Why to Never Fantasy for Money

If you watched five minutes of any NFL game (which would necessitate at least six commercial breaks) you'd see ads for those single-week fantasy football leagues like FanDuel or Draft Kings.  Or maybe you heard about them on CNN or 60 Minutes or something because there has been a lot of heat on them in recent months and debate over whether it constitutes as gambling or not.

Anyway, I would never play any of these leagues for money.  I had one this last season on ESPN and my team sucked ass.  If you followed me on Facebook I ranted about it once per week, usually lamenting how my team got its sorry ass kicked.  My team was of course the traditional full-season kind so injuries and just a shitty auto draft kind of screwed me in a way you don't have to worry about as much in single-week ones, which is where the allure comes from mostly  I mean if your lineup sucks one week, next week it can be entirely different.

The thing is, there are simply too many fucking variables that unless you're clairvoyant, you're not going to do that well.  I've heard some of the bigger winners spend a lot of time plotting elements right down to the weather for each game, but there's still so much that you simply can't control.

Something that screwed my team early was my second main receiver, DeSean Jackson of the Washington Racists, got hurt on the first ball thrown to him and was then out for the next 8 weeks.  OK sure in FanDuel you don't get stuck with him for a whole season, but still if you picked him that game expecting 15-20 points, you got 0.  My primary receiver, Antonio Brown of the Steelers, wasn't hurt but when his quarterback (Ben Roethlisberger) went down with injury, Brown's stats went way down because the backup (Dog Killer Mike Vick) could not throw with any accuracy

Or take the weather.  You draft some good receivers but then the games they're in are rainy and sloppy and so no one is catching anything.  That's a real act of God right there.

Then there's just general flukiness.  I had Randall Cobb of the Packers on my team.  On a December 3 game against the hated Lions, Cobb had 29 yards receiving, which means he should only get 2 points.  Except on a fluke play, the Packers running back fumbles the ball, it goes into the end zone, and Cobb falls on it for a touchdown.  That means he gets an extra 6 points while the running back gets jack shit.

Plus there's the general flukiness of a guy who has done nothing in his whole fucking life will suddenly have a huge day.  One game I have Doug Baldwin of the Seahawks on my bench because he has done hardly anything in like 3 years.  That week of course he catches 3 touchdowns, pretty much doubling his season total.  And next week, he probably had 3 yards total.

Anyway, I get the attraction.  I mean it's football and if there's anything a manly man should know something about it's football, right?  But it's a sucker's racket.  There are so many things that can go wrong that really you might as well go play craps in an alley--the odds are probably better.

Does this have anything to do with writing?  Well, you probably have better odds winning a big prize on DraftKings than publishing a book with Random Penguin.