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I state the obvious very often but... (1 Viewer)

Of course, then you have in-season management of your team (waivers, who to start, etc.). In some leagues I bet you could hand the top owner the worst roster coming out of the draft and give the worst owner the best roster and I'd still put my money on the owner who knows his stuff.There is a lot of luck involved but in long-term leagues there's always a couple guys that usually make the playoffs every year
:goodposting: Bingo. Post draft is where the great players make their money. Waivers and trades.
Exactly. There is a lot of luck involved in who gets hurt, how many games they miss, which sleepers pan out and which studs unexpectedly bomb. The better players are proactive and circulate free agents and make trades....doing whatever they have to in order to stay competitive when "bad luck" hits.
 
This is my 5th year of fantasy football. The past 4 years I have finished in first place twice and second place twice. My opponents claim it's all luck. The main reason I win is Footballguys. This year I drafted Jermichael Finley, Jahvid Best, and Arian Foster in rounds 4, 5, 6. All because of Footballguys. I expect to win again.
which rounds for each player? those are 3 players i really want to target as well.
 
Luck is simply where probability meets emotion. Everyone is dealt the same hand with regards to probability over the long term.

There is a guy in my office league who uses FBG. He just downloads the projections the night before the draft and goes offf them without doing any reading. I read the morning email every day and typically have a few mock drafts before our office draft (in addition to reading quite a few articles and SP threads). I beat him handily every year. Even after losing Brady (1st rounder that year) I beat him. Why? Because I was more prepared and had better in-season management.

Among similarly prepared people, then yes... luck plays more of a factor.

 
50% luck...but skill (research, analyzing, etc.) helps to mitigate against it by creating depth or avoiding high risk players so that the busts or injuries don't kill your season...not to mention skill allows you to grab that WW gem (MSW or jamaal charles last year, antonio bryant the year before)

 
I think luck is a lot like religion. If you believe in either, than you believe it has a hand in everything. How much of an influence is only how much you believe it to be.

 
If fantasy football was 100% skill, then the best owner in any given league would have a 100% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 0% lifetime winning percentage.If fantasy football was 100% luck, then the best owner in any given league would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage.
Not that simple at all. You can only have 1 draft per league, so if you had the "skill" to draft the #1 QB, RB/WR etc etc, you would still lose some weeks.
SKILL is making the playoffs year in and year outLUCK is winning it all any given year
:lmao:
 
If fantasy football was 100% skill, then the best owner in any given league would have a 100% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 0% lifetime winning percentage.If fantasy football was 100% luck, then the best owner in any given league would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage.Obviously, fantasy football is neither 100% skill nor 100% luck. How much of it is luck? Well, in one of my leagues (that's been around about a decade), the owner with the highest lifetime winning percentage has a 60% winning percentage, and the owner with the lowest lifetime winning percentage has a 40% winning percentage. I'd say that that's a pretty good illustration of how luck plays a far bigger role in fantasy football than anyone wants to acknowledge.
In the one I league I'm in we've played for 7 years. One team has a regular season(weeks 1-14) winning % of .700 for those 7 seasons. No other team has a winning % greater than .540%. They have only won the championship once(the first year). Since then made the playoffs 5 of 6 years, 0-5 in first round playoff games. I'm willing to say that over the regular season the luck factor can be less since there are more games. Once you hit the playoffs in a H2H format the luck factor in the game is much higher IMO.
 
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This is my 5th year of fantasy football. The past 4 years I have finished in first place twice and second place twice. My opponents claim it's all luck. The main reason I win is Footballguys. This year I drafted Jermichael Finley, Jahvid Best, and Arian Foster in rounds 4, 5, 6. All because of Footballguys. I expect to win again.
I don't like to criticize other peoples leagues and that is not my intention with this post but I want to quote this to make a point that there is a huge difference in the amount of skill vs luck depending on how competitive the league is. In my two biggest money leagues, virtually everybody has been playing FF for more than 15 years and they all are well aware of guys like Finley, Best and Foster. Most regularly read FBG and other FF websites.In a league like this, luck plays a much bigger role but there is still skill involved. In fact, the skill is really in figuring out what players FBG and the other "experts" have wrong. Winning the league is much tougher now than it was 15 years ago but, for me, it is more fun.I'll give one example of what I am talking about. Jermichael Finley is going to be a key player in drafts this year. I have a big draft coming up this weekend and I guarantee everybody in my league has Finley among their top 3-4 TE's, some probably have him #1. Somebody is going to draft him in the 3rd or 4th round and it won't be me. I'm of the opinion that there are several TE's that can be had around round 8 that will put up numbers very close to what Finley does. If I'm right about this it will give me a huge advantage over the guy who does take Finley. If I'm wrong he will gain a huge advantage over me.
 
high variance not high luck
strictly speaking, no. but variance measures uncertainty, and in this thread people are basically using the terms interchangeably. imo:In a league made up of competent players, the game ultimately does boil down to mostly luck. This is particularly true now, as opposed to say ten years ago. There's a wealth of easily accessible information on how to snake draft well now, even total mouthbreathers can do a solid job. Ten years ago the media carpet bombing didn't exist, nor did many sites like this one.Uncertainty is mitigated in auction drafts and in leagues with keeper rules, or in leagues with unusual scoring and/or linupes. Basically anything that deviates from the standard snake redraft that everyone and their mom has basically mastered at this point. Different types of rules can create spots where your opponents make mistakes, and mistakes are exploitable. No mistakes, nothing to exploit. And mistakes are really few and far between nowadays in boring old snake drafts.
 
Someone much smarter than me once said that the absolute diehard, that tirelessly tracks depth charts, TC and preseason preformances, injuries, waivers, etc. is probably yielding about an extra 6%-10% advantage TOPS over the guy drafting straight from the grid without reading a thing. I think that's fairly close.
In terms of your initial draft, this may be close to true. I think where the knowledge and information really plays out is in the ability to use the waiver wire effectively, manage your starting lineup, and make trades. Trades set the men apart from the boys.
 
Do you believe that there exists any game of skill that does not involve luck?
No luck whatsoever? No, not as long as the human element is involved. I do think there exist games where the skill factor is so much larger than the luck factor that luck doesn't play any role at all unless the two parties are both relatively equal in skill. Chess is one such game- I could get all the lucky breaks in the world and I'd never be able to beat a grandmaster.I think that's ultimately what luck boils down to. In any endeavor, if the skill gap is 0, then the outcome is a 50/50 proposition (i.e. determined totally by luck). If the skill gap is nonzero, then luck plays less of a role. The role luck plays is influenced by two factors- the size of the skill gap (the greater the skill gap, the less role luck plays) and the inherent uncontrollable randomness of the game (the greater the randomness, the more luck is involved). Games with less uncontrollable randomness are therefore more influenced by skill, but there's no game with absolutely no uncontrollable randomness as long as humans are involved.In terms of "heavily skill-based" vs "heavily luck-based", I think fantasy football falls pretty well on the luck-based side of the equation. I think a great chess player will beat a terrible chess player 99% of the time. I think a great fantasy football player will beat a terrible fantasy football player somewhere around 70% of the time.
If fantasy football was 100% skill, then the best owner in any given league would have a 100% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 0% lifetime winning percentage.If fantasy football was 100% luck, then the best owner in any given league would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage, and the worst owner would have a 50% lifetime winning percentage.
Not that simple at all. You can only have 1 draft per league, so if you had the "skill" to draft the #1 QB, RB/WR etc etc, you would still lose some weeks.
That's because there's luck in fantasy football. If there was no luck in fantasy football, then the best team would always win because there would be none of this "I had a bad break" or "my stud had a bad day" nonsense. Every player would score the exact same number of points every week. No one would ever get injured. The high scorer in one week would be the high scorer in every week as he went undefeated and won the championship. That's what fantasy football would look like if there was no luck involved.
 
this is not a horn-tooting post. in fact, in all 3 redraft leagues i'm in there are a lot of guppies (hometown or work leagues). these guys draft off of rankings or magazines usually. anyway, i have never missed the playoffs in any of these leagues (17 for 17). a lot of the guys in the leagues are decent to very good, and that is the point: if it was as much luck as some people claim i should have missed at least 5 times.

i think i'm pretty good at this hobby, but certainly not as good or informed as many in the SP. to me this indicates there must be a somewhat significant degree of skill involved somewhere. no other explanation makes much sense.

 
if it was as much luck as some people claim i should have missed at least 5 times.
I'm not sure you understand luck. If you correctly predict a coin toss 10 times in a row, does that mean coin-toss calling is now a game of skill? Because the odds say if luck were involved you should have missed 5 times?But I do get your general point and I agree with you. You can increase your edge with offseason prep and great inseason management.
 

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