Matthew Martin: Proffesional Gambling and Daily Fantasy Sports

Ride The Wave #1

Introduction

By: Daniel Magazu

"Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today." – James Dean.

Congratulations! Welcome to the first Ride The Wave post. 

Every week Ride The Wave will feature a new guest in the newsletter. Our first guest is featured below after our brief introduction.

Our guests will feature people who are remarkably talented in a particular field. 

The goal is to allow readers to meet enjoyable and successful individuals and prove to people that working to follow your dream is a priceless reward.

How will you benefit from our articles?

You will find inspiration to explore your passions. 

Forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, harness your power your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart, and success will come to you. -Oprah Winfrey

Every person featured in the newsletter will demonstrate how pursuing their passion has led to a fulfilling work life.

Perhaps someone's success story will spark inspiration for you to try something similar.

When you are working on something you love, work no longer feels restricting. You will never have a job because you love what you work on. 

You will grow your network. 

"The richest people in the world look for and build networks, everyone else looks for work. Marinate on that for a minute."—Robert Kiyosaki.

Successful individuals surround themselves with other successful individuals.

I will make it straightforward to connect and contact our guests. If you find something inspirational or have questions for the guest, I will make it easy to interact with them.

The goal is to create a community of like-minded individuals who will help each other grow.

You will learn unique lessons from successful individuals. 

"My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had -- everyday I'm learning something new." -Richard Branson.

Gaining different perspectives from people will open up your mind to be capable of thinking in a wide variety of ways.

Learning from other successful individuals will show you that there is no one path to success.

You will see different strategies that individuals have explored that have allowed them to build a name for themselves in their particular field. You will learn from the experiences of others.

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This week, Ride The Wave features our first guest, Matt Martin.

Matt is a football expert. He specializes in daily fantasy football and professional gambling, where he has amassed well over $30,000 in winnings. 

He is a lead analyst at Fantasy Labs and Daily Fantasy Insider, publishing articles for two top football analytic companies.

Matt proves that you can pursue your sports dreams without being an athlete. Let's hear his story.

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A Career in Football

By: Matt Martin

To go into detail about how I've reached where I am today, I think it's essential to go back to the birth of my passion. Speaking anecdotally, I find that most people my age with burning desires can point back to a galvanizing moment/set of moments. 

For me, my passion isn't that out of the ordinary. I love football. I love everything about football. It's been a part of my life for as long as I remember. 

However, it's been a part of my life differently than most people. A good chunk of the people my age who are obsessed with football grew up playing the sport—playing youth football with their friends and under the lights on Friday nights in high school.

Despite my father being a former college football player, I've never played a snap of actual football. I grew up with two older brothers, one eight years older and the other five years. My oldest brother played a year of youth football, and my other brother played just as much as me, zero. So you're probably wondering, where did my passion start?

As most younger brothers do, they idolize their older siblings. When my oldest brother was in high school, he and his best friend were bookies and would also bet on games. For those of you who don't know, a bookie is someone who takes the place of an actual sportsbook. They accept bets from gamblers, pay out winnings, and collect losses. 

So, on Sundays, my brother and his friend would sit in our basement and root for their bets and against the bets that other people would take. In the early years of elementary school, I would sit with them and cheer.

Through this, I became obsessed with football and became a diehard fan of the sport, along with my favorite team (Go Pack). My brothers also played in many fantasy football leagues, so I would sit in on drafts and watch them draft away. I remember convincing one of my brother's friends to draft DeAngelo Williams in the first round, who was a running back for the Carolina Panthers. I don't think I've ever actually apologized, so Philip, I'm sorry for making you draft Williams. But, in my defense, I was 9 or 10 years old, so you probably shouldn't have been listening to me in the first place.

This went on for years, and as I got older, I started playing in my own leagues. Once my brothers discovered DraftKings, FanDuel, and all Daily Fantasy Sports, it didn't take long for me also to become fully invested. Thankfully, DraftKings and FanDuel didn't make you verify your age back in the early 2010s. While most kids were looking at schoolwork in middle school and high school, I was on DraftKings building lineups and texting my brothers about players.

I was terrible initially, as most people are at any new thing they try. I would roster Johnny Manziel because I thought he was cool (although he helped me turn $2 into $40 during my Freshman year of high school. He threw two 50+ yard touchdowns to Travis Benjamin). 

However, as the years went on, I started to get better as I played more and more. Based on matchups and prices, I began to figure out who my opponents were going to play, and I would use this knowledge to find a different player with a similar outlook at far lower ownership.

My oldest brother started working for Daily Fantasy Insider as an NBA and NFL analyst but didn't have enough time for the NFL work. During my Freshman year of college, he mentioned to them my interest and knowledge of football, and I took over his role as an NFL analyst. I was assigned four teams each season, and each week I would dig into the respective teams' matchups and prices, and I would compile my research to provide a writeup as to why certain players were worth using in daily fantasy. 

During my Sophomore year of college, I started to level up my talents and improve as a daily fantasy player/gambler overall. After years of watching and studying the game of football, I learned that even I couldn't always predict what would happen. I was reasonably good at predicting who would win games, but when it came to who would produce each week for what team in each game, it was a crapshoot. 

People fall, drop balls, blow coverages, and miss throws. It's an odd game, yet, everyone believes they know what will happen. Different studies give varying results, but somewhere between 3-5% of all sports bettors are profitable in the long run. If these people all "know what's going to happen, " why don't they win more? 

No one knows what's going to happen. People refuse to look at themselves in the mirror and admit they're wrong. Unfortunately, they're often wrong, and this is where I strike in daily fantasy. Each week, certain players are highly owned in contests, meaning a high percentage of other people playing in the tournaments use those players. These players become highly owned because of a multitude of reasons, but the consensus is that the public believes that this player is going to play well. 

This thought process works in all daily fantasy sports. For example, even the best batters in baseball go 0-4 in a game, and the best pitchers perform poorly.

So we know players can play poorly, but the other primary strategy in daily fantasy is game selection. This refers to the type of contests that I play in. You've seen the commercials where somebody turns $20 into $1,000,000. Yes, this is possible, but it is improbable. To win those types of contests, you basically need to hit a huge parlay and have all your players hit a top-percentile outcome.

I instead aim for smaller contests, ideally between 20-300 people. When you limit your number of opponents, you limit the number of people who can beat you. This is obvious, but it makes a lot of sense when partnering with my strategy of avoiding high-owned players. 

For example, if I'm playing in a contest with 100 people, and 50% use a player who does extremely poorly, while I don't play him, I have a huge leg up on the competition. With such an advantage over the rest of the players, I don't need a top 1% outcome from my players to win, more like a top 10% outcome to have a good shot at finishing highly in the contest.

If I implore this same strategy in a contest with 100,000 and 50,000 have a player who does very bad, it's far less valuable. So, yes, half of the field is still way behind me, but I'm still competing against 50,000 others. 

More often than not, it isn't just one higly owned player. It's usually a few players from the same team, as their success is correlated. For example, it may be a few hitters on the same baseball team, or a quarterback and a couple of his receivers. Instead of choosing the highly owned, correlated "stack" of players, I prefer a low-owned one with the potential to score many points. When the high-owned players do poorly, you don't need that much to break your way to win, as seen by my recent win in Week 3 of the NFL season.

https://twitter.com/mattmartin_19/status/1574191039010820096

If you are looking to learn more about my DFS strategies, here is one of my strategy articles on a particular week last year, or you can reach out to me on Twitter : 

https://www.the33rdteam.com/breakdowns/daily-fantasy-strategy-analyzer/

https://twitter.com/mattmartin_19

Besides daily fantasy sports, I've also found a lot of success betting, especially in football.

As most people start off betting, they look at a bunch of games and say, "there's NO WAY team X loses to team Y!". Then you fast-forward to the end of the game, and they've lost their money.

This is an acceptable way to gamble, and you must be honest with yourself. Are you looking for a little bit of fun? Some harmless parlays to have something to root for? If that's the case, then perfect!

I found that this is not who I am as a bettor. I believe I will be right more often than I'm going to be wrong, so I devise my strategy around that. 

The first part of my strategy is my wager amounts. If you're going to deploy an approach like mine, it's wise to deploy the "unit" system. This is where you assign a value to "one unit," and you bet based on that. Most of the time, I'll make most of my bets to win one unit. If you're throwing different amounts of money on each bet, you could be right 60% of the time but still, be a losing gambler.

Another key strategy for me is utilizing trends. I don't bet blindly on trends but like to work them into my thought process when looking at betting lines. There is a multitude of trends out there, and that's why you don't want to bet on them blindly. There can be numerous trends that support both sides of the same game. 

Some examples of trends are 

• An underdog coming off a loss

• Coach X of an underdog of 7+ points

• QB is coming off of a multi-game losing streak

For example, a few for this week (Week 7 NFL)

• Matt Lafleur and Aaron Rodgers are 10-2 straight up and against the spread after a loss

• Mike Tomlin is 38-15-1 against the spread as an underdog from Week 5 on in the regular season

• Teams coming off games in Lambeau Field are 89-65-3 against the spread in their next game in the past twenty years.

These trends are fantastic, but you don't want to get too out of hand. For example, Bill Belichick has some amazing trends, but how much of his sample size includes Tom Brady? Remember, context matters. 

Here are a couple of other vital things that I'll hit on:

• Don't overreact to one week.

  • Teams have bad performances; other teams have outliers with good performances. Don't let one game sway you too heavily in one direction.

• You're betting on a number, not on teams.

  • You must put away your bias and look at games on paper, putting specific anecdotes aside. Use this past week, for example. The Broncos have been a dumpster fire to start the year and have been in the media spotlight. On the other hand, the Chargers' are everyone's favorite team to root for. So, what now? The Broncos were 4.5-point underdogs, which fit perfectly into the media's portrayal of the two teams. With the Chargers' missing tons of key players, and some stats leading me toward believing Denver was due for some positive regression, it was a no-brainer for me. Yes, Denver has looked bad. Yes, Russell Wilson is my mortal enemy after what he did to my beloved Packers in the 2014 NFC Championship game. Still, +4.5 was too many points, regardless of how cringey Russell Wilson is. Bet on numbers, not teams.

• Look out for critical numbers.

  • The majority of NFL games end on the numbers 3 and 7, as they are considered key numbers.

• Place bets early in the week

  • If you're too late to get "value" on a betting line, you should wait until closer to kickoff. However, a strategy I've utilized is looking for "closing line value." I'll look at gambling lines for Sunday or Monday Night for the following weekend. If I see a team is +7.5, but I think that line should be +6.5, I'll bet that at that moment. Fast forward to Wednesday, and the line is +6.5, and I've gotten a lot of value, having bet it before it crossed the key number. 

  • You're not going to get these results every time, but it will prove profitable in the long run. 

• The odds (-110, +200) represent probabilities

  • If a team's Moneyline is set at -200, they're expected to win this game ⅔ of the time.

    • A -200 bet would be risking $20 to win $10. If they play three times and win twice, you would break even

  • If you disagree with some of these probabilities, put some money on it!

  • Many professionals have betting models that give them a percent chance of an event happening, and they bet based on that. 

My work now:

I'm still working with Daily Fantasy Insider, writing the specific players for DraftKings and FanDuel weekly. On top of that, I have recently started a job with Fantasy Labs, where I write six weekly articles.

Four articles are positional breakdowns for DFS (QB, RB, WR, TE), and you'll see those reposted on my Twitter when they're published each week. Here's a link to one of last week's articles. 

https://twitter.com/FantasyLabs/status/1580994354222895104

The other articles are for player prop bets on Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football. I combine my game analysis with one of our analytical models to find player props that show a lot of value. 

Here's a link to my most recent writeup on Monday Night's Chargers-Broncos game, where I went 1-1 in props due to Joshua Kelley leaving the game after his first snap due to injury. The props are 17-9 on the year, and the articles are free to read, so read them and make some free money!

For me, writing all of these articles isn't considered work. Football is something that I love, and I've known for a while that I have no interest in doing a job that I consider tedious. Of course, everyone wants to enjoy their work, but my key focus has been ensuring that I'm good enough at what I like that I'll get paid to do it. 

People aren't paying you to do something you like just because you enjoy it. So you need to prove to be valuable.

Proving to be valuable shouldn't be too tricky since you're doing what you love. It will help if you strive to be the best you can be. My skills in the football industry are far improved from where they were two years ago, and I plan on being noticeably improved two years from now. 

The main thought that stuck with me when I started in this industry was, "I am already doing this out of pleasure; I might as well get paid for it." 

Find something you enjoy doing, and get paid for it. Then it won't be considered work.

The link to my Twitter account and my email address are below. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions on anything I wrote about or anything else.

Email: matjmartin@umass.edu

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattmartin_19