Transcript

Max:
Hey guys, this is Max Steinberg here with my brother, Danny Steinberg. We’re partners here at SaberSim and we wanted to make a video covering the most effective ways to build a bankroll in DFS. There are a lot of different views out there on how to best do this. Some people suggest grinding cash games for a while, some suggest focusing on a few lineups every week. But we think that far and away the best way to build a bankroll is to mass multienter. And this means entering 10, 20, 50, or even 150 lineups, into small stakes GPPs with a lineup builder like SaberSim. And while that might seem difficult and complicated, we’re going to show you why it’s really not.

Danny:
I think the first thing to talk about is game selection. The most important thing by far, when you’re building a bankroll is to ensure that you have a positive ROI in the contest you’re playing in. It may seem like if you’re a good player, you should be able to win in any type of contest, but some contests are much softer than others. Some contests are single entry or capped entry, which means the best players normally enter one or a few lineups in that contest. For example, the Play-action is a 20 entry max compared to 150 max of the Millionaire Maker, which means the millionaire maker ends up being a lot harder. Then you even have the Power Sweep, that’s three entry max. And you even have tournaments that have only one entry you can make.

Danny:
FanDuel and DraftKings also offer contests that exclude experienced players entirely. These are players with over $1 million in entries in their account history. So me and Max are both experienced players that are restricted from entering contests on FanDuel and DraftKings that are under $3, or that’s say no experience players. So if Max tries to enter this no experience player contest, he gets an error where it says, “The contest is not open to players of your current experience level.” In DraftKings, we can’t even see the contests under $3, so you can’t even get that error message. But these are really great contests to take advantage of.

Max:
And there are similar contests like this with cash games, like $2 double up I can’t enter either, or head to heads under $3. You have the similar types of contests with cash games and these experience players like us can’t play them. However, we think that GPPs in general are a much better way to take advantage of the mistakes of inexperienced players. In cash games, all that matters is projecting players and there’s a lot of information out there on how to do that well. You’ll notice if you play cash games, even players who play low stakes are going to have pretty reasonable lineups. The ownership play percentage of the best place in low stakes contests will often be 60%, 70%, or even 80%. Good players just don’t really fly under the radar anymore.

Danny:
Right, but in GPPs, there’s so much more than just projection that goes into making a good lineup. You have to think about optimal lineup construction, the correlations of players among each other and on different teams, upside ownership. There are a large amount of factors to consider to make a lineup that’s better than your opponent in GPPs. And because of this, your potential ROI is going to be a lot higher in low stakes GPPs than cash games. With some lineup builders, there are a lot of settings to mess with. You have many lineup builders that work off something similar to what we call stacking rules.

Danny:
These are rules that force the lineup builder through heuristics to create specific types of lineups that the builders think will be successful lineups and tournaments. This means maybe forcing a QB wide receiver stack or a QB stack with two wide receivers, trying to group together players in the same game to take advantage of correlation. But with SaberSim, we don’t use heuristics. We leverage the data from our simulation to mathematically take this all into consideration. You don’t have to worry about jerry-rigging our builder to get the optimal lineups you want. SaberSim is going to use the data we get from our sims to do this for you.

Max:
So this is where these sliders come into consideration. We have sliders that allow you to consider how much correlation you’re taking into your lineups, how much you’re going to fade the potential ownership of players in a tournament. And then a really smart way that I talk about in other videos of diversifying your lineups and capturing the upside of players. So, I already made a build earlier before this video and if you can look at the example build I created, you can see that without any rules and just by setting these sliders, our lineup builder actually gets the type of lineups that you want. It’s stacking in the way you want.

Max:
You’re using a QB with two receivers, you’re using a QB with three receivers. All of these lineups contains some sort of stack. And it’s also using game stacks, which you’ll see a lot of these high stakes players and GPPs do. It’s where you’re taking advantage of the correlation between players in the same game and stacking them up in your lineups. What ends up happening is just by using these slider settings, your GPP lineups are actually being constructed really, really well. And these well-constructed lineups are just going to raise the floor of your ROI in these low stakes GPPs, because you’re going to have that edge over other people.

Danny:
One misconception people have about GPPs is that even for these small stakes tournaments, you need a big bankroll because GPPs are so high variance. Yeah, GPPs are high variance if you’re entering one lineup, but if you enter multiple lineups, like 20 to 50, GPPs can actually be a really low variance way to make money. This is because when we build lineups for GPPs, we’re going to use a wide array of players every week. So you can see in this build Max made, really the highest owned player we have is Keenan Allen, which is 62% owned. And you can even adjust that to say, well, maybe I don’t feel comfortable and I only want 40% or 50% as the max exposure. And you can change his lineup stat.

Danny:
But let’s say we have that 60% exposure. Let’s say the worst case scenario happens and Keenan Allen gets injured. Even when that happens, you’re still not screwed. Let’s say you made 50 lineups, you still have 20 lineups left that don’t have Keenan Allen that still are going to have a good shot of winning. Even though you may risk some amount of money every week, me and Max, we’d only lose a third or half of our investment in GPPs when making lineups because of the diversity we have.

Max:
Usually some lineups miss, some hit and we make some money back. And then occasionally you get lucky and the skill that you’re putting in and the lineups that you’re putting in pays off, and you grab that big score. That big score is when your bankroll is going to get a really nice boost, and probably it’s going to come when your lineups become better, your projections are becoming better. And then you can start moving up stakes and playing these contests like a Millionaire Maker or a Sunday Million, where you have a chance to win a million dollars, which is really the dream. So in general, we really feel like, especially with a lineup builder like SaberSim, where it’s just so simple to just build 20 to 50 lineups that are really well-constructed. Playing these low stakes GPPs and entering them quite a bit is going to allow you to really, really easily build your bankroll way, way more easily than these double up contests, or even these higher stakes contests where your ROIs just are not going to be as high.

Max:
So luckily for you, SaberSim is offering a three day free trial for anyone who wants to try this out. What that means is you could try SaberSim out on a Friday, mess with the builder Friday and Saturday, use it to enter lineups on Sunday. And that basically means a free week of great lineups for Daily Fantasy NFL. We really hope you try us out. I think there’s really literally nothing to lose, it’s free. I think you’ll find that you’re going to start winning. You’re going to start actually making lineups that place highly in these small stakes GPPs and you’re going to start developing as a player and maybe develop to really win some big, big bucks. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, feel free to tweet Danny or I @maxjsteinberg on Twitter. Danny is @danielsingers. And if you have any questions, please hit us up. I really hope, wish you luck this weekend with your Daily Fantasy contests and hope you win big. Thanks.