Snapdraft Playoff Football Strategy

As I mentioned in my previous post, I think there was a great profit opportunity in the Snapdraft playoff football contests. My thinking was that the correct strategy in large multiplayer contests is always to create a much variance as possible, since it takes an extreme score to win these winner take all contests. Since you get nothing for coming in 2nd (or 10th), there's no point playing it safe. You can always create some variance in weekly contests, by taking players on the same team, whose scores are likely to correlate with eachother...for example, the QB and WR from the same team. In Snapdraft, that correlation (and thus variance) is amplified by the fact that all players on the winning team score an extra three points. In Snapdraft playoff football, it's further amplified by a great deal by the fact that players on the same team either will or won't advance to the next round together, making a team full of players on a Super Bowl winning team almost unbeatable. Since you can't pick a team of players all from one team, the correct strategy was to pick from two teams...ideally those who will make it all the way. I assumed that for the most part, others would not be following this plan, meaning that I didn't have to take into account which team combinations would be most popular. Otherwise, I might have shied away from the best teams.

So I entered $50 of $1 and $5 contests. Almost all were either 25 person contests or 101 person contests, with just a couple of 15s and 20s mixed in. My opponents managed to surprise me with how smart they were and how stupid they were at the same time! I'm generally unable to check live scoring in the 101s without freezing up my computer, but I looked through rosters for all teams in 3 of the 25 person contests. A relatively large percentage of people used the correct strategy - players from just two teams, or possibly two team plus Adrian Peterson if they obviously didn't think one of their teams had a viable running back. However, they almost universally did not pick a New Orleans - Indianapolis matchup! Considering that the Las Vegas odds have those two teams as the favorites, they should have been the most popular pick. Do people think that they know better than the odds? If so, they should reconsider...while the favorites won't always win, the odds are going to do a better job of making predictions in the long run than just about anybody. The only other possibility is that everybody incorrectly assumed that "everybody else will take NO-IND, so I'll be sneaky and take someone else".