This article is a transcript of an interview recorded on October 28, 2023.

Introduction

I used to be a basketball and baseball reporter in Cleveland, Ohio, following the Cleveland Guardians and Cleveland Cavaliers for a living for a while. I have a pretty deep background in sports. I create and distribute projections for MLB and NBA. We have a Discord “SorareFP” and you can sign up at patreon.com/sorarefp. You can access various things very quickly but you can also subscribe to the app, which is the FP Projections app. It’s only on Apple right now. Otherwise, on Patreon, you can get Excel spreadsheets and other stuff. We are expanding as much as we can. We are two men's operations because while I don’t formally pay him, I distribute him cards when I can as gifts. He does not ask me for payments. He is a commercial air pilot in the Netherlands, and he just codes because he likes it, and he is helping me create this app and everything. That’s what I do.

How I found Sorare is a kind of a long journey. In 2020, during the pandemic, I decided to play daily fantasy football. When the Bundesliga returned, I went to do that; I put money into my DraftKings account, and I found a guy on YouTube called Gattorguy, and he was doing football DFS videos. I joined his Discord, learned the game that way, and had a lot of success. Thanks to him and some advice I found there, I made about $12,000 on a $15,000 investment. I was already a football fan, but I was just learning about that game. Fast forward a little bit, I listen religiously to the Rotowire Soccer podcast, which had a guy called Jordan Cooper, who is incredible in the DFS space and Andrew Laird. Andrew started publicizing Sorare, and I was into the idea. It was something that I always really wanted. It was the fantasy experience that I always pictured.

I made an initial deposit in February 2021 because of Andrew. I knew he was on the platform, advertising, and eventually moving over to SorareData. I joined that way, but not in a big way via a huge deposit. Eventually, I got a job doing lineups at a place, and that way, I could not play DFS anymore, so I took my DFS money out of DraftKings and put it into Sorare. The rest is kind of history.

I started playing J-League because it was the cheapest entryway, it was only Rare at that time, and there was no Limited. So I did that for a while, and then when the US sports started being added to Sorare I switched because J-League was becoming impossible for me to follow, the news was coming up when I was sleeping and all of that. So I started to put money into US sports and had a lot of success in MLB, good success in NBA and then I started being more active in the Limited market in football. So that was a long way, but that’s kind of my journey.

Boris: How many games have you played before playing Sorare?

Alex: I played FPL and I played a lot of DFS Football. I grew up with fantasy NBA, fantasy MLB, and the traditional fall season. I was playing DFS, mostly Premier League, some Bundesliga, and then a lot of the UFC, and I dabbled in MLB and NBA a little bit as well. I never played anything other than football-related other than the Premier League, which I enjoy, but the scoring metrics there are just so basic, it is generally: goal, assist, and clean sheet. There are a couple of more things but I don’t care for it, so that was really the extent of my gaming in terms of fantasy sports.

Boris: How does SorareFP come to your mind? Did you start Sorare directly and decide to start a project? How did you approach this?

Alex: Kind of the opposite. I learned the MLBs about the drop. I then was covering baseball as a reporter. It was right at the start of this new era of MLB, where data is very heavily used, and it was when the onfield data was really making its way into the public eye. I was really into that. I am very analytical and very pragmatic, so when those stats and those metrics started becoming probably available, I landed on that whole movement. When Sorare: MLB was being teased, I thought, “I think I have a lot to offer here,” so I started a YouTube channel, and I was like, “You know I want to promote this product because I already know about Sorare, so I am going to try to help people and get success”. So I started the YouTube channel with Gatorguy, and I did not necessarily think about starting anything else. At the time, I was really trying to get into the broadcasting space, and that was the thought behind it. But I started mentioning my personal projections that I was using behind the scenes, and during a show, someone asked, “Do you sell those projections?”, I answered, “No, not right now; I do it for me to have success”. And he was like, “Do you mind selling them?” and I was like, “I guess… (laughter)”. So I really only started because someone asked me to do it. And I had no plans to start something like this. Now we have about a hundred subscribers, which is more than what I never could asked for. It’s more work than I bargained for. I knew that it was gonna take over my life a little away, not in a bad way. But I have always wondered why those people had my regular job + 2 other jobs on the side and ate them to the bones until the point they were exhausted. So I was like: I don’t want that. But that kind of turned into that. It was somebody who asked me, and I said yes, I started promoting it, and I kept promoting it.

Boris: Can you please explain the initial plan and the value you provide exactly?

Alex: For sure. We sell the projections, that’s the main thing. I am pretty decent at data analysis and data structuring and things like that. There is the value of the YouTube content that is a little bit more thin since I have reorganized the workforce. That’s for free. You can find that out on YouTube, “SorareFP,” and basically, I am helping you regarding the MLB and the NBA, especially if you are not deep into it. I am trying to help you understand how the game Sorare works. So there is that, with the projections, in baseball, it’s pretty important because so much of MLB is variance. That’s why I called this game a random number generator because that’s what it is. But there are certain points where things get manipulated, and there are very small things that can make a difference, so we have that factor in, and we will give you those projections. The SorareFP Discord for MLB has had so much success, and it’s not all because of me. I don’t want to take that amount of credit. It’s just that we had a lot of smart people there very early. A lot of people are really good at the game, so you could learn from them in Discord and I think that it is one of the biggest things that we own.

On the NBA side, I think the value that we bring is, first of all, there is a lineup builder in the app now. I don’t think there is another way to make your lineup. Another way is SorareNBAJet. I don’t know how that works. I can say very confidently that our app runs very well. So the projections side for the NBA, you can’t get it anywhere else. I noticed you can get on SorareData and SorareNBAJet median projections, I don’t know on PlaySharper if you are gonna have this kind of thing because I don’t pay for their subscriptions. We propose an upside score which I created to take key metrics that contribute to peak scoring in the NBA, so shot volume, how often they convert, steals, blocks, and that basically split out if this player plays well, this is what you are looking at. The reason I feel so strongly about our projections is because, now if you scrunch down the amount of rewards, you scrunch down the amount of mint, you need big scores in Sorare: NBA. If you just play medium scores and play guys that will score +5 over their L10, it is not gonna bring you anywhere. You need guys that outperform by 10, 20, or 30, those peak scores. For example, I finished 10th in Rare Champion in Game Week 1, I was 14 points away from 1st place, and I was 15 points away from not winning anything at all. So as the margins are so small, you need to find these upside scores, and that is what we provide in NBA along with the lineup builder. Those are the two things that I think set us apart.

First cards

Alex: I was just trying to buy cards that look cheap.

I bought a card of Guimarães when he was on the bench at Lyon. I flipped him. I cannot tell you why I bought his card. He looked good. When I joined, it was right at the boom when many people started signing on. So I was just buying cards to try and then sell them; I bought many wrong cards and then sold them for slight losses. I was not quite sure what I was giving myself to. I just know I wanted to try out the platform. I did not really apply much thought to it at all. Then I bought Carlos Cuesta, the Colombian center-back.

Strategy

Boris: You knew other sports were coming?

Alex: Eventually. After I had been on the platform long enough, they announced the MLB, and that’s when I got really excited. I did not know; I had no idea. I remember being super excited because baseball is my thing, and that’s why I kind of jumped on it.

Budget management

Boris: How did you manage your budget?

Alex: I’m not sure. I just put my money on the platform and tried to make what I could. I couldn’t play DraftKings anymore. My intention and approach were that I just wanted to grind thresholds until I was good enough to actually compete for rewards. I got to the point where I could buy J-League cards. There were no real money management principles other than “I’m going to grind thresholds.”

There was a point when I sold off all my Rare and went into the MLB. I played Rare for a good 6 months. Once I sold off my Rares. I did that because I felt I would not be good enough to win anything. I took that money and reinvested it into MLB. I always made a deposit and said, “I’m not going to add extra money.” I started getting a secondary income, and I planned on taking all that money to create a website, developing an app, and all of that stuff. It turned out that I did not have to spend all the money on the app, although I needed to find more ways of giving the developer gifts. When I started generating revenues from Sorare, I did start putting money back into Sorare. I did quite a few deposits, so my gallery price has grown a lot in that way. It’s tough to say. I consider, “Here is my money, and whatever happens, happens, I’m gonna try and increase it.” So, it has been thresholds on football, but there are no thresholds on the MLB and NBA sides. I had plenty of success playing the game over there, winning and selling prizes. My approach in MLB, super early on, was, “You can totally buy players that project super well at cheap prices.” I worked my way up to some of those Tier 1 and Tier 0 cards in MLB, and then since when I started generating income with Sorare FP, I bought a couple of high level cards myself.

Boris: That’s pretty good. It is not easy to make people pay for projections.

What was your approach regarding the divisions?

Alex: Like I said, I just wanted to buy some folks and see what I can do with them. I had a strategy that was playing All-Star. And then I just decided, like I said, to go into the J-League because it was the cheapest entry point. I was not going to be able to buy Champion Europe cards at that point. I don’t know if the divisions were dividing like that back then. I was not stacking, and I was not pairing a lot of cards. So then, I started to buy MLS cards. So basically, what I did then, and what I do now, I target specific competitions in specific leagues, and I try to get 2 to 3 good cards so I can put a good team for the league competition and then also in All-Star. But that shifted a little bit when I could play with better cards. So now I prioritize All-Star first because I have cards to compete there. When I started, I targeted a specific league to be good there. All-Star was where you were getting the thresholds, and there was no Cap, so I would optimize for All-Star and then optimize for the league-specific competitions if that makes sense. I would optimize for All-Star, but this would allow me to play these secondary competitions I would take the best one and put it into All-Star to try to win the thresholds.

Boris: How did you approach the new sports? Did you keep all your cards? Or did you sell them to buy cards from the new sports?

Alex: I started selling off my football cards because I was having trouble with the news in the J-League. Then, MLS and J-League were coming to the end of the season when they started MLB. So I started selling off cards to generate a little bit of revenue, and then I moved it to MLB. And they had not announced the NBA yet.

When they announced the NBA, I kind of did the same thing: I sold some off my MLB cards and what was left in my soccer gallery and moved them over to the NBA. That was kind of the transition.

I was trying to grind the rewards and sell at the right prices. The goal was always to reinvest in football because it is a more focused project. At a point, I almost had a decent MLB Super Rare team. I hesitated to buy Super Rare in the NBA but thought I could still build my Rare. What I really would like to do is to go to football Rare again. I think that’s kind of going to be my next step when I stabilize my NBA gallery.

In the first season of MLB, there was a kind of run on Relief Pitchers, which started games. Spencer Strider was the big one. A good Relief Pitcher could score 30 points in a Game Week. But a Starting Pitcher to the level of Spencer Strider could score 30 as a medium score to an upside of about 50.

Boris: So what were the most evolutions of your strategy? You had galleries of different sports; you bought different scarcities. What were the best moves? What was the worst? What are the next plans?

Alex: For MLB and NBA, at the time of launch, the early Limited cards on Football went for crazy prices. I overpaid quite a bit for my entries in MLB and NBA. I did not have a lot of money, and I did not think I could get into the higher scarcity of those sports. So, I started at the Limited level and planned to work my way up to progress early. I managed to do it.

I think the income from FP allowed me to progress from Rare to Super Rare MLB. But otherwise, it was really just, again, in MLB, I had a hedge, not over everybody but over a lot of people, knowing that the margins are so slim between players, so you don’t have to buy the best players, you can optimize the budget. I had a lot of success. If you look at my SorareData chart, you can tell I had success with rewards, and I believe strongly in my ability in MLB. I was able to progress that way.

NBA was kind of the same thing as when I started on Limited, but ended up selling some to get into Rare. And I think my first-ever FP income was a solid MVP for playing Champion. It is impossible to win without a guy who scores 60 to 80 points during a Game Week.

In MLB, I was playing the margins. The foundation of Sorare FP was built around the idea that you could win cheaper. You don’t have to go and buy the studs. I think it is not pay to win in football, but you win a lot by having the best cards. In the NBA, you just need 1 or 2. Especially in Limited Football, my teams are pretty good, and I did not sniff a T1 at this point. In Limited Football, you need to have the lineup in your competition. Whereas in American sports, the user base is a little bit smaller, so there is more ability to win. Playing the margin and moneyball was how Sorare FP came to exist. In the NBA, I just knew the power of projections from playing DFS. Knowing essentially the whole userbase on Sorare: NBA seems to understand that if one player goes down, someone else is going to play those minutes, and they are going to surperform compared to their L10. Basically, the power of data was my strategy in American sports. In football, I can’t keep up as much as Laird, Gattorguy, or the other sharks over there, so I rely on SorareData and PlaySharper for that.

Boris: What do you think about the different levels of data analytics? Is it accessible to someone who does not really know computer science, someone who knows a bit, or someone who knows very well?

Alex: It is a good question. I think it is pretty easy to read and understand projections at the basic level. It is pretty important to understand that projections are median projections. If this contest was simulated 10,000 times, this is the average score for that player. Many people see projections and say, “Oh, his projection is 70, so he will score 70”. No, they can score 25, or they can score 100, but most of the time, they are going to score around 70. So, I think projections are accessible to that basic level of data analysis understanding. But you just have to understand what it is fully. In MLB, it is pretty simple. It is basically a rating system because the variance is so strong. You can look at any player's SO5 score on SorareData; MLB's variance is incredible. So when you get projections, they are essentially just a rating system. In the NBA, it is kind of the same thing. You can understand what is happening.

The next level is Roster construction. In the NBA especially, knowing that if you play a player with an L10 of 5 and he is projected to score 25, that is a plus 20 difference over his L10. When you have a guy with an L10 of 20 and is projected to score 27, he has scored 60 or 70 in the past. You need to know that while yes, the points added over the L10 are great, playing those two guys in the middle tier… I will try to explain this a little better. Playing two twenties as opposed to a 5 and a 35, you need to expect different scoring levels. A lot of the time, these two guys of 20 are capable of scoring 60 as opposed to the guy with an L10 of 5 able scoring 25, and the guy of 35 scoring a 50. You just need to know where those upside scores lie. In the NBA, that is really the balance to understand. While this guy projects really well, if he does not allow you to get someone who will outscore their L10 vastly, he might not be worth aligning in this specific contest. There is a lot of the same stuff in MLB, including understanding roster construction. Same in football; you will not play your star forward against your star keeper if they play against each other in the Champions League or whatever. Because if your forward scores, then your keeper is going to suffer. I think that is pretty accessible, but I think that is something where, if you are just starting out, you may need someone explaining that to you on Discord, for example.

Once you get to that expert level, I think you should simulate the games. You talked about computer science, being able to run simulations and understand how that works. I learned Python in the last four months, and understanding how to manipulate data can really give you an edge. That’s kind of the next step.

Boris: I will speak only about football. For a player, I can have an idea and can give a player a score. It can be really interesting for me to try with my players and try to add different criteria that I want and try to make the same system of builder lineup of SorareData. My approach is that if I want to do it as I am lazy, I would say, okay, I will go to SorareData; I would take the different parameters they propose and put my own. But in the end, there won’t be so many criteria that will change because of the match-up and the history, it is something that I cannot impact, the player form, also it is something that I cannot impact. What parameters does a manager using SorareData really depend on the analyst and not on past data?

Alex: That’s a really good question. On football, it is tough. I don’t project football because there are so many more variables. There are so many differences in tactics and how opposition tactics are going to affect the ways your players are going to score. You can get many points for crosses because a right back will bomb the ball in the surface, for example. If you are facing a team doing a block, you can use these kinds of players trying to get the ball inside the box. If your cards will face a team to play a higher press, this same player can not have the opportunity to reach forward that much, and that will have an impact. So, finding the data and trying to guess the tactics of the opposition teams is nearly impossible. I don’t feel as in power to speak in football. I really lean on the pick scores from SorareData quite a bit. But, mainly, the odds and the opponent rating. I use my DFS knowledge of how players get a certain score, relying on AA and decisive chances.

That said, in baseball, it is a posing picture of the stadium they are playing at because there are different dimensions and sometimes different level patterns that lead to more offline play. Those would be the two, probably. And then correlation is huge in baseball, so like batting order. If you play a player from a team who is hitting third and want to decide who else to play, the fourth hitter has more of a chance of driving in the third hitter, and then you get an RBI and the run. I know that may not mean much to you.

Boris: I got the idea.

Alex: It is basically like playing a defender and a keeper in football.

In the NBA, it is minutes, points per minute, and pace. These are the three big things.

I think there is a hedge there above and beyond projections.

Boris: I think it's a good exercise to play with some data and a good base for someone who wants to get more advanced. The step before is to understand the variances and know what you can expect from projections. Giving importance to different factors, analyzing the data, and storing it is for someone more advanced.

This is super interesting.

So, what is next for you and SorareFP?

Alex: For us, realistically, our next step is to work on more technical things, like getting a website and finding other ways to sign up with our Patreon. We are also excited about improving our app. Getting on Android is also a big project. The big thing for us is just to continue to grow by providing better projections and attracting people to the success we know we can bring. We need more marketing, so thanks for the marketing. We need to spread the word out more.

I think MLB is the best experience on Sorare, so spreading the word, especially to those who are interested in data. I think MLB has a huge potential for people who play fantasy sports, love data and don’t necessarily know baseball yet.

Marketing and getting people interested in Baseball, onboard to FP, and see what we do.

Vision and wishes for Sorare in the next two years

Growing user base is my number one concern. So in two years, I don’t necessarily think that Sorare needs to overtake DFS in America, but I think it needs to push itself as the premier fantasy sports experience and especially for again, focusing on baseball, it is so much better than a season-long baseball league like most people here play.

It’s going to be hard to convert people from traditional baseball leagues to Sorare because the concept is not easy to understand.

I guess my call to Sorare, too, would be to have a little bit more synergies between the NY office and the Paris office and work together on implementing things in opposition to what can be seen as patchwork, where you know, football rolls something out, and the US office strives to put it together in their sports.

I think they are doing a great job communicating. They have said they are going to implement all the things we enjoy, but it was too slow, and that was the frustrating part.

Keep the transparency, keep the good communication, growing the user base, I don’t have the key for it. Keep marketing, keep people understanding it is the best fantasy sports experience out there, I truly believe that.

Hall of Fame

To be completed.