Does initial ownership drop today, and is it under “Model”? I assume it is updated periodically until lock.
It’s usually updated around mid-day Tuesday. We’ve run the initial update for this week, and they live on the fantasy projections page.
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How accurate are ownership numbers that DG produces? I feel as if they are just rough estimates rather than anything exact.
For instance, just this week, DG had Scottie at 41.5, by far and away the highest owned player in the field. In my contest, he’s 23.7 and 3rd owned. Jake Knapp was the highest own player at 26.4, but DG projected him at 14.5, only 1 percent higher than Lowry at the same salary, and Lowry is only 10.2.
I suspect the overall correlation would be fine, as there are a host of sub 5% players that are easily identified and projected to be sub 5%. The whole point of estimating ownership is that you are identifying popular players at different price points and how popular they will be.
It is probably a bit tough to project as the projection may influence the reality. Since DG is so popular, if they projected a $7700 player as massive chalk (25-30%), that may be the case when it is projected. As people see it, they may look else where and drive that player’s ownership down. So the correct projection influenced behavior and made the projection incorrect.
Rambling a bit, but I just feel it’s just not really reliable compared to ownerships I see projected in the only other DFS sport I take seriously, which is the NFL. Probably a lot easier to project NFL given the wealth of content, especially compared to golf.
They are rough estimates in the sense that we aren’t running optimizers to help predict what kind of lineups (e.g. stars and scrubs) are more likely to be built, and we also aren’t making manual adjustments. But our correlations / mean-squared errors are still pretty good. A year or two ago someone was publicly posting ownerships from the main fantasy golf sites; ours were pretty good but behind a couple sites (ETR comes to mind as one of them).
Our ownerships are probably more likely to have big misses than the other sites, but because we have internal data that nobody else has I’m guessing there is a lot of alpha in our projections.
Agree that this week doesn’t seem like it was a great one for our ownerships.