Daily Fantasy Sports is a Dying Profession
It’s still profitable to play, but I can see the end because DFS is following poker’s profitably trajectory, albeit at a much quicker decline.
In 2003-2010, poker was booming.
Chris Moneymaker, 2003 WSOP champion and unlikely pioneer of the poker boom
It was ubiquitous on ESPN channels, the recreational players were significantly weaker than the professionals, and the ratio of recreational to professional players in online games was high enough that virtually any online table or live tournament was profitable for me.
After Black Friday forced the largest poker sites out of the US, the better American professionals moved to continue playing poker while all the recreational players and weaker professionals from USA quit playing: the games were instantly more difficult, and spurred a revolution in poker which forced everyone who continued to play to improve, but made all the games less profitable.
Daily Fantasy Sports Boom Period: 2013-2016
Constant advertisements on sports channels, weak professionals, and clueless recreational players made it highly profitable. Poker and DFS have many similarities, but one of the biggest differences was scalability: I can enter a lineup in every contest on the site while poker requires attention: the amount I could play was limited by the number of tables I could focus on at once. As I became one of the best in the world in a few different sports, I was able to play very big and grow profits at a rate that was impossible in poker.
Scalability and Access to Information Ruined Profitability
The scalability has a downside: introduce just one shark into the ecosystem and there is an instant non-trivial drop in profitability. This issue leads me to the other large difference between DFS and poker: preparation. Playing DFS is like having to map out a game theory optimal strategy for one hand of poker, while playing poker requires many on the spot decisions that can only be made through countless hours of practice. Let me explain this better using an example.
Suppose you wanted to play poker in a casino tonight and asked me for some tips. I would give you a basic hand chart that told you what hands to open from each position, and general guidelines on how to play in others, but you would still have to go play poker and you’d quickly find yourself in unique situations that I wasn’t able to cover in a brief lesson. Compare this to DFS, where I can tell you 6 guys you need to play, and a handful of viable choices at each unfilled position. With just a couple minutes of advice you can now go make a lineup that nobody in the world can beat after rake. So making that one new shark in an ecosystem is far easier with less barriers than poker.
There are many websites devoted to helping others be better DFS players: Rotogrinders, Fantasylabs, DailyRoto and FanVice are some of the more popular ones. These sites have successful DFS players giving out strong advice for every sport every day. The growth of these sites, combined with reduced advertising due to legislation, and rising rake means the games are dying at a much quicker rate than poker. I see the end coming and I’m preparing for it.
Cryptocurrency is the (my) future
I bought my first bitcoins back in 2013 when the price was roughly $550, then sold them off when it hit $800 because it felt unsustainable. But mid last year I was more bullish on the market, and started buying as many as I could, and I diversified by using my BTC to first buy Ether, and then other cryptos.
It should come as no surprise that due to the parabolic rise of the crypto market and the ever increasing difficulty of DFS, I've made the majority of my profits this year because of cryptocurrency investments. Every few years I am left wondering how I could be so lucky: I stumbled into poker at its peak, stumbled into DFS at its peak, and stumbled into cryptocurrency at the right time. But now that I'm here, I need to make the most of it.
I can still make decent money in DFS: in the first 2 months of the MLB season, I made $22,616. However, this pales in comparison to the money that can be made in the crypto space. I'll still play the upcoming NFL season, but that is less time consuming than other sports and I'll be able to treat it like a part time job.
Approaching a Bear Market?
There has been speculation in the past few months that we are approaching either a rapid or extended downtrend. From one perspective, this would argue that I should continue playing DFS and simply HODL my coins and not think about what's happening. However, I argue the opposite: by managing my assets during the downtrend properly, I can mitigate the losses more than my expected DFS profits.
How to improve my knowledge?
Restarting my computer science education
Comp Sci was my 2nd major in undergrad, but it's been over 10 years since then. I'm currently taking CS50: Introduction to Computer Science offered by Harvard as a refresher. The course teaches the basics of programming languages, and we learn C, Python, Javascript, MySQL, and a few other useful languages.
I signed up for a monthly membership at codecademy: I took the Python course, and learned Command Line, and plan on doing their full stack path.
I've looked into a few coding bootcamps, but they all run at bad times for me, so I'll probably just do it on my own using online resources.
Taking CryptoCurrency classes
The University of Nicasio in Cyprus is offering a graduate level program in Digital Currency. The first class is a free MOOC (massive open online class) that starts September 4th -- I suggest signing up. To finish the graduate degree you have to take at least 8 more courses (some required, some elective) which cost 1510 euros each, for a total cost of €12,080 for all 9 courses.
Learning to trade
A while back the steemspeak trading guys recommended taking the pips course. Other than this, I'll need a refresher on some economics classes and maybe even a personalized MBA from online classes. Any suggestions here?
Studying Individual Cryptos
Read whitepapers, research teams behind projects, look at price history charts, read rumors, reddits etc. You can learn a lot about a cryptocurrency in a few hours of research. Of course it helps to have the coding, economics, and digital currency abstract understanding to work your way through the material efficiently, but anyone can skip those steps and just read everything they can.
I was originally planning on making a "Learn a CryptoCurrency a Day" series where I outlined my thoughts on a different coin every day, but that's a bit too restrictive. I'll occasionally post my thoughts on one (more so to help me remember through explaining it), but I don't want to pigeonhole myself into a routine on it.
Any Suggestions?
I know more about the space than most of the people I talk to, which is a problem because I don't know nearly as much as many of the people on this site, so I need to crowdsource some suggestions: just anything you guys think I should add to my list of topics to study, magazines/articles to read, people to follow on steemit/twitter, etc.
Thanks! Looking forward to a new adventure.
My name is Ryan Daut and I'd love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my page, then click 
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I am a professional gambler, and my interests include poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.