6. Advanced Lineup Management
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6. Advanced Lineup Management 108 6.1. Advice about number of lineups per week By Maurile Tremblay There’s ultimately no right or wrong answer—how much time you want to spend entering lineups each week depends on your goals and preferences. But there are some guidelines. 6.1.1. Cash games The more you diversify by entering different lineups, the more of your bankroll you can wager, and—as long as each lineup is +EV—the greater your return will be (not as a percentage of amount wagered, but in absolute dollar amount). The problem is that your second-best lineup won’t be as good as your first-best, and your third- best won’t be as good as your second-best, and so on. So there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. If you’re going to spend 10% of your bankroll on a single lineup in a given time-slot, you can probably spend 8% on each of two lineups (16% total), 6% on each of three lineups (18% total) ... the exact amounts depend on how much your rosters overlap, and even there, there is a trade-off. The less they overlap, the more diversification you’re getting (justifying a higher total amount of wagers), but the less they overlap, the less they’ll generally include the very best values, giving you a lower EV on the lesser lineups (militating toward a lower total amount of wagers). 6.1.2. Tournaments As with cash games, you can diversify by entering multiple lineups—and there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. But the trade-off is a bit different with tournaments, and generally a greater number of tournament lineups is warranted. When you go to your second, third, and fourth lineups and beyond, your floor generally drops faster than your ceiling. And with tournaments we’re primarily interested in ceiling—so we’re not losing as much in the way of EV as we would be with our Nth lineup in a cash game. As I improved as a DFS player, I started to pare down the number of lineups I used. Part of it was the fact I began to enter more contests, particularly cash games—it quickly became a bandwidth issue. Practically speaking, the diminishing returns became readily apparent—I did myself no favors by entering sub-optimal lineups, as fun as it might have been to see a bunch of different lineups going at once. —Alessandro Miglio 109 6.2. Managing a large number of lineups By David Dodds My philosophy on FanDuel is to play a lot of lower-priced 50/50 games. Some weeks I have also taken as many as 20 shots on the Sunday Million. So how does one manage so many rosters and not get in trouble should a key player scratch on Sunday? It can be tricky, but here is my approach. I create a dummy lineup for every type of contest I want to play. Enter these before the Thursday game starts: Thursday - Monday Sunday - Monday (Cash) Sunday - Monday (GPP) After the Thursday game starts, these additional options become available: Sunday Only Sunday 1 p.m. Start And then after the Sun 1 p.m. games start, one can also enter: Sunday 4 p.m. Late (4 p.m., SNF, MNF) and even Primetime (SNF, MNF, and TNF) The key to all of this is the dummy lineups. Don’t create 15 different rosters for a particular slate to start the week. There will be time to change the rosters later. If you don’t wait to set rosters later, it soon becomes unmanageable if something like a late scratch impacts multiple lineups. The one exception I will make is I like to make one dummy GPP lineup so I can easily separate all of my GPPs at one time. The biggest (and most popular) GPPs are loaded up early in the week (Sunday night), so I generally will just enter in this dummy lineup to secure the spot before the contest sells out. To get nearly 2,000 games in play with the best structures (100+ man 50/50s, large Double Ups of 300+ people), I generally look to enter new contests every four-to-six hours from Wednesday on. My plan is to have completed entering contests to match what I want to wager for the week by Saturday night. 6.2.1 Switching from Dummy to Real Lineups 110 Before the Thursday game starts, I will craft two-to-four lineups for the Thursday–Monday slate. I like to pre-plan my strategy so that I do not have too much exposure to one player or one game. For example, say I am planning to wager $600 on my Thursday games between three lineups. I might further choose to put $250 on Lineup 1, $200 on Lineup 2, and $150 on Lineup 3. Using FanDuel’s export lineup function, it’s easy to then replace the dummy lineups with real ones a lot closer to the game start. (I generally do it after the inactives are announced or about one hour before the start of the game.) By pushing from the dummy lineup to the new lineup, you can easily view how much action you have moved over to each lineup. A little bit of tweaking here and there and you have your desired output of $250 for Lineup 1, $200 for Lineup 2, and $150 for Lineup 3. Since most of my action is in games from $1-$5, I don’t care about the exact number of contests for each lineup. (I am managing to the dollar exposure.) I do this for the other slates at the appropriate time as well (usually Saturday night for the Sunday starting contests and then again if necessary after inactives are announced on Sunday morning). For GPPs, I actually like to use the Footballguys Interactive Value Charts and write the lineups into a spreadsheet. Because I routinely would go with 20 different lineups in the Sunday Million, I usually wait until late Saturday night to change my dummy GPP lineups. This allows me to also quickly view my stacks and exposure to common players. I do it this way so those lineups are not colliding with entering additional cash games and forcing myself to maneuver through 20-30 lineups each time I put an additional lineup in play. 111 6.3. Exposure Per Player By Austin Lee and Chad Parsons For our purposes, exposure is loosely defined as how much you have invested in a particular outcome. The more confident you are in your prediction, the more you’re willing to increase your exposure to it. The concept of exposure comes up regularly in finance and business, but it also shows up in small decisions we make every day. Should I fill the party fridge with one type of drink that everyone loves so I don’t run out? Or should I broaden the drink selection to be sure I get most people’s favorite? Do I trust the weather forecasters with my limited luggage space and pack only shorts for my vacation? Or do I swap shorts for jeans and risk having to do laundry sooner? Should I spend all of my time developing one concept? Or should I split that time to explore multiple ideas? All of these decisions involve calibrating exposure. In the world of DFS, each week is filled with hundreds of predictions, and each prediction is tied to a low or high percentage of the money you’ll spend entering contests that week. The more you diversify your lineups, the more you flatten the swings in your bankroll. Some fantasy players understand this instinctively, but many don’t analyze their exposure until they have a bad week and realize they had the same underperforming player in almost all of their lineups. Analyzing exposure in advance ensures that your favorite players get the exposure they deserve while limiting the usage of players you’re less excited about. Because the math is simpler, it can be easy to fall into the trap of calculating exposure by number of lineups or entries instead of total entry fees, but it’s all about the money. For example, if you have Running Back A in one $100 contest, he has the same exposure as Running Back B in five $20 contests and double the exposure of Running Back C in 10 $5 contests. If you’re playing $250 worth of contests that week, then your exposure to Running Back A (1 * $100 / $250) and Running Back B (5 * $20 / $250) is 40% each. And your exposure to Running Back C (10 * $5 / $250) is 20%. 112 Most exposure calculations focus on individual players, but it’s important to also consider multiplayer exposure to a specific game script prediction. For example, if the Packers are a seven-point favorite over the Colts in a game with a high over/under, you could use Eddie Lacy in some lineups and a stack of Andrew Luck and T.Y. Hilton in others. You might even diversify your investment in the Colts’ passing attack by stacking Luck with Donte Moncrief in some lineups. Notice how all of these choices play to the game script of the Colts passing from behind and the Packers running the clock on the ground? If the game doesn’t play out that way, relying too heavily on that game script can kill the production of all of the players you rostered from both teams, and—in turn—kill a large percentage of your lineups for the week.