Daily blurb
Those under the age of 30 probably don’t recall Don Meredith (who passed away this morning.) After 9 years (1960-68) as the QB of the Cowboys, he shared the MNF booth as the “folksy” counterpoint to Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford for many years. But since retiring from that gig after the 1984 season, he hasn’t been seen much, appearing in a few commercials (Lipton Tea) along with limited TV and film appearances. Wikipedia notes that Meredith is “said to be the only player to play his high school (Mount Vernon), college (SMU), and pro (Dallas Cowboys) career in and around the Dallas, TX area. He never played a home game, on any level, outside of North Texas.”

I’ve been regularly playing daily basketball contests at FanDuel.com this NBA season. I have had an affiliate relationship with FanDuel for about a year (so if you do decide to try it, please register after clicking one of the links from this site), but I must confess that I have not been a regular participant until lately. I’ve really been enjoying the hoops experience. The advantage of daily contests is that every day you get to start fresh – picking a roster without having to live with any carryover impact from yesterday’s mistakes. And you can always decide not to play on any given day, if you don’t like the options, or simply don’t have the time to play that day. I thought I might start sharing some of my personal results and observations.

We are now 41 days into the NBA regular season, and I have played a single contest on 30 of those days. I’ve been focused entirely on the salary cap format, and have exclusively played in the “Expert” contests which have a salary cap of $55K (vs. the more flexible and more popular $65K contests.) There is always a self-selection issue for any contest labeled as “Expert”; I’m sure it scares away many of the weaker competitors. But I like the need to have to ferret out the cheaper options. In those 30 contests, I’ve won 18, for a 60% win rate (so far). I’ve been exclusively playing the $5 head-to-head contests, for which the winner wins $9. If you do the math, that means I’ve won $162 on a cumulative investment of $150. That’s not going to make me rich, but if I can effectively play regularly against strong competition for free, I’m game. I’ve faced 22 different opponents in those 30 contests, so there is clearly a critical mass of potential opponents playing at the site – many who are playing much more frequently than I am.

Although the basis of my daily research is the RotoGuru sortable stats (and notice how I have configured the filters in that link to display only players appearing on a given day), it’s also been important to look for daily opportunities brought on by injuries and illnesses. For example, last Friday I capitalized on Marcin Gortat when Dwight Howard was announced as out. In a $55K contest, each contest entry has 9 slots, so the average player must have a value of about $6000 or less. Gortat was priced at $4600 that day, so he provided room to upgrade elsewhere. Prices are reset daily, trending toward “fair value”, so some of the early-season cheapies have now migrated up to fairer value, which means you have to be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities.

Yesterday, I thought I might be dead early, as my opponent had Amir Johnson, who played in one of the early games and probably had his career day. Further, we were effectively playing 5-on-5, as four of our players were identical. But by the end of the night, I had come back to prevail, after strong games from Love and Griffin. My other unmatched cheapies (Barbosa, Jawad Williams, and Kaman) were OK albeit uninspired, but cheap enough to allow me to load up on the other two studs, who carried the day.