Snapdraft Pricing and Lineups

As I was looking through the teams for the Snapdraft football playoff contests, I found one that had an identical lineup to my team in the same contest. This problem is more common at Snapdraft than it is at other contest sites, such as Fanduel, for two reasons: Snapdraft has the largest multiplayer contests, and they never update player prices during the season. This problem becomes amplified during the playoffs, when there are fewer players to choose from.

So, should I care if somebody is using the same lineup as me? My initial instinct was that this is a disaster. After all, if I win, I'm going to have to share the prize. But let's think about that a bit. In the contest where this happened, the other player and I both selected a lineup made up only of players from the Saints and Colts. I've discussed in previous posts how the structure of Snapdraft's playoff contest virtually guarantees that if those two teams make it to the Super Bowl, a lineup made up of those two teams is going to be the winner. In this case, nobody other than the two of us limited themselves to Saints and Colts. Let's assume that there's a 20% chance that we'll have a Saints-Colts Super Bowl this year. So with identical lineups, there's a 20% chance that I'll win $50 (half of the first prize). Now imagine, that instead of Hartley (the Saints kicker), my opponent had chosen Stover (the Colts kicker). One of the two of us would still win...but we definitely wouldn't share the prize, and the total chance that one of us wins wouldn't increase. I'd have only a 10% chance of winning a $100. Either way, my 'expected' winnings would be $10. And the variance is lower with identical lineups, which is generally a preferable situation.

In other words, having identical lineups isn't as bad as it sounds. Now imagine that five other players had various combinations of Saints-Colts players. Now THAT would be bad...whether or not any of the lineups matched mine exactly.