After heroically turning $1 into $2.50 Tuesday night, I flushed $20 down the toilet yesterday, reducing my $1000 buy-in to $980. I'm not going to obsess over particular bad decisions - obviously DFS is easy in hindsight. But two issues plagued me yesterday, and I'm not yet sure how I'm going to resolve them: (1) Picking the optimal time to set my lineup; and (2) Having an aversion to doing the obvious.

Let's address the second issue first because it transcends DFS and has long been a problem for me generally. When I first went to college, I bought into the concept of it. Not that I wasn't partying my ass off - of course, I was - but the centuries-old, beautifully-landscaped campus and neoclassical architecture had their effect. I thought I was in a serious place. So I was surprised when some of my classmates would ask questions of and praise the professors after each class. I kept thinking: "Why are you sucking up like that? You really think he'll be swayed by your transparent ass-kissing?" It was embarrassing.

Fast forward to the end of the term when our papers were due, and I thought I'd say something original about the material. Not that I had read all or even most of it, but I paid attention in class and had some ideas. So I'd write the paper and get a B or a B-plus. I realized only later the suck-ups, aside from currying favor, were getting intel about what the teacher wanted to hear, and I imagine most of them got As.

So in my senior year when I took a religion class from a professor who had spent a couple years in Africa with a primitive tribe, I tried an experiment. The whole deal for the final paper was to use our sources (Freud, Marx, Weber) to decide whether that tribe's rituals/practices constituted a "religion." Personally, I cared about the topic less than you care about this story, but figured if I told him what he wanted to hear that yes, this tribe in which you're so invested had a legitimate religion according to the criteria of these great thinkers, I would do well. It was the most Captain Obvious paper I've ever written, and of course I got an A in the class - though I felt like Les Grossman's assistant in Tropic Thunder doing it.

The bottom line, there's often a mechanical, robotic way to do things, and I have no interest in that. I don't want to grind out 10 percent profit on my $1000 (I'm sure that return would be hard to achieve at higher stakes anyway.) And though I'm now convinced college is mostly a stepping stone for the aspiring careerist, the idealist that hoped for something more isn't entirely dead. The question is whether being more or less as lazy now as I was then, minus the heavy partying, I'm able to discover something worthwhile. Playing Rick Porcello in Philadelphia as an unlikely tournament SP over say a strikeout guy like Carlos Carrasco or Scott Kazmir was original, I suppose, but also probably dumb. It's a question of how to innovate without being too clever. It's also an issue whether I can even play 50/50s with this philosophy. I might have to reduce my buy-ins to $2 and $5 entries and play only large tournaments where creativity is more likely to be rewarded.

The first issue cropped up because I set my lineup early in the day with the players I liked, then checked back an hour before the games to finalize it when the MLB lineups were available. Between late scratches and possible rainouts, there's usually someone you have to sit. More often, it's 2-3 players. So you look for similarly priced subs, but you don't like any, so you go cheap. But then you have surplus cash you don't want to leave on the the table. So you replace some of your other guys with better, more expensive players. But now only 2-3 of your initial players - the guys about whom you had the strongest hunches - are still in your lineup. So you put a few guys back in and tinker some more. Now you're lost, and it's a random guessing game.

For DFS players who go by the book, I imagine this is easier - just optimize your lineup based on available players at their current salaries. Don't be attached to hunches. But I want to trust my observations and angles - otherwise why bother? Of course, I don't want to wait until all the lineups are out to formulate my hunches because even being lazy, doing this seriously requires *some* research. Maybe later in the year where I know everyone's splits and home/road tendencies from memory, I'll be able to use informed hunches to fill lineups 20 minutes before the games start. Until then, I'll need to do at least some of that day's work in advance and figure out a better way to work in the subs.

I didn't set any lineups for Thursday's games, but will have at least a couple for Friday.