The "Math" Behind Going Pro in Dfs

We all play DFS because we love the game. I don’t care who you are, or how much (or how little) time you spend researching, building lineups, or managing your bankroll, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t love daily fantasy sports. There’s nothing like building a team of your favorite players and sweating out the last few minutes of a game to see if you can squeak out a win, all while making a little extra cash.

But for players like myself, there’s always that pipe dream of one day building your bankroll to the point that you’ll be able to quit your job and play DFS for a living. I realize that there is virtually no chance it will ever happen for me, but I thought it would be a fun exercise to break down the math required to get to that point.

Disclaimer:, none of the math in this article is all that complicated and a decent amount of assumptions are made, so keep that in mind as we go through it.

Bankroll Requirements

For the sake of this exercise I’m going to assume that the average person would have a goal of making $50,000/year to consider the profits enough to live off of. Without further ado, here we go.

To make $50,000 per year, you would need to average about $961.54 per week. Assuming you play an average of 4 days per week over the course of the year (possibly more during baseball/basketball season and less around this time), that would mean that you’d need an average of a $240.38 profit per day.

Let’s assume the average profitable grinder can maintain a steady 7% ROI from H2H and Double Up games, since these games would be the bread and butter of a grinder looking to make an income without too much risk.

To average $240 per day with a 7% ROI, you would need to play 240/.07, or $3,434 each and every day. That’s a big chunk of change. Keep in mind that this number can change depending on how you vary your lineups, but as a simple baseline it works.

Using a general rule of putting 10% of your bankroll in play at any given time, this means that to safely make this income (assuming you’re a profitable player) you’d need a bankroll of just over $34,000. That’s a LOT of money.

How Long Would it Take?

After realizing this number and feeling thoroughly depressed by the impossibility of ever having a bankroll that size, I decided to take it one step further and figure out how long it would take me to grow my modest $400 bankroll to $34,000 assuming the same profitablity (a big assumption considering the small sample size I have so far).

In Investing there is a rule known as the “Rule of 72”. Essentially, the premise is that you divide 72 by the annual percentage interest rate to determine how many years it would take to double your money. For example, if you had $10,000 in an investment with an interest rate of 8%, it would take 72/8, or 9 years to double your money to $20,000.

We can apply this rule to DFS by using the ROI instead of the interest rate and using a daily rate instead of an annual one. So in my example, we start with $400 and assume a 7% ROI. This means that the money I play with ($40 in this case) would double every 10.3 days that I play DFS.

With this knowledge, I put a formula into Excel and ran it until it got my total bankroll to $34,000.

Long story short? At that (very generous) rate it would take me 638 days of grinding DFS without ever making a single withdrawal to get a bankroll large enough to comfortably grind an income out of. That’s 638 days of actual playing, which at a rate of 4 days per week comes out to 3 years of non stop grinding! Sounds pretty overwhelming.

Conclusion

If you took the time to read through this whole article, I commend you, because you may just have the patience to make it as a long term grinder!

I think the lesson to be had here is that if you want to go pro, the best way to build your bankroll is to simply win one of the big tourneys and bring home a cool million bucks. So what are you waiting for? Start throwing all your money at the qualifiers!

Sigh, why do I torture myself with these numbers? Ah well, back to the grind!