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Sports

You’re Not Smart Enough To Make A Living Off Fantasy Sports

Did you know you can make thousands of dollars a week by watching sport?

Drew Dinkmeyer plays fantasy sports for a living and makes a lot of money doing it. That’s right, this dude watches sport, talks about it, plays in a bunch of fantasy leagues and doesn’t live in his mum's basement. Before you finish unbuttoning your pants and call your boss to tell him to suck it, we should probably say he’s one of the very, very few people who have made it work. But if you still insist on ordering that pizza and finally making a pass at your HR manager’s daughter at least read how he does it first.

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VICE: When I was preparing these questions I was wondering about what you say when people ask what you do for a living?
Drew Dinkmeyer: I sort of try and gauge their level of knowledge, if it’s an older person who doesn't know much about fantasy sports I say I'm an entrepreneur or I run a website. If it's somebody with more exposure or who I know is a sports fan I’ll explain I play fantasy sports for a living—that dovetails into a whole different conversation. It’s a difficult question, I'm still trying to figure out the answer.

Are they amazed or do they assume you’re spinning shit and are unemployed?  
I’d say most are pretty astounded: even people who have a good concept about fantasy sport generally don't understand how you could make a living doing it. I try explain I dont just play the games, we also run a website that gives recommendations to players and is subscription based so that’s a portion of my income, and I host a radio show.

People do assume that’s the bigger portion of my income because it’s more consistent with what they think of as real jobs—but in reality it’s a small portion of my income.

Looking at the playing of the games—not the subsidiary stuff—how do you make money from this?
The daily fantasy industry has grown so significantly that on any night you can play 15-20 thousand dollars worth of games. If you're playing that much and you’re upside on any given night you could be winning 30-40 thousand dollars. There was one guy this past football weekend that won 150 thousand dollars, just in one weekend.

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That’s astounding. How much do you make a week?
It’s hard to map out; it’s similar to a day trade where your income can be lumpy in terms of how it comes in. But what got me doing this as a living is that for two years I’d made a salary in the daily games that was comparable to what I was making as a financial analyst for an investment consultant firm.

This sounds a lot like investing.
It’s exceptionally similar. When I tell people often the first question people will ask is: So you’re a professional gambler? And I’ll say: well it really depends on your views on gambling—if you consider a professional poker player a gambler or a day trader a gambler then yes it’s very similar.

The legality issues of poker versus daily fantasy are a big topic because online poker has been largely outlawed with the exception of Las Vegas. But there’s a lot of overlap between them. No one questions the integrity day trading though—it’s all in the same realm—essentially using math or intuition to understand and value players or stocks. Then it’s about trying to extract the most potential value out of a combination of other stocks or players.

Do you think it runs the risk of facing restrictions like online poker?
That’s certainly the risk, my own personal views are that in the US all the states are facing some sort of financial challenges and are gonna need to find ways to garner additional avenues to make money— this is an easy way.

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If you can make money through income tax, why make something illegal that’s a potential revenue driver? I think you're starting to see that same argument happen for the legalisation of marijuana—that's really driven by just states being so financially challenged. I think because it’s already considered legal and because financial challenges are gonna continue to be significant, there will always be a place for daily fantasy sport. The challenge will be if the scope ever gets limited and individual states feel the need to restrict it.

Have you developed a system for all this?
Absolutely, it depends on each sport as they’re all a little different and have their own algorithms.But I’ve developed a system that I'm very comfortable with across all the sports that’s very mathematical.

What sports do you play?
Professional basketball, professional football, professional baseball, golf—which is a bit of a niche sport—and occasionally I'll play college football.

But you play several leagues within that?
That’s the great thing about daily fantasy. I tried to set myself up to become a professional fantasy sports analyst years ago, I was playing these season long leagues and I had a nice win rate that was affording me a little bit of extra income but certainly nothing that could ever convince me to potentially leave my job.

When I started I was playing 8-10 leagues a year so I thought: if I have this win rate at 8-10 leagues maybe I should expand? One year I tried to play 20 leagues, but the problem with season long leagues is every league is unique; you have different players available, different trade offers, and you have to set your line ups everyday. It’s very taxing to try to keep 20 teams straight.

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With daily you can create one team based on the different pricing for that day. You get a budget and when you put one team together you can export that immediately to hundreds of leagues. While it’s difficult in season long to scale up to 20 or 30 leagues, in daily it’s exceptionally easy.

People play fantasy sports largely to make the games more exciting, can you maintain that level of excitement when it’s just your job?
Every night when I'm watching I have some sense of financial stake involved in the game and certainly there’s an enjoyment from that. I would say when you do this for a living at some point the range of your emotions comes down significantly: you can't get as high or low as if you’re rooting for your hometown team. If you're doing this for a living you have to be able to weed that out, otherwise you’ll drive yourself insane. But I do get a lot of enjoyment from watching the games and from playing on a daily basis—I just love watching sports.

When your job is something everyone is interested in and talks about constantly is it hard to keep your job from becoming an insidious part of your social life?
Absolutely it’s really hard, and bless my wife for putting up with this. It’s hard when we go to social events and people are learning about it for the first time, it really dominates the conversation. If it doesn’t it’s because people don’t understand what fantasy sport is and they just move on and they think—I dunno what they think.

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Usual you spend a couple of minutes learning about someone and then you move on; almost always someone dismisses me right away or they want to question me for 20 minutes. It’s a challenge to keep it from eroding other social interactions where I’d prefer it to be casual and not discuss my work.

I assume people are always asking you for tips, if you have a really good feeling about it do you keep it to yourself?
I come from a family of teachers and coaches so its always been in my nature to help other people and that’s why we started the subscription model in our business. Every player we use on a given night has been referenced in our articles in one way. There would be a significant lack of credibility if we were withholding information from players.

Do you have a favourite team?
My dad and my family are from the Chicago area and so I’m a Chicago sports fan. It’s a bit different when you have those interests and try to put them aside, that’s one thing a lot of people who try fantasy sports for the first time take some getting used to: the separation of rooting for your team versus rooting for your own interest.

When a hobby becomes a profession does it force you to find new ways to relax?
It makes me more sensitive to the time I spending watching. Now I’m watching games all the time, if I want a way to relax and spend time with my wife it’s more likely that I need to get out of the house and not have the distraction of potentially been able to watch the game. It certainly makes me more cognisant of how I’m spending time with her.

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Follow Wendy on Twitter: @Wendywends

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