Matt Smith Now A Successful Daily Fantasy Sports Pro

Matt Smith is a talented poker pro with $527,656 in live tournament earning, to compliment the $1,156,406 he has won online playing under the screen name ‘SamENole’. According to pocketfives, however, Smith has not cashed online since April 15th, 2011, a day come to be known as Black Friday after the US Department of Justice pulled the plug on the country’s unregulated online poker industry.
Talking to cardplayer, Matt Smith said that following that fateful day he ended up having to grind $2/$5 and $5/$10 cash poker games at the Hard Rock, and while he continued doing well, he was by no means “getting rich or anything”. As a sideline hobby, Smith said he also enjoyed playing some daily fantasy sports (DFS) at sites such as FanDuel, DraftDay and DraftKings, and before long began winning consistently leading to DFS becoming his main job.
Matt Smith’s transition from poker to daily fantasy sports was helped in no small part by his winning last year’s DraftKings Millionaire Maker contest, outlasting 92,400 other competitors on his way to collecting the event’s $1 million top prize. Elaborating further, Smith said he currently spends around 80 percent of his working time playing DFS, and that the only poker he concentrates upon these days is the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, and the occasionally trip to his local casino to play cash games.
Nevertheless, Matt Smith is not the only poker professional who has found the transition to DFS a smooth one, and there are plenty of other former online poker players who are also currently making a living from the game. When asked what makes poker players so good at fantasy sports, Smith replied that managing a bankroll was a crucial skill to possess, as was “just knowing the numbers.. and being able to somewhat predict the stats.” Another important aspect to being a winning player is game selection, and as he explained to rotogrinders earlier this year:
“There are tons of regulars on Fanduel just like on Pokerstars and other online sites. I try not to join the regulars that routinely have good lineups and find the people who are new to the site or people that have had questionable lineups against me in the past.”