One of the most important traits an individual can possess is self-awareness.
Of course, that trait is inherently complex, as everyone is guilty of overestimating their skills in specific areas while undervaluing crucial facets of their being for whatever reason(s) that folks who know them adore.
We’re all flawed, but the more actively you work to be aware, the better your decision-making will be.
One of the adages I take to heart is an interpolation of a Socrates quote from the late '80s Bay Area ska punk act Operation Ivy that says, “All I know is that I don’t know nothin’.”
I try to speak on topics only at the level I understand and avoid escalating beyond my comprehension. When the topic is challenging and unfamiliar, my #1 go-to move is spinning the critical points into analogies or examples reflected in areas where I better grasp the context.
Whether or not the analogy you concoct is perfect is immaterial if you’ve achieved arrival at functionally understanding the basic premise of what you didn’t previously know — that is how “getting smarter” works.
In this exercise, we’ll explore the concept of being “aggressive” in your dynasty fantasy football leagues and why trying to be the “shark” who preys on the weaklings isn’t the best mindset in dynasty.
In reality, your awareness and ability to cooperate with others will be your strongest edge.
Dynasty Is Not a “Zero-Sum” Game
Don’t hear what I’m not saying— holding hands and singing campfire songs with your league mates will not be how you get ahead.
But the issue with operating as the unrelenting carnivore in dynasty is that the format doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being a zero-sum game.
For those unfamiliar with that term, zero-sum basically means a rigid dichotomy between a win and a loss — there is no wiggle room for a “win-win” situation involving others.
Redraft fantasy football lends itself to being zero-sum quite well. Each year, you build a team of NFL players who are only with your roster as long as you decide to have them or until the end of season, and solving the proverbial puzzle of creating a dominant team faster than every other league member is the only way to win.
By season’s end, your journey with that team is complete, and you either won the league or you didn’t. There’s no continuity aspect, as the next year you play against your league mates, everyone will (theoretically and almost always in practice) have a different team.
Are there slip-ups or surprise factors that crop up and topple the “best” team in a redraft league? Certainly! Even the most stat-based expected outcomes can be upset at any given time, but your only incentive is to operate within the context of “now” and steamroll everyone.
Dynasty leagues, however, function very differently, as there is an indefinite end to the game you’re playing. Unless your league folds or you withdraw from participation, the outcome arc is longer, and there are several different ways of maneuvering your path toward victory.
I’ve got a laundry list of topics within that notion and look forward to sharing those thoughts down the road, but the critical aspect of this specific conversation to focus on is that the outcome arc is very long.
From here, we can better identify what the scope of your competition in dynasty actually looks like.
What Is “Cooperative Game Theory”?
Now feels like a good time to get in front of an argument that inevitably comes up in this discussion: “Well, if you don’t win your league, then you’re a loser. That’s a loss, and therefore, dynasty is zero-sum.”
Why that retort is narrow-minded was briefly covered in the last section, but it’s also essential to bring to the forefront the false assumption that all parties in a dynasty league are acting with the mindset of winning that year.
Just take into account your most active and competitive league and ask yourself these questions:
How many managers are “contending”?
Which managers are “tanking” or “rebuilding”?
Where do you and your team fit into this spectrum?
Let’s say you’re a contender for the sake of this argument.
If half of your 12-person league is either tanking or rebuilding, you’re only competing against the five other individuals striving for contention from the outset in a practical sense. Everyone else is competing for “something,” but that outcome is achieving roster supremacy in 2026 or so rather than 2024.
The deals you make will be based on aligning your interests with the goals of others, then, right?
In this way, you’re playing a game that requires cooperation. Once you embrace the concept that your league is cooperative, the game becomes considerably less intimidating, and it’s easier to focus on how you approach success.
Cooperative game theory deals with forming relationships and coordinating actions with other participants in the game. One of my favorite examples of cooperation comes from the lessons learned from political scientist Robert Axelrod and the results based on his early ‘80s experiment involving “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.”
Axelrod’s Tournament and Results
What is the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
While it can take on many forms, the version that directly relates to Axelrod’s tournament is a game in which players are rewarded with various point totals based on two individual choices: cooperation or aggression.
Should both players cooperate, they each receive three points.
If one player cooperates and the other is aggressive, the aggressor receives five points while the other receives zero.
When both players decide to be aggressive, each player receives only one point.
Here’s a handy visual chart you can reference if that explanation didn’t make a lot of sense:
The goal of this game is to end up with the most points, but it’s not one entirely predicated on your individual actions by nature.
In 1980, Axelrod invited a group of game theorists to participate in this activity and bring their own strategy (15 in total) of competition to the table. Each strategy in this tournament squared off with one another, including once against itself and another against “random,” and every game went 200 rounds. This exercise was completed five times for all the science-y reasons you would expect.
Now, this is where losing the thread is a distinct risk.
I’m not going to dive super deep into each of the different strategies or discuss a ton of what went on in the tournament because I don’t know enough to talk about it briefly.
The results determined that cooperative strategies performed best and aggressive approaches accomplished the least.
The top strategy, from mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport known as “Tit for Tat,” is the clear-cut winner from this initial tournament.
All Tit for Tat does is start by cooperating and then following strictly whatever the other participant did in the last round, merely reacting to what’s happening and not being afraid to push back when necessary.
The tournament was conducted again with slightly different parameters, and taking any more of your eyeball time to work through those results would be cruel, so here’s where the ultimate findings of this study ended up:
Being nice works, and you should never be aggressive first.
When pressed with aggression, you need to react appropriately immediately, but it is optimal to be cooperative and forgiving afterward.
The game isn’t about diminishing the other player’s total; it’s about building yours.
Trying to outsmart or big-brain your way to victory fails because transparency is crucial to a game that requires cooperation as a core feature.
Moving Forward and Why You Should Be Nice
The tricky part of this, which needs to be conveyed very clearly before we close, is that being a largely neutral and measured reactionary is not a “strategy” when it comes to dynasty.
That’s not the lesson, pal.
In a league where everyone is hyper-aggressive and no one willingly tanks for deferred success, being a stick in the mud makes winning much harder. Conversely, a league where everyone defaults to being only cooperative means that the zealous carnivore is likeliest to exploit that weakness and become champion— different environments will breed different results.
The point is that, over a prolonged outcome arc in a typical environment, the positive relationships you build with your league mates will make it more likely for you to work out deals and thus make it easier to win.
It’s all about your mindset.
It’s easy to be turned off by a jerk who’s obviously trying to fleece other parties with all of their trade offers. That person will quickly have a poor reputation in the league; thus, their avenues for roster improvement will be rapidly limited.
None of this is to say that you can’t ever take a jab and make a lopsided trade in your favor. Still, your goal should be to exploit market value discrepancies and not to rip off the limp sardines you play against because you’re an alpha genius bro playing 4-D chess.
I don’t functionally understand half of the advanced metrics many analysts track and talk about in their work, yet I don’t run into many problems competing in leagues with them. This game isn’t necessarily about how much you know or if you flex that muscle outwardly.
How you interact with, engage with, and approach your league means more than the strategy you put behind it. The greatest gift you can give yourself is being observant about your team's performance in relation to everyone else’s and reacting appropriately without pretense or malintent.
So long as you remember to do that, any *real* strategy you deploy thereafter will be done so earnestly and reflect well within your environment.
“Well then, what are some of those strategies, and how can I best understand them?”
I promise we’ll get to that stuff with my next article and onward, but for now, just start by being nice to your leaguemates.
