Ultimately, your daily fantasy lineup needs to be your decision. You can load up our DFS Pro optimizer and get a lineup suggested for you and enter that straight into your DFS game of choice, sure. And there’s a chance that lineup will be one of the best, if not the very best, of a given game slate.
The problem, of course, is that you are one of thousands upon thousands of players, and every one of those players could also use a lineup optimizer — maybe even the exact same one — and enter the same lineup as you.
No, our optimizer isn’t to build your lineup for you, let you just click a couple times and turn your brain off.
But ohhh, what it is for.
I’ve played my fair share of daily fantasy. I’m not even bad at it. Made enough money to justify continued playing, and even saw my name next to some big profit numbers a time or two. To do that, I had to sit down with hours of research and stats, comparing this offensive player to that defense, checking weather, wondering about injuries. I made money, but it also took up a ton of my time.
(Subscribe to DFS Pro here, or get it included with a subscription to All Access.)
What our tool does is it cuts down the work. All the grunt work is done for you, and all you have to do is run through, decide your best lineup (maybe have us optimize it for you as a starting point) and run your lineup. The money might be the same as it was before on a net basis, but oh man, the hourly rate is better.
Below, I’ll run through a couple of quick features of our optimizer, and you’ll see what I mean.
In Week 1, Odell Beckham Jr. is playing Dallas. On its face, that’s appealing — a stud receiver is a great starting place in DFS, and Dallas is not exactly known as a defensive stalwart. But that’s pretty surface thinking. Click on Beckham’s name in the optimizer and see more.
So Beckham lines up split out right almost half the time, and that matchup gets an 82.9 grade for him. Well, that sounds appealing. Even better, that would have taken me, what, 20 minutes without the tool? With the tool, it took me 30 seconds.
But some players struggle against particular teams, even when it doesn’t make sense, right? So how does Beckham do against Dallas?
Well hmm. In 2014, Beckham was a super-duper-star against the Cowboys, topping 50 combined FanDuel points in two matchups. Last year, though? No touchdowns in two games, 12.4 combined points. That’s a little concerning. Beckham is Beckham, but if you’re spending on him, you want maximum value. Maybe we run a comparison of Beckham against another stud receiver that week, Julio Jones.
Look at that. Beckham has a seemingly awesome matchup, but according to basically everything we have at our disposal, Jones looks like a better play. I might have found that out on my own. Maybe. Better chance is I’d have flipped a coin between two star receivers. That can work. Sure. But man, are you better off with actual data. And that’s what we have. The optimizer shouldn’t be your last step when setting a lineup. But it should be your first, second and third.
(Subscribe to DFS Pro here, or get it included with a subscription to All Access.)
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