This is the third of a series of posts about the next evolution in valuing players for fantasy football. Just as value based drafting (VBD) corrected many of the errors in drafting by pure points scored, Random Win % (RW%) corrects many areas which VBD does not address easily. The end result - better drafts, more wins, and more championships!
What makes one fantasy football team better than another? We've all been in games where one team was a huge underdog yet ended up winning. This is also a theme in poker games like Texas Hold Em, as anyone who has lost an all-in bet with pocket Aces knows. There are a lot of similarities between fantasy football and Texas Hold Em. Both games start with a known quantity and then introduce randomness. The end result is that you can start out as an overwhelming favorite yet end up a loser.
One of the key tools of a good Texas Hold Em player is an understanding of the relative strength of starting hands. While 2 Aces is a better hand than 2 Kings, how much better is it? To answer this question, we have to know how likely our hand will beat our opponent's hand after all the cards are shown.
Here's the problem: the number of possible games is massive. To work around this, poker odds calculators simulate millions of hands and count how often one hand beats another. Due to the power of random sampling, we can get very good estimates without having to calculate every possibility.
I apologize for the digression into poker, but the concepts are critical to RW%. In my next post, we will use these concepts in fantasy football to definitively answer the question "how much better is an awesome player compared to a scrub?"
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