Of the four lineups I entered Friday, only one cashed, and it doesn't count toward my bankroll because it was an industry free-roll. The two for which I paid I lost, costing me another $15 and leaving me with $952.
I did learn something, however, namely that a "double-up" tournament is not the same thing as a 50/50. That's because I finished 26th out of 56, one slot (and .16 points) out of the money. In a 50/50, the top-28 would have cashed for $18 each, but apparently in a "double-up" where your $10 becomes $20, it's slightly fewer than the top half. It makes perfect sense, but I hadn't until this morning grasped the distinction. And had Jayson Werth merely gone 0-for-4 rather than 0-for-5 for me, it's one of which I might still be ignorant.
Jeff Erickson also reminded me that when figuring the rake, there's the rake-back you get - usually up to $200 of your initial deposit - that amounts to four percent of each entry. So for every $5 entry, my account got credited 20 cents. That brings the overall rake down somewhat - at least until I blow through that portion of my deposit. (I'm also not sure whether I'll get $200 worth of rake-back or only $100 because my initial deposit was $100 last year and not the $1,000 I added to my account before this season. I'm pretty sure this arrangement is only good for one's initial deposit, so I'm assuming it's the latter.)
I'm also realizing what a big deal the starting pitcher is in the FanDuel format. Considering one has a $35 K budget to spend on the entire lineup, and it takes about 35 points to cash in 50/50s, you need to get about one point for every $1000 spent. Clayton Kershaw got me 21 points last night for the $11,800 I spent on him, meaning he got me more than half way there on roughly a third of my budget. While that was a 12-K, 1 ER win, a strong Kershaw start at home has to be more bankable than a strong 4-AB game from any hitter anywhere. Put differently, the volatility of elite pitching - though great - has got to be less than the volatility of elite hitting over one game, as the pitcher throws 100-plus times, where the hitter sees maybe 10-15 pitches total.
Of course, that's reflected in the pricing as the top hitters are less than half the price of the top pitchers, but nearly all viable pitchers are pricier than any hitter, so the extra $4,000 you spend on Kershaw seems like a good investment for games where the moneyline is -300-ish, and the O/U is below seven. I'm sure people who play MLB DFS much more seriously than I have worked this out in great detail already, but Friday night's games opened my eyes to it.