Daily Fantasy IEM D1 on Vulcun

Despite the fact that I know nothing at all about the players on four of the eight teams participating in IEM, I’m eagerly looking forward to IEM D1 on Friday and expect that this will be a great money-making opportunity on daily fantasy LoL sites like Vulcun.  That confidence stems from a few factors:

• The same techniques that work well for daily fantasy LCS should work for daily fantasy IEM.
• Many participants on Vulcun (and AlphaDraft) will be unfamiliar with players from other regions, and may shy away from picking them.
• Some contest participants will struggle with how to compare the relative strengths of players and teams from different regions.
• Some new users who haven’t played daily fantasy LCS yet may be attracted to these contests by the participation of the Korean teams.  New users generally mean weaker competition.

Day 1 of IEM is going to be a little bit tricky because it includes two games per team, and the match-ups for the second game aren’t set in advance.  I’ve made the decision to keep things simple for myself by mostly ignoring the second game.  Trying to predict those match-ups and take the differences into account would probably yield a small edge, but I think I can get a big enough edge without doing the extra analysis.

Looking over the odds for the matches that are known in advance shows four heavy favorites (listed from heaviest to least heavy): GE Tigers (1.13), CJ Entus (1.31), SK Gaming (1.33), TSM (1.45).  What stands out is that GE Tigers are an almost certain winner…and that certainly suggests that they’ll be very heavily favored in their second match, regardless of opponent.  I would steer clear of anyone on the four underdogs. I’m hoping that a few people choose to throw away their money by picking players from Cloud 9.

Looking over the Vulcun pricing, I noticed that the CJ Entus players seem to be underpriced across the board.  They range from $715 down to $500.  Those would be fair prices on a heavy underdog…not one of the heaviest favorites of the day.  I’ll certainly want three of their players on my team, and hope that will allow me to save enough room under my salary cap for three players from GE Tigers.

Since I didn’t know much about any of the players on CJ Entus and GE Tigers, I gather the raw data on their kills, deaths and assists from Wikipedia.  Keep in mind that the calculations of their scoring averages for Vulcun and AlphaDraft are leaving out creep scores, so their actual scoring averages are mostly a few points higher than what’s shown here.  

Also, keep in mind that this data likely exaggerates the gap between GET and CJE. GET’s scores have been accomplished while achieving an 18-2 record.  CJE’s have been accomplished while going 12-7.  If you assume that both will win their matches Friday, I’d expect the scoring gap to be a bit closer.  That said, this data is very reassuring in one sense…it’s clear that GE Tigers’ players are very capable of putting up huge scores even lopsided games where they might be expected to win quickly.

Without giving my whole lineup away, I’ll say this: I managed to put together a team that I’m extremely happy with.  The low prices on CJE players allowed me to get three players from each of the Korean teams, and I had enough left over for WildTurtle and Dyrus at the other two positions.If you’re interested in a recap of how this worked out for me, visit ProFantasyESports on Friday morning and I’ll do a short write-up.

If you want to try your hand at playing daily fantasy IEM or LCS, the two leading sites are AlphaDraft and Vulcun.  Both offer freerolls (free contests with small cash prizes) as well as allowing you to deposit money via Paypal or credit card so that you can play for anything from pennies up to hundreds of dollars per contest.