The industry of daily fantasy sports (DFS) is growing. Entry fees for daily sports tournaments, where users hand-pick line-ups of actual athletes and earn money depending on their players’ statistical performance, produce millions of dollars in annual income for market leaders DraftKings and Fanduel.
While football is a display of physical strength and precise coordination, fantasy football is all about the statistics. The goal is to use my understanding of mathematics and optimization methodologies to assist me in creating the ideal DraftKings football lineup each week.
What is DFS?
To begin, you must first comprehend the game’s fundamental fundamentals. In this situation, you should concentrate solely on daily fantasy football. Users “draught” an NFL roster each week, aiming to maximise their potential for fantasy points while remaining within a $50,000 salary cap. Each week, DraftKings assigns salaries to specific players based on their predicted performance. DraftKings also limits the makeup of your squad, with most competitions needing one quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, one tight end, one team defence, and one “flex” position (this can be filled by either a running back, wide receiver, or tight end). The user must pay an entrance fee to participate in a contest, and prize money is awarded to the top-scoring teams at the conclusion of the week.
There are several approaches to putting together a lineup. Some users select players from their preferred NFL teams, while others seek to “stack” numerous players from a single high-scoring game. These pseudo-strategies appeared to me to be far too subjective and inconsistent to be used as a programmed solution.
The Knapsack issue
To further NFL Fanduel optimizer comprehend this issue, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you’re in a world on the verge of a zombie apocalypse. To bunker down and weather the epidemic, you must abandon your city flat and travel to the countryside. You only have a single backpack to load with your most prized possessions, and the bag can only hold 50 lbs. How do you decide which of your possessions to put in the backpack in order to maximise the worthwhile remaining within the 50-pound weight limit?
The challenge does not appear to be very tough at first glance, but it is far more complicated than it appears. The knapsack problem is NP-complete, which means that no polynomial-time solution has been found to solve it. Polynomial-time refers to the problem’s temporal complexity in this context. Given varying amounts of inputs, time complexity is a technique to estimate how long an algorithm could take to run in the worst-case scenario.