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How Does Fantasy Football (DFS) Betting Work?

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What Is Fantasy Football And How Does It Work?

For years, I’ve participated in free fantasy football leagues on Yahoo!  Sometimes there’s a $10  at stake but usually it is just for bragging rights. Yahoo! has always been the fantasy football site of choice.  The free fantasy football setup is super easy to navigate and makes it easy for people across the country to setup leagues and add some excitement to football Sundays.

At some point in the not too distant past, Pennsylvania legalized playing fantasy football for money.  Within the Yahoo! Fantasy Football interface I discovered you could pick a lineup each week and compete against other people.  There are free contests that Yahoo! runs with cash prizes an there are paid contests.  The paid contests have an entry fee that ranges from $0.25 up to $10,500.  Most of the big ones on Yahoo! typically have entry fees between $0.25 and $20.  There are numerous online gaming fantasy football sites including Yahoo!, Draft Kings, Fan Duel and numerous others.

How does the daily fantasy football game thing work?

There are multiple game slates and single game slates.  On a typical fall Sunday there are a bunch of NFL football games played during the day. When you play a multi game slate you’ll get to pick players from all teams playing on a single day or in an afternoon (say games that start at 4:05pm on a Sunday).  When you play single game slates you get to pick players from the two teams playing each other.  Each player is assigned a salary.  On Yahoo! you get a salary cap of $200 for a multi-game slate for 9 positions.  For a single game slate you get a salary cap of $135 for 5 positions.  Each player playing n a game that day is assigned a salary based on their expected and historical performance.

Single Game And Multi-Game Slates

When you enter a multi-game slate you pick players for the following positions:

  • A single quarterback
  • Two running backs
  • Three wide receivers
  • One Tight End
  • One Defense
  • One “flex” player who can be anyone except for a defense or a quarterback

When you enter a Yahoo! single game slate you pick any 5 players from the two teams that are playing.  One player “superstar” and gets their point multiplied by 1.5X

How Does Fantasy Football Scoring Work?

Each player or defensive unit earns points when they do things like catch a pass or score a touchdown.  An individual player can lose points if the throw an interception, fumble the ball, lose a fumble.  Each defense starts out with 10 points and loses some number of points when they give up points to an opposing offense.  A defense gains points when they recover a fumble, score a touchdown, intercept a pass and things like that.  Each site does things a little differently.  Here are links to the scoring systems for some of the major fantasy football sites:

What Do You Need To Consider When You Play For Money And Pay An Entry Fee?

The incentive for companies to offer online fantasy football leagues and daily tournaments is of course to make money.  It’s important to understand how the companies that offer fantasy football make money.  The basic answer is they take in more money than they pay out.  They usually take a percentage of the prize pot before awarding it to winners.  The percentage the company running the contest takes is called “The Rake”.  The greater the “Rake”, the less money is paid out in prizes and the lower your chance of winning anything.  It is important to pay attention to the rake.

Fantasy football sites structure their fantasy football contests in different ways.  If you know what to look for you can  greatly improve your odds and enter contests with a zero or even negative “rake”.  In these contests the hosting site pays out as much or more in prizes than they take in in entry fees.  Now lets look at how some fantasy football contest are structured and why it is important!

Check out the following articles for an analysis of different fantasy football contest structures.

 

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