability to accurately assess football talent, I hope that your skill helps you when it comes to fantasy football. I imagine that it must. But I'm unconvinced that your skill affords you anything more than a negligible advantage. In a perverse way, my inability to accurately assess talent might actually improve my odds when competing against someone who correctly believes and someone else who incorrectly believes that they possess the ability to evaluate talent. Because I make no attachment to sunk costs, I move on from a misfire without compunction. (Which is not to suggest that I give up more quickly. It just means that I don't take it personally or dwell in regret.) I attack the waiver wire tenaciously yet judiciously – aggressively yet patiently. I just keep churning and churning. In the end, I think that fantasy football is like herding cats: yes there is (or can be) some very real skill involved and some luck but mostly it is just a task that requires persistence. Addressing the OP, I reject the statement that "fantasy football takes no skill" but I heartily endorse the statement that those of us who possess very little skill can win at fantasy football consistently and repeatedly.
The supercomputer that plays chess does not possess more skill than the Grand Master; but it does possess more information. You might say that I or someone like me is good at fantasy football because we know how to compile information and we know what to do with it. But I think what I'm saying is that I don't do anything with it. I just collect perspectives and play the average. When I do make decisions from the gut, they inevitably turn out to be correct almost exactly 50% of the time.
I'm leaving the thread open because I don't want to kill the conversation.
To the OP: Maybe you didn't understand that when I redacted the link in your original post, it wasn't an invitation for you to undo my edit. Please don't post any more links in this thread or in any other threads.
To everyone else: If you see xander756 post a link, don't quote it (so as to preserve it). Instead, please report it. Thanks.
To the OP: Maybe you didn't understand that when I redacted the link in your original post, it wasn't an invitation for you to undo my edit. Please don't post any more links in this thread or in any other threads.
To everyone else: If you see xander756 post a link, don't quote it (so as to preserve it). Instead, please report it. Thanks.
CalBear
Footballguy
I think both Buffett and Dodds possess skills relevant to forecasting future events. If they didn't, they wouldn't consistently perform better than the average. In both stock forecasting and fantasy football, one of the greatest skills is understanding the effects of perturbations to the system. No one can provide accurate predictions for chaotic systems. Fantasy football is chaotic, not random: it's more like the stock market or the weather than poker or backgammon. Chaotic systems have too many variables for anyone to control for them all. But good predictors (whether individuals or crowds) do a better job than average at understanding which variables are important, and thus predicting the outcome of a particular event (say, the effect of 9/11 on the stock market, or Peyton Manning going to Denver).
Your grandmother taking a cheatsheet and doing as well in a draft as Dodds (which I don't think is really likely) is somewhat analogous to a stock index fund. It certainly doesn't take investing skill to buy a stock index fund, or to understand that you're probably better off buying an index fund than trying to pick individual stocks. It doesn't take fantasy football skill to draft off a cheatsheet. But it does take skill to understand where the cheatsheet may be sub-optimal, and I think that skill demonstrably exists.
spreagle
Footballguy
I waiver-wire bid a normal 2.25 bucks on Felix Jones when Demarco Murray went down with injury around week 6-7, not really expecting to get him, not really caring actually. Then I realized the Murray owner was in a playoff race with me, and his team salary cap only allowed a 2.70 bid without dropping a player. So what the heck I said, I raised my bid to 2.80 and won Jones. Then I played Jones that week and he scored one more point than my next best RB option, and I happened to win that week by 0.50 points. Whew! Ended up tied with the Murray team and winning the playoff tie-breaker. Won the league because during those few seconds of decision-making a few neurons in my brain fired that resulted in a 55 cent raise. Skill or luck?
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