Draft Kings has been pouring money into marketing their NFL Millionaire Maker contest, where one winner is guaranteed a grand prize of $1mm, with about 300,000 to 400,000 entries competing each week.  Below are some fast facts we found after some digging into the data from 2015 NFL week 7 of the Draft Kings Millionaire Maker.

• First off, congrats to “Guzzi52314” for winning the grand prize in week 7,  you can see his winning lineup here.
• There were a total of 341,099 entries, where the top 75,500 entries are “in the money”.  So basically, you would need to finish in the top 22 percentile to win any prize money.
• Of the 341,099, there were a total of 180,880 players.  About 26% of the player had multiple entries.

• Although 75,500 entries were in the money, since ~26% of the people had multiple entries, 46,831 people ended up collecting prize money, leaving 134,049 people (~74%) with goose eggs, including 4 people that entered between 51 and 100 lineups, and at $20 a pop, that’s between $1000 and $2000 of complete write off.
• 74% of the people ended up with $0 return, and 83% of the players ended up losing money, which leaves only 17% of the player making any amount of money playing the Draft Kings Millionaire Maker in week 7

Does more Draft Kings entries give you a better chance at winning?

• Based solely on Week 7’s data, it’s hard to tell.
  • 19% of people with 1 entry won money, where only 12% of the people with multiple entries made money.
  • 17% of people with between 1 and 50 entries won money, where 20% of the people with more than 50 entries won money.  So with more entries, do you see more people winning.
  • Does that mean more entries  gives you better chance at winning?  If you look at the subset which ignores 1 entry players, you do see an uptick in winning %.  But again, this is only based one 1 week of data, we will continue to monitor this in the weeks forward.

What about return on investments?  Does more Draft Kings entries give you better ROI?

• It does appear that more people attain higher ROIs with more entries.
  • 91% of the people that won between 0% and 25% only had 1 entry, and 59% of the people that won more than 500% had only 1 entry.
  • which means, 9% of the people that won between 0% and 25% had multiple entries.  And here’s the key stat, 41% of the people that won more than 500% had multiple entries.
• Here’s another way to look at this:
• Although it’s slight, you can see people with between 1 and 10 entries trending lower as you move up on the ROI grid, from 99% for 25% ROI to 95% for >500% ROI.
• and between with beteween 11 and 50 entries trending higher as you move up the ROI grid, from 1% with 25% ROI to 4% with >500% ROI.

So in conclusion, does more entries mean better chance at winning and higher ROI?  Based on one week of data, it does seem to suggest that you do achieve a better ROI if you submit more entries. But at the end of the day, only 1 in 6 people win at this game.