Footballguys has a new DFS Lineup Optimizer!
This article will provide a brief overview of lineup exposure percentages for your DFS lineups. One thing to note is that DraftKings’ Community Guidelines require two changes to the player pool in order to run a player optimizer, so it is critical that you learn how to change the player pool.
What is Exposure?
Exposure when utilizing a lineup optimizer is the percentage of rosters a player shows up in your lineups. Managing exposure is critical in order to not be over-exposed to a certain player unintentionally. It is ok to take a stand on a player and intentionally have a significant amount of exposure, but where you want to be careful is to really evaluate the outputs of any lineup optimizer and whether or not the exposure percentages are right for you.
For example, if two running backs are the same price and one is projected to score 14.5 points and the other is projected to score 14.4 points, the optimizer is going to use the running back who is projected to score 14.5 points far more often than the running back who is projected to score 14.4 points. Randomness can help with this and if you want to learn more about randomness go to the third article in this series, but even with randomness on, you can still get some results that will make you want to change the percentages of players in the optimized lineups.
Below is a screenshot of the output once you have completed finishing the build of your lineups. It is here that you can evaluate your exposure percentage based on the settings output.
How do you change exposure percentages?
Once you have run a player build, go back to the player pool. You’ll notice that the column Last Exp is now populated. This represents the exposure percentages based on your last lineup build for this lineup setting. You can then manually change the percentages in the Exp % column which represents the maximum exposure that a player will be included in your lineup. As you can see below in the exp % column, Ezekiel Elliott, Saquon Barkley, Christian McCaffrey, and Odell Beckham all have had their exposure percentage manually changed.
Mass Changing Exposure Percentages:
As you start to build your lineup, you may come to the realization that you don’t want any player above a certain percentage. Click on the pencil icon above the Exp % column which will take you to a screen which will allow you to set the maximum percentage for all players at a certain percentage.