Chris is on vacation, so I'll fill in with a brief bare-bones version of my DFS travails. After quadrupling my initial buy-in of $75 in April, I've given nearly all of it back. Bankroll management has been a significant issue - I can't resist playing tournaments, and my cash/tournament ratio has worsened over the course of my six-week downswing. But that's not all - the threshold to cash has also gotten tougher, roughly from the point where FanDuel lowered the pricing on their hitters, though I'm not fully sure if that's merely correlated or a cause. It seemingly was a shoe-in to cash at around 40 points in cash games, and that hasn't been the case. What's interesting is that my average score hasn't declined during my downswing - just the scores of my competition have improved over that time.

I entered four contests on FanDuel tonight - two $5 50/50's, the $2 ToutWars Challenge (another 50/50), and the $5 Sirius/XM Fantasy Challenge, which is a limited entry tournament. I'm trying to use some self-discipline while I rebuild my bankroll, and not have so many entries in the various $2 and $5 tournaments to try to grab the brass ring.

Here are my lineups (apologize for the formatting):

TOUT WARS:

SP - Bumgarner, $10.9
C - McCann, $3.6
1B - LaRoche, $2.2
2B - Zobrist, $3.2
3B - A. Ramirez, $3.1
SS - Correa, $3.7
OF - Ethier, $2.7
OF - Reddick, $3.1
OF - A. Garcia, $2.5

SIRIUS/XM

SP - McHugh, $8.2
C - Norris, $2.91B - Fielder, $3.6
2B - A. Hill, $2.7
3B - Frazier, $5.2
SS - A. Cabrera, $2.2
OF - Pollock, $4.4
OF - D. Peralta, $2.5
OF - J. Upton, $3.3

50/50(a)

SP - C. Martinez, $9.5
C - Lucroy, $3.1
1B - Goldschmidt, $6.1
2B - Dietrich, $2.7
3B - Headley, $2.5
SS - Segura, $3.0
OF - Byrd, $2.9
OF - D. Peralta, $2.5
OF - Ethier, $2.7

50/50(b)

SP - Archer, $10.4
C - Lucroy, $3.1
1B - LaRoche, $2.2
2B - Zobrist, $3.2
3B - Carpenter, $3.5
SS - Correa, $3.7
OF - Buxton, $2.2
OF - Peralta, $2.5
OF - Gardner, $4.0

Obviously I'm taking a pretty big chance that the Yankees game eventually gets played, after starting off in a delay. There are a lot of good pitching set-ups tonight, and I'm leaving out David Price, Zack Greinke and Danny Salazar, among others. I'm also confused why the OAK-TEX game has an over/under of 9, given the recent form of both Jesse Chavez and Chi-Chi Gonzalez. I took a couple of Oakland hitters so as to not totally fade Vegas, and also took Prince Fielder once.

I'm also dipping my toes in the DraftKings Survivor tourney pool, though I only have one entry there. The $27 price point ensures that I'm not really playing it optimally - it's a multi-entry tournament, and I think that it's pretty transparent that you're far better off having a lot of options in there, to lessen some of the variance.