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Topic: FC projections

1 Topic by mkilroy1112
We all know you can't give away the whole recipe of your secret sauce, but I for one need some general information before I begin to trust and use your product. Your ideas concerning recency / history, or if things like Park factors, splits, bvp, weather, etc. are weighted in to the number. You guys are smart - come up with a way to explain your philosophy on how you create projections that will give at least a "taste" of where you're coming from and let us decide if that place seems solid or not. Don't see how anyone could pay hundreds without a good dose of this kind of basic information! Can do?
The models we use vary from sport to sport and we make changes over time. We use a ton of factors such as historical performance and various advanced metrics. We don't factor weather into any of our models. Some of the sports require more of a human touch as models won't cut it on their own.

With all this being said, we don't feel like you should be subscribing to FantasyCruncher for the projections alone. There are many sites that offer projections as good as ours, many of them being free. What you are really buying is access to our optimizer, export tools, and stat database. There is enough information on our site for you to build better lineups for all types of DFS contests in significantly less time than you could without us. The value of FC varies from user to user, if you are a lower volume DFS player you may find that FC is not the right site for you.
i'm pretty sure the "secret sauce" involves a combination of mayonnaise and thousand island dressing with a dash of salt.
although i could be wrong... keep up the good work fantasy cruncher staff, i love your product.
oh by the way, if anyone used rotowires hockey optimizer yesterday, you got goalies on the bench getting all the projected points while the 2 starters were projected at less than 1.0 points. what kind of "sauce" were they using at rotowire yesterday?
I asked an almost identical question in the "Everything else" section last night ... ... ...

I guess based on this reply I would ask ... ... ...

Fair enough, and I signed up without any intention of using the projections ... but I guessI'm more wondering, especially with you guys downplaying them, if I should factor them in at all? I often will crowd-source or aggregate projections, but I can't get a feel for whether these are useful. I can LOOK at football projections and be like "these are junk" or "these are solid" but I can't do that for NHL, because I know nothing about NHL.

So - I mean you can be honest! Are the projections solid? What are their weaknesses and what are their strengths? So like for baseball I have a set that is A+ for pitchers but terrible for batters, another set that is the opposite, and another set that best factors in all of the matchups and park factors, etc. - and between the three I can piece together I pretty sharp set. I'm used to that. I didn't sign up for the projections. BUT. They are there.

I guess you mentioned a stat database - but for NHL all I see is a line number and a final projection ... maybe ceiling but in any case ... Is there a stats database for NHL that we can view?
as far as research, you can click on the players link and it opens up a window with the past games with the projections and actual points scored.
it has color codes on if this was a good day based on value or bad day. at a glance you can see if this player has under-performed for 5 or 6 games in a row or over-performed. there is alot of info with this product if you just dig in.
somewhere in all of these threads, i did a study for about a month of baseball comparing numberfire, rotowire, and fantasycruncher.
it was based on each sites "top 4" projected points and top 4 value plays.
fantasycruncher was clearly better on both counts based on the research i did.
That's good stuff crash!

For the record though numberfire in my experience is a total garbage proj, for all the sports I've ever looked at. And rotowire not far behind.

The eye test tells me that these have more logic in them than those setups.

Like I said I'm not looking for the answer to be "yes these projs are a one-stop shop for all your lineup needs" I'm just wanting to know more about them, so I can decide what the strengths and weaknesses currently are- and maybe even help to improve them!
Ive been on the site for over a year now and from experience I find the projections very, very solid. For a sport like Basketball or Football I feel fantasy cruncher has a Top tier projections, not only that, the floor and ceiling formula is spot on and gives even deeper insight into what a lineup is capable of. I usually download and use excel to add my own factors to the base projections, then reupload the whole player list and crunch.

For baseball I do not rely on projections at all and prefer to use game theory, but still use the site exclusively for 'crunching' since I can upload my own ratings for MLB players based on my own 1 - 100 scale and still crunch the lineups i like and on a volume I could never replicate on any other site. A combination of highest "my projection" and highest FC porjection is how I select lineups.

I for one trust the numbers and use them as a big factor in my custom projections and have solid results. I have yet to experience an episode where numbers were simply wrong or off, and was a benefactor of a 2 week stretch during this years NBA season where we were literally running with the default lineups and cashing.
I asked an almost identical question in the "Everything else" section last night ... ... ...

I guess based on this reply I would ask ... ... ...

Fair enough, and I signed up without any intention of using the projections ... but I guessI'm more wondering, especially with you guys downplaying them, if I should factor them in at all? I often will crowd-source or aggregate projections, but I can't get a feel for whether these are useful. I can LOOK at football projections and be like "these are junk" or "these are solid" but I can't do that for NHL, because I know nothing about NHL.

So - I mean you can be honest! Are the projections solid? What are their weaknesses and what are their strengths? So like for baseball I have a set that is A+ for pitchers but terrible for batters, another set that is the opposite, and another set that best factors in all of the matchups and park factors, etc. - and between the three I can piece together I pretty sharp set. I'm used to that. I didn't sign up for the projections. BUT. They are there.

I guess you mentioned a stat database - but for NHL all I see is a line number and a final projection ... maybe ceiling but in any case ... Is there a stats database for NHL that we can view?


I would say our projections are very good if not better than most sources on the internet. We take pride in this and want them to be as good as possible. IMO we tend to be better at sports with less variance. So ranking sports in terms of variance I would go NBA > NFL > MLB > NHL. With golf being more or less a crapshoot because of cuts and the bonuses involved with the players final place.

This actually corresponds quite well with DFS sports I play. I have my highest DFS volume during NBA season, second highest with NFL, then MLB and I don't play very much hockey. I avoid DFS PGA/MMA/Nascar.
I will always vouch for Fantasy Cruncher as product as well as the staff. The staff are always on point with listening to us as customers and the improvements over the last few months have been incredible!!!

As far as the projections....I'm not sure you can ever take the number and just go with it. I've always looked at the projections as starting points....you'll need to dig into the stats more and kinda come up with your own numbers.