Staking Bales: Recapping a Profitable Week 1

I have to be honest: I was a little worried about Week 1. If you recall from my intro into this “Staking Bales” series, Josh has staked me $2,000 to play on four daily fantasy sites in an effort to show you guys how to build a bankroll. Well, sometimes you lose in daily fantasy football. Even if I’m a long-term winner, there’s no way I can be profitable each and every week. Not even close.

I knew heading into Week 1 that it wouldn’t be a major concern if we lost money, but I still wanted to remain profitable to start the season. There would be nothing worse than just tanking to start the year and losing $500 right off the bat.

But, I had a pretty good week. All told, I was profitable on three of the four sites, netting $334.48. That’s a 16.7 percent increase in bankroll, which is great for one week. Here’s the breakdown:

Here’s a screenshot of my cash on each site. I won’t do this every week, but I will post them periodically in an effort to be as transparent as possible.

FanDuel

DraftKings

DraftDay

StarStreet

I was particularly happy with this week because my tournament lineups were pretty awful. That’s obviously not a good thing, but it meant that I was dominant in heads-up matches. Here’s how the tournaments shook out:

That’s $102.00 in tournaments, or 5.1 percent of my bankroll. You might see that number increase slightly, depending on the opportunities available, but it will never be more than 10 percent.

I won $60.00 in the FanDuel FFFC late last night, or else this would have been a lot worse. But this is really what you have to expect with tournaments on most weeks; you take the steady losses for the shot at the big payday. If you can’t sustain consistent losses, you shouldn’t be playing tournaments.

But check out how I performed in non-tournaments:

I got killed on DraftDay, but otherwise I looked good this week. Around 90 percent of my non-tournaments were heads-up leagues, with a few 50/50s and small leagues sprinkled in. I maintained a profitable heads-up winning percentage on every site other than DraftDay, taking down 27 of 30 DraftKings heads-up leagues and 35 of 41 heads-up leagues on FanDuel. Here's a quick peek at my FanDuel Week 1 heads-up dominance:

By the way, you shouldn’t take your money out of sites if you have a few bad weeks. DraftDay isn’t any tougher to win at than DraftKings, for example, but I just submitted lineups that didn’t perform. It happens. We’ll assess site profitability at the end of the year when there’s a much larger sample of results.

The heads-up success is a great sign, but news alert: I’m not going to continue to win at some of these rates! I had a few really good lineups this week, but if you’re expecting me to win 80+ percent of heads-up leagues, you’re going to be disappointed.

If you had a profitable Week 1 like me, don’t get carried away. You’re not an 80 percent long-term winner. If you’re betting as if you are, you’re gonna go broke, bro.

And if you aren’t yet playing daily fantasy, what are you waiting for? There’s lots of cash to be made, so buy the Value Reports, read this series and my book, and get money.