Footballguys has a new DFS Lineup Optimizer!

This article will provide a brief overview of customizing the advanced controls for your DFS lineups. One thing to note is that DraftKings’ Community Guidelines require two changes to the player pool to run a player optimizer, so you must learn how to change the player pool.

Stacks

Stacking when used appropriately can be a powerful tool to increase the upside of your lineups by pairing your players with their teammates or even players on the opposite team to hope for a high scoring game.

When you go to the stacks section of the advanced controls, the default setting shows all of the recommended stack combinations, if you’d like to see all of the possible combinations of stacks, click on the checkbox that says, “show all possible stacks”.

The green highlighted boxes will show a positive upside correlation, while the red highlighted boxes will show a negative upside correlation and typically should be avoided as it decreases your upside.

Projection Randomness

Projection randomness can be utilized to create some different lineups that may not be as optimal, but while building a large number of lineups it creates lineup combinations that otherwise may not be possible based on optimal lineups.

The randomness feature ultimately adds a random percentage to each player between 0% and the number that you set (maximum of 25%). The randomness feature can help address issues you may be experiencing in which the optimizer is favoring a core group of players and while that may be optimal based on projections, the randomness tool can add in some variations and different lineup combinations.

Flex Setting

The flex tool is one of the most useful tools of the optimizer. Using the flex setting allows you to customize what position you want to include in your flex position. For example, you may not want to have any tight ends in your flex position. If that is the case, simply move the slider of the tight end to 0% and the optimizer will not give you any lineups that have a tight end in the flex position.

If you run a lineup build of setting your tight end to 0% and setting your wide receiver to 0%, this will guarantee that your flex is a running back. One thing to note is that your percentages for this setting must add up to at least 100% for the optimizer to be able to run.

Teams Setting

The teams advanced control allows you to set the minimum and a maximum number of players from each team that is included in your lineup. For example, if you’re going to the Bears game on a Sunday, and want to build some lineups, you may want to have at least one player in every lineup that you build. By changing the minimum under that setting from 0 to 1, it will guarantee that at least one Bears player will be included in that lineup for that build.

The team's tool is also useful if you do not want any stacks in any of your lineups that you’re building. If you go the box where it states “Set all max to” and put 1 in that box, this will set the maximum of every team to one player from that team.

Cap Setting

Not utilizing all of your salary cap space can be a useful tool to create uniqueness amongst your lineups. Winning a large-field tournament is difficult, and if you do win a tournament, one of the things that you don’t want to have to worry about is sharing the winnings with other people who had identical lineups as you. The cap advanced control is useful if you are taking players with high ownership percentages.

If you’re taking some of the most popular players on the board, you may want to leave a little bit of salary unused to hope some of your competition will utilize more of their cap. Say you want to leave $300 more in each lineup, to do this you would go to the advanced controls, then to cap, then set the maximum cap to 49700 for DraftKings.

Typically you really shouldn’t need to go a minimum cap of $49,000 for DraftKings. If you start going below that amount, there likely are moves that could have been made to improve your team. The one exception to this might be a short slate such as the three-game Thanksgiving slate.