If you’ve ever experienced losing $9,000 in one night, raise your hand slowly as you read that first sentence.

For the majority of average citizens, dropping 9K in a couple of hours is about as foreign of a concept as is learning the Russian language.

For Jonathan Bales, however, it’s nothing new.

The Brandywine native and current Philadelphia resident is an accomplished daily fantasy sports player nestled just over an hour away from the Lehigh Valley, but Bales may be quickly building himself up to more notoriety with the recent news that Mark Cuban, the billionaire-owner of the Dallas Mavericks, plans on investing in Fantasy Labs.

Bales, 30, who co-founded the daily sports analytics company with his friend Peter Jennings, has a website and format that Cuban, who has always been technologically savvy, has certainly taking a liking to.

Fantasy Labs (www.fantasylabs.com) helps daily fantasy players create optimal lineups to maximize their chances of victory using a platform that provides users with daily fantasy sports data, tools, analytics and articles, which in theory, should provide users with a competitive edge in their daily competitions.

The company also offers a premium subscription service for $59 a month that grants members advanced data and tools to create optimal lineups for any given day.

The analytics craze in sports is nothing new and neither is DFS, but for someone like Bales, who played high school football at Kutztown because Brandywine doesn’t offer the sport on a varsity level, the story of being apart of something like this is amazing in itself.

“Daily fantasy is the perfect combination of what I like in sports and data,” said Bales, “but I also think it would be terribly shortsighted of me to think that I can be a professional fantasy player the rest of my life.

“The game’s are going to become way more efficient. You have really smart people coming in now and it’s becoming more challenging. Developing something like Fantasy Labs offers a really big upside.”

The upside that Bales is currently experiencing is nothing he could have envisioned when he started playing consistently on a daily basis in 2011.

“I was bad. I didn’t win much,” Bales said about that year. “I didn’t start playing, what I consider professionally or where I was making a lot of money, until the beginning of 2014.”

Like anyone looking to better themselves, Bales did that by putting the time. He spends 12 hours a day going over everything possible fantasy related to help build lineups that generate income.

Baseball is where he earns his bread and butter over the course of the year, as he cleared $95,000 in Draftkings baseball championship last year and has had several $10,000 pay outs from contests.

Practice makes perfect and Bales understands that it takes a lot of knowledge and skill to become successful at this level.

“The first thing people think is that they know sports and think they should win,” he said. “Knowing sports isn’t that important to me. Approaching the game and figuring out potential edges you may have over the competition is more important to me.”

Winning and losing is part of everyday life, but when you have thousands of dollars on the line every single day, you would think that your nerves would be shot when it comes down to the risk-reward with DFS.

Every touchdown, three-pointer or strikeout can mean the difference between winning $50K or losing out on a jackpot. Bales has figured out that staying on an even keel is the best route, because losing is what happens the majority of the time.

“I think once you get conditioned to losing money, you think about it differently,” he said. “I actually lose quite a bit because I primarily play in tournaments. My chart is quite volatile because I lose a little bit at a time and then make a lot.

“I don’t treat the money I have in my bank account the same as my bankroll for playing. I’m OK with losing $9,000 on a night, but if I went to a club and spent $9,000, I’d be pretty upset.”

As of today, Bales probably doesn’t have much to be upset about.

He was in Los Angeles recently for the Draftkings 2015 Fantasy Football World Championship and then spent time Dallas to hook up with Cuban and the gang to discuss their new partnership.

Jonathan Bales has turned his passion for sports and analytics into a burgeoning business and is having a blast doing what he loves.

No matter how much money he has on the line tonight, Bales is still coming out a winner.