If you have an account with PokerStars on FanDuel in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Ontario, there’s a good chance you already know your way around the subject of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS).
Use your knowledge and skills to build a successful roster, stay under the salary cap, and you can win some money while getting a fun sweat with some skin in the game — or, lots of games at once.
But can those same things that make you a winner in DFS help you at the poker table?
You’d better believe it. And with PokerStars available exclusively at FanDuel in the states above, a game is just a click away.
Here are three reasons why the skills you’ve picked up playing DFS can give you an edge in your next poker game.
1. You know how to maximize value
Just like if you were building a real sports team, being able to identify mispriced players in DFS is a great way to extract maximum value from your spend. You might have even read a book or seen a movie about it.
If you study the data and drill down into the metrics that matter, so the principle goes, you can find players that deliver returns greater than their price says they should.
Give that scenario a small twist and you’ve got one of the core principles of successful poker: maximizing your expected value.
At a basic level, consider a situation when you face a bet with a drawing hand. You’re on the turn, there’s $90 in the pot when your opponent bets $10, and you have nothing but four cards to a flush.
Some quick calculations reveal that there are 9 cards in the deck that will fill your flush, and 46 potential cards that could fall on the river. 9/46 gives you around a 4-to-1 chance to hit, but you’re getting 10-to-1 odds on that $10 call. That’s great value: make the call.
Another example might be when you’re on the river holding the nuts, and weighing up your bet size. You need to evaluate your opponent, their playing style, the table dynamics and their potential holdings, and figure out the highest bet you can make that they’ll call.
The winning margins in both poker and DFS can be thin, so finding extra value wherever you can is crucial.
2. You understand the competition
‘Chalk’ in DFS refers to players that have a high ownership rate. That means that any points they earn for you, they’ll also earn for much of your competition.
Of course, there are going to be great reasons why a player is widely owned, and just because that’s the case it doesn’t mean you should ignore them; doing so could result in you falling behind not just one opponent, but many.
But in DFS tournaments, in particular, it’s important to have enough variety in your selection to differentiate your team from the larger field. At the most basic level, if your team is exactly the same as someone else’s then the best you can ever do is tie with them. That’s where understanding how the wider population is thinking can be an edge.
An understanding of population tendencies in poker is also incredibly useful. For example, you may find that, at certain stakes or in certain fields, players open with a wide range from late position but overfold to 3-bets. They might have an unbalanced preflop 4-bet range, with very few bluffs, or check/fold a lot of turns if their flop c-bets get called.
Reading a player is a valuable skill, but so is reading the field.
3. You can remain objective
Here’s the thing about sports: it’s tough not to play favorites.
If you’re into DFS, you probably follow sports, and if you’re into that you most likely have a favorite team. But you know deep down that, just because they’re your team, that doesn’t mean the facts don’t matter.
When you’re drafting your DFS teams you need to remain objective and make each decision based on the results you predict, not your emotional response.
And it’s the same in poker.
Maybe you desperately want to stack an opponent who you dislike, or who you feel is a worse player but getting too lucky. Maybe you’ve had your opens 3-bet five times in a row, and are being baited into making a stand with a hand you know you should really let go.
Or perhaps you just won the biggest pot of the night and are experiencing ‘winner’s tilt’, paying off bets you’d usually fold because you’re high off adrenaline and feel you can’t miss — no matter what everything else is telling you.
It’s difficult to stay objective, and very few are able to master this side of the game completely. But we need to try, because it’s only when we’re thinking rationally that we make the best decisions we can.
And that’s the key to success in poker, in DFS, and pretty much everything else.
Put these tips into action at PokerStars on FanDuel, where poker and DFS is available right now.
US players head here to learn more; Ontarians, this link’s for you.
