Yesterday afternoon I received an email from DraftKings with a 'special offer': A free $3 NFL Ticket with a paid entry into their NBA Opening Tip Off contest. The entry cost was $8 with a top prize of $250,000. (You know, that really isn't much after Uncle Sam get's after it...)
Being the sucker for value that I am, and already interested, but inexperienced, in DFS basketball, I figured I'd give it a shot. Since the waning days of baseball's regular season, I've been ruminating on which sport I ought to try my hand at next (in addition to the NFL): hockey or basketball? After brief investigation, combined with my general apathy towards hockey, I had all but decided to go the NBA Way when this offer popped up in my Inbox.
Basketball, it is. And what better night to get started than Opening Night?
I don't possess great knowledge about hoops, but I do lightly follow the sport as the Celtics are pretty big around here. And since I subscribe to a few of the Line-Up Optimizer products, my approach was pretty simple: Choose two of the top projected scorers on the card, and click the Optimize button to generate a line-up.
Bingo.
This was really a flier as fliers go. Projected points were 272. After a brief check as to the average winning totals for contests of this size, I determined that this ought to be enough, as research shows exactly 272 points is usually good enough to prevail.
Survey Says:
Rookie luck prevails as my entry scored 277.25 points, good enough for 19,940th place out of 147,058 entries, a Top 14 percent finish in the field. The highest scoring 30800 entries, or so, actually cashed.
Why made this truly a fun sweat was the fact that I had just three players in the first game, Philadelphia @ Boston. Following that game, my DFS entry was in 98,000th place. However, over the course of the second game, I was leaping the field by tens of thousands of places at a time as Golden State's Steph Curry and Kevin Durant ran up their totals on their way to a 108-100 win over Oklahoma City.
Granted, this was a min-cash for $12, but adding in the $3 NFL ticket pushed my ROI to 93.75%. Now, if only I could just get my 401k to post returns like that...
The moral of this story? Apparently any idiot can win playing Daily Fantasy NBA on DraftKings. And tonight, I just might take another three point shot ($3 entry) into my new DFS distraction...
Good luck with your bets and favorite teams!