Transcript

Andy:
Thank you guys so much for joining me this morning. We’re really excited to get this video together on League of Legends DFS strategy. We’re lucky to have a couple SaberSim players joining us. We’ve got Kyle and Alex, who both have been playing DFS League of Legends for years, and they’re joined by myself, who is a complete League of Legends newbie. Andy Baldacci. I’m the CEO of SaberSim, and we’ve got Danny Steinberg who is a SaberSim partner and professional DFS player. And Danny bridges the gap between me and Alex and Kyle because Danny is very experienced with DFS, being a professional, has played League of Legends and does play League of Legends, but is new to the DFS game. So what we’re hoping to do today is really just break down what goes into becoming a winning League of Legends players, how to adapt your standard DFS approach to this game, what makes it different and all of that.

Andy:
We’re going to do our best to cover as much as we can, but we’re obviously not going to be able to get to everything. So if there are any questions you have that we don’t answer, feel free to reach out to us in Slack or just shoot me an email at [email protected], and I’ll reach out to the guys and we’ll do our best to get everything answered so that you can really hit the ground running, as DFS League of Legends is blowing up. It’s crazy how big these contests have gotten. I think there’s 100K to first coming up on DK. Every day, it seems like there’s a six figure prize pool, so I think there’s a lot of money to be made if you know how to approach that, and hopefully by the end of this today you’ll have a good context on how to do that. So with that long-winded introduction, thank you guys for joining me today.

Alex:
Absolutely.

Kyle:
Yeah, this is exciting. I’ve been waiting years, Maav and I have to have big league contests instead of the $100-

Alex:
Seriously.

Kyle:
[inaudible 00:02:05], five years.

Alex:
Getting that $300 first place prize with the 10 people in your contest always-

Andy:
Yeah, I feel like your DFS trajectory has completely transformed in the last week or so-

Kyle:
It has.

Alex:
Yeah for sure.

Andy:
And finally, it’s your time to shine right now, I think. So for people who aren’t as familiar with League of Legends, can you just give a little bit of context on what the game is, and how it works, and what to pay attention to? We don’t need to, like I was saying before, walk through the rule book or anything, but just to get people up to speed on the important parts. Where should they even begin? What should they be thinking about?

Kyle:
Real quick, too. So just go dating back five years when I started, when Alex got me into this, I was the King of making fun of Maav for watching these games. And I was the guy that said anyone that watches sports or Esports is just the ultimate nerd. And then, I started playing DFS and I started watching it, and now every Saturday it streams on my TV and my son watches it with me, my wife gives me a bunch of crap but I thoroughly enjoy it. Even right now, if you think that it’s just some nerdy game, but if you really get into it, I promise you it’s just as exciting as any other sport out there.

Alex:
Yeah, I’m not going to lie, I am a giant nerd. I mean I’m an athletic director for a living, but I’ve loved sports. I grew up playing sports, I teach sports, that’s my job. But this is just another sport. There’s so many aspects to it that… Is a team motivated game. So there’s something new every single time that makes it really interesting to watch. So, League of Legends is obviously a computer game. It is a MOBA, which stands for a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. So basically, it’s one map with five players from each team. Each of those players has a position, and the objective is to destroy the other team’s base. There are different things that go on during that time period, but that’s the gist of it. You’re just looking to push towards the other team’s base and destroy what’s called the nexus, which is basically at the other end of the map for you on where you start.

Alex:
As you can see, it says blue nexus and red nexus. You’ll hear them talking about one team is on the red side, one team is on the blue side. The blue side is always a bottom. The red side is always a top. There are different advantages, disadvantages to that, but we’re not going to go too deep into that. So like I said, there’s five players. There’s one player that generally goes into the top lane. There’s one player that goes into the mid lane. On DK, they’re called the ADC, which is attack, damage, carry, and then there is a support which babysits that person. The attack, damage, carry is generally someone who starts off not as strong and then gets stronger as we go along. And then, you can see here, it says jungle. There’s one player that goes in to the jungle.

Alex:
There are different little monsters that hang around in there, and he kills monsters. And his role of the game is to try to influence the bottom lane, the mid lane, or the top lane as much as possible to gain small advantages. You can see it says turrets. They’re basically structures in the middle of the lanes that fire little bolts of energy at things as they go back and forth. You’re trying to kill turret by turret, and then you’ll see it says three inhibitors here. Once you kill those things, then you get big minions that spawn in the lanes. Each lane has a wave of minions that comes down every 30 seconds, and if you kill the inhibitors, then it has a giant minion that comes with it that does a lot of damage.

Alex:
There’s objectives in the game which teams are trying to play for. When you draft your team on there, they get points through objectives. So killing a turret is one point. Getting the first kill of the game is two points. There’s a dragon that spawns here every six minutes, I think it is now. It might be five minutes. It changes a lot. If you kill the dragon, your team gets two points. Each dragon has different things it does for your team. And then, up here before the first 20 minutes, there is a giant crab. They call it Shelly-

Andy:
Is it actually a giant crab?

Alex:
It’s a giant crab. They call it Shelly.

Andy:
That’s great.

Alex:
If you kill that, you can summon it. It spawns twice on six minute intervals. If you kill it once, it’ll spawn in six minutes, but at 20 minutes, a giant purple worm-dragon thing spawns here called the Baron. And, that is a major objective. If you kill that, it gives your team a giant buff that makes your minions super strong and you’ll see most of the teams will fight in this river here for control of this area, so that they can take those objectives.

Danny:
Yeah. Why don’t you just backtrack a little bit and talk out the choosing of the champions war? Is it a draft based?

Alex:
Yeah. So at the beginning of the game, each team gets to band three champions. After that-

Andy:
I guess just to go really basic, what is a champion?

Danny:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:07:13].

Alex:
Yeah. A champion is the thing you’re choosing to control, your avatar, I guess. They call it a summoner. So you’re the summoner controlling the little dude in the map. There are I think 139 champions right now. So with the draft, each team gets to band three different champions, and then they go pick order. It goes first pick gets one pick, then the next team gets two picks. Then the next team gets two picks, then the next team gets-

Kyle:
Snake drafts.

Alex:
One pick. Yeah, it’s snake drafts down there if you guys are familiar with that.

Andy:
Okay.

Alex:
Then each team gets another two bands, and then they snake draft the last two picks. So each team gets five different champions. Each one has four unique abilities. Some have a little bit more because they pushed the mold on how a champion should be, and some counter other champions, they’re just good against them. Some are weaker in the beginning and really strong late. They all have different unique things to them and teams will draft in a way to try to give themself an advantage at a certain point in the game, or to pick against a team’s other picks, or they’ll try to band out champions whose teams are really good with.

Kyle:
Yeah. And I would say that, just to add on, a lot of these players, professional players have what we call comfort picks that they’ve grown up in the game playing, that they’re good with that. That they know all the different abilities, and when to do them, and all that sort of thing. It’s I think, important to realize, and we can go into this further, but the meta changes constantly, and that affects the draft indirectly or directly affects the fantasy points that come off that. So for instance, just if we go back a season or two, the meta at the time was-

Andy:
Wait, when you talk about meta, can you give a little context on what that means specifically?

Kyle:
So league does updates all the time. I think every two weeks there’s a minor update that comes out. But with those updates come different buffs and nerfs for all the different champions that Alex was just talking about it. It changes. The whole draft is… Every update, there’s new draft, there can be new champions. So there’s a whole… I mean it just sounds so nerdy saying it out loud and listening to Maav. I’ve always been a sports guy my whole life, and I got sucked into this thing. It’s a whole new world, so it’s a lot to take in.

Andy:
Alex-

Danny:
You’re doing a good job explaining, I think. A lot of basic stuff to go over. Just reiterating what was just said, the champions’ abilities change on different factors. The strength of the… You can pick, I don’t know if we even talked about this. You can buy items for the champion and the abilities of those items change and they can change the macro strategy of the game.

Andy:
Are those changes intentionally getting something, an item or whatever be might be overpowered or is it just changes are made and then players realize, “Okay, this is not properly priced.” Or whatever it may be and they take advantage of it and then they come up with a new update to balance this. Are they trying to get a balance or are they intentionally making certain things overpowered?

Danny:
I think I have a good answer to this and let me know if it’s [inaudible 00:10:32]. I think what The Riot, the creators of the game or the people in the game are trying to do, they’re trying to balance the game, which is take things that are overpowered and nerf them, which is make them less good-

Alex:
Weaker, yeah.

Danny:
Buff, which is make some items or characters a little better. And I think what happens is, they don’t do a perfect job of that and sometimes they get imbalances.

Alex:
That’s a good way of saying that they don’t do a good job of it.

Kyle:
And Riot releases new champions, I think probably every season and when they do that, right, there’s a moneymaking aspect behind the game where people have to buy these champions. So what they do is when they release a new champion, typically that new champion is going to be overpowered, right? So if you’ve been watching these league games, recently there’s a top laner called Sett, which is a relatively new champion, but it’s very overpowered and I can guarantee the next nerve that comes out or next update, there’ll be some nurse to that champion and maybe some of the items that he uses as well. So it’s a constantly evolving balancing act.

Andy:
And what we’ll do is at later on in this, we’re going to walk through what this actual process looks like. We’re going to talk about some resources to get data, to get stats, to get condensed versions of the game. Because just like with any DFS, there’s a huge range of time commitments that you can can invest in this. And just to get started, just to get your feet wet and especially the smaller stakes contest, you don’t necessarily need to watch all of these matches.

Andy:
You don’t need to even watch the condensed matches I’m sure, but as you move up in stakes, as you get more serious, if it’s something you enjoy, whatever it may be, you can scale up your time investment based on what makes sense for you, for your life. I mean I know a lot of us right now has some extra free time so it might make sense to get really involved in this, if you enjoy that, but we’ll make sure to cover some tips for people that might not have or want to go all in on this. Yeah, so going back to just the fundamentals for the different sites between FanDuel and DraftKings and just in general, what are the major scoring statistics that stand out?

Alex:
This site is called oracleselixir.com as you can see here, oracleselixir.com. Just for reference, Oracle’s Elixir was an item that used to be in the game that let you see invisible things. So you’re seeing the invisible stats. They took that out of the game. But this is for LCK, which is super boring. So we’re going to go to a more fun one, which is LPL. LPL is a Chinese region of Legal of Legends. As you can see in these stats, you have total kills, which is where you get your points for DraftKings. Every kill is three points. They have assists. Every assist you get is two points. The little minions that run through the wave, each one of those I think is like .1 point?

Kyle:
.02.

Alex:
.02 points. And then there are deaths. Every death is -1 point. So you’ll also see here it says dragon percentage or dragon control. That’s once again, every time a team kills a dragon, you get points from that. So what you’re really looking for is almost like basketball. You’re looking for pace, you’re looking for two teams that just love to battle and go at it and go hard. And if you read my write ups, I always go into this. It says combined kills per minute. This is team kills and opposing team kills. That means how many deaths they’re also giving up. So you’re looking for a team that just loves to get in there and go hard. If you sort it, you can see, it’ll show you the top team is Invictus Gaming. If you’ve ever watched their games, it’s like watching The Sons or-

Andy:
Mid 2000s Sons?

Kyle:
Yeah, mid-

Alex:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really fast paced. They don’t play a lot of defense. They give up a lot of kills also. They get a ton and they give up a ton just because they’re overly aggressive. It’s just super bananas type stuff. So Invictus Gaming is the fastest pace team and then Billy Billy gaming is the slowest pace team. Now this is just for the Chinese region. If you look at another region like LCK, which is a Korean region-

Andy:
So I guess actually on that note, this is probably a good time to just get into what the major regions are that-

Alex:
Sure.

Andy:
That we’re all degenerate gambling on, on DraftKings-

Alex:
LCS is the American region, North America. LEC is the European. LCK is the Korean region and then LPL is the Chinese region. That’s all the DraftKings [inaudible 00:15:10].

Andy:
Okay.

Kyle:
So there’s four major regions and then there’s smaller regions, but yeah, DraftKings is just those four. And in terms of-

Andy:
One single league per slate?

Alex:
No, generally yes, but right now they’ve actually done it since the inception, but people just weren’t used to it. They mix up the Korean region and the Chinese region because they happen at the same.

Andy:
Yeah. So there’s LPL, LCK, is one slate right now.

Danny:
Our LPL, LCK, is that best out of three?

Kyle:
I was going to say yes-

Alex:
Yes.

Kyle:
The reason they combine those two is it is best out of three and LEC and LCS are best of one. So if you look at the fantasy points per game, that column in DK, when you draft a team, it’s going to be a lot higher in the LCK and LPL just because they’re playing at minimum two games. So.

Alex:
Exactly.

Andy:
Okay. So it would be ridiculous to combine two leagues that have different numbers of teams in the matches because-

Alex:
It would just be so-

Andy:
You just pick the one with more games.

Alex:
Exactly. The advantage would be astronomical.

Andy:
That makes sense-

Alex:
So-

Andy:
Yeah, keep rolling man.

Alex:
So pace is generally the thing I personally pay a lot of attention to, but when we’re talking about this LPL-LCK slate, I just want to show you something real quick. This is always something that I’m like, I don’t know why people play LCK teams as much as they do, but just looking at this, if you look at the lowest combined kills per minute, at .63 for the LPL, if you look at LCK.

Kyle:
.7 is the top, right?

Danny:
I’m pretty sure. .68 is the top. So the lowest paced Chinese team is about middle of the pack in LCK and the highest paced is almost double the top one in LCK.

Kyle:
So if you talk about a strategy, right? When you look at this, we just talked about how LPL and LCK have combined slates. I mean this is a huge money maker for me dating back a couple of years, but, if there’s two games from LCK and two games from LPL, a lot of times it makes sense to do a stack of the two LPL teams that you think are going to win those games and just fade the LCK. And, in the past it’s worked too when you’ve had the average people, because just in terms of popularity, LCK was the premier league in League of Legends for a long time.

Kyle:
And, the average person would follow those big name people. There’s a guy named Faker who’s considered the best midlaner in the world, but people are going to play those names and those teams that they at least know a little bit just for the average league fan. When you get these LPL teams, I think the second one on the LPL list there, I forget who it was, but just after IGE, they’re not a good team. If you look at their record, there’s 79, but they’re constantly pushing the pace and that’s where the fantasy points are.

Alex:
Yeah, it’s just like in LCK, the top team in pace is the worst team in the league or the second worst team in the league. APK, their CPK is so high because they give up a ton of kills.

Andy:
We’ll get into more of the specifics in just a few minutes, but one thing I want to stress a bit is just when you’ve talked a lot about the context of League of Legends, what makes it different, how it works. We’re going to get again more into the specifics of lineup construction, but to bridge that gap, one thing I think that’s important to think about is just fundamentally what makes strong GPP lineups. And to me a lot of that comes down to upside and it’s finding ways where you can separate your lineups from the rest of the field in whatever that may be. And typically what we’ve found, the three main areas of that to be are through correlations, which lead to stacks, ownership in variants and, Danny is going to talk about what he’s found on the correlation side of things and then we’ll talk about ownership and variants as well and just how that on sort of a fundamental standpoint, how that impacts how you should be thinking about lineup construction so that you can have sort of a good foundation to build your lineup solid.

Andy:
And then after that, we can get into some of the specifics of, “Okay, here’s what this actually looks like in practice, but we always find it important to just help you make some of these decisions for yourself by understanding the fundamentals.” And I mean in this, when were looking at some of the correlations, it blew me away how strong they were. So Danny, do you want to just jump into what jumped out at you when you’re looking at the correlations? Because to me it seems like when they are as strong as they are, which we shouldn’t get into, this is probably one of the most important things you can look at. It’s just really understanding what those look like.

Danny:
Totally. Just as a point of a fact is they’re different in scoring between FD and DK.

Alex:
FanDuel makes you play three teams.

Danny:
Yes. That’s the only difference.

Alex:
Well there are a few differences and points and such, but that is the biggest difference. That you have to take three teams instead of two.

Danny:
But mostly it’s almost, it’s pretty close, similar. The correlations between DK and FD scoring should be-

Andy:
But you just can’t have as big as stacks.

Alex:
Right. The biggest way to look at it is if you’re playing on DraftKings, you’re playing a two game parlay where if you’re playing on FanDuel, you’re playing a three team parlay. You’re trying to nail the three highest scoring teams and player or players from those teams instead of just having to hit the two. It doesn’t mean you can’t play three teams from DraftKings because sometimes that is something that can work out. But yeah, on FanDuel you just have to.

Danny:
Okay, so let me give them to the correlations. So say for SIM, we have a little bit of the data from the different leagues and my prior going into looking at the correlations was that people on the same team would obviously be really positively correlated. I would think that ADC and support would have the highest positive correlation and then players on opposing teams you would think would be negatively correlated. So it’s a small sample size so far. But I was surprised by what I found. Actually the strongest correlation in the small sample size of, [inaudible 00:21:15], sample size of 63 games is jungle and ADC and jungle and team also have a strong corelation. Jungle and everything seems to have a strong correlation.

Alex:
Yeah, jungle just influences the entire map, so yeah.

Danny:
Okay. So that makes sense to you guys. So support and ADC is also pretty high. Really the least strong correlations on team level are between top and the rest of the team, which makes sense to me because the top line tends to be more isolated.

Alex:
Yeah, they’re on an Island.

Danny:
So I don’t know if we even mentioned this earlier, but the one thing that’s unique about bottom line is that teams normally have two characters on each team go to the bottom line and support and ADC are always together most of the time. So that’s why it made sense to me that support and ADC would be really highly correlated. Some of the interesting things is I didn’t… So remind me the leagues that are best out of three versus best out of one.

Alex:
LCK and LPL are best out of three and then LCS and LEC are best of one.

Danny:
Okay. Europe and America are best out of one and-

Alex:
Yeah, they have the poor way of actually doing that now.

Danny:
Okay. So for Europe and America, there is strong negative or somewhat strong negative correlation between players on opposing teams. For Korea and China, that’s actually not the case. And I think the reason is because of the blowout dynamics. So if a team just loses, tell me if this makes sense to you guys or the team just loses in the best out of three in the first two games, they’re not going to get as many points as if compared to if they play a three game match. Right? Is that correct?

Kyle:
The games that you don’t play where you get that 20 point bonus, right? For LCK and LPL, a lot of times that 20 points is-

Kyle:
Bonus rate for LCK and LPL, a lot of times that 20 points isn’t enough. You want the teams to go three games, right? Because even in a loss your guys are-

Alex:
Yeah, you want it to be closer.

Kyle:
If your ATC score is 20 points, it’s not going to be enough for any GPP [crosstalk 00:00:13].

Alex:
Yeah, no.

Kyle:
So that makes sense.

Danny:
Well where, if you have a best out of one, then there’s no consideration on some of that. You just want the team you play to completely smash the other team, right? Or do like a really long game maybe would be [inaudible 00:23:27] –

Alex:
Game length generally is a positive correlation towards how many kills are going to happen because if the game is going a longer time, that means there’s more opportunities for kills to happen in that game.

Kyle:
Yep.

Danny:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So-

Alex:
Sometimes it’s good too, even with the two bad teams going against each other with an elongated game, right? If you tie it back to NBA, right? When, a couple of years ago when the Sixers were in that trust the process stage, but they were putting up… When it was like Michael Carter-Williams and I forget who else, but he was getting a triple-double every game. But the games are absolute shit. If you’re an NBA fan, you watch it and you’re like this-

Danny:
That was when I was, first started playing [crosstalk 00:01:01].

Alex:
Trash but [crosstalk 00:24:02] like your fantasy games and they’re in every winning lineup. So it’s kind of the same in league, right? You get those games that two crappy teams that just want to fight, but they don’t know how to close out. A lot of fantasy points there.

Andy:
Danny, were there any other correlations that jumped out at you when you were analyzing that?

Danny:
I mean. I think just looking at the correlations general, they are gigantic. The correlation we have between or SaberSim found between Jungle and ADC was 0.94 if you round up-

Alex:
Wow.

Danny:
Which is higher than I’ve ever seen anything. QB and wide receiver I think is like one of the highest positive correlations and any sport, maybe NHL has better and that’s like 0.4 at its most. Like certain players.

Danny:
So the correlations are absolutely gigantic, which means to me that playing as many players on the same team as possible is very optimal.

Alex:
Yeah.

Danny:
There’s moderate negative correlations between players on opposing teams in the European and American leagues. So that should also mean that you should be inclined to not play players on opposing teams.

Danny:
That’s not clearly the case in three game leagues. And that may be a source of edge you can have, if… I kind of want to wait on more data here, but I’m seeing some positive correlations between opposing teams in the best of three data.

Andy:
And just as a quick point of information, we’re literally in the process right now, hopefully by the end of the day today we’ll have a much bigger set of data for past matches so we can go deeper into these relationships and really build out a stronger correlation model to better analyze these. But right now we still have, I feel like we have a decent sample to draw some inferences from it.

Alex:
[crosstalk 00:25:54] Just on the playing teams against each other in the [inaudible 00:02:59], in the LCS and LIC. The games yesterday, the top two winning lineups in the $10 were game stacks. It was Team Liquid versus C9 with a random team that scored the most. That’s what took down the biggest contests. So-

Danny:
I feel like that’s such, it should be an exception to the rule.

Kyle:
It’s such and [crosstalk 00:26:22] it really is.

Alex:
It is the biggest. But people always ask me, they’re like, “Well should you game stack?” And I’m like, “If you’re playing one lineup, no. If you’re playing three lineups, no. If you’re playing 20 maybe you can have one in there. On a two game slate, I’m definitely going to have one or two game stacks which we’ll go over when I’m building lineups. If you’re playing 150 go nuts.” Like there are definitely, there are definitely possibilities.

Andy:
Is that? Is the thinking for this that it’s more of an ownership play? Like a lineup construction play? Because, I don’t think you’re necessarily doing that to take advantage of the game stack. You’re more doing that to be contrarian and as you have more lineups you can take riskier plays that might be plus EV but are just going to destroy your variants. And so is that the angle you’re saying? Is like, you’re not saying in like an absolute sense these games stacks are good in terms of maximizing likelihood to project.

Alex:
No they’re not. No.

Andy:
It’s just that they’re unlikely to be, have that combination highly owned. So you can take advantage of that if you are willing to take more risk.

Alex:
Yeah. It’s like game stacking NBA. You’re hoping that it goes into double overtime, goes really long and they just happen to be the highest scoring players. It’s not a skill based thing that you’re doing this on.

Andy:
Well, are there strong negative correlations like that and in a game stack in an NBA game?

Alex:
I guess in NBA it wouldn’t be as much because you don’t get points for the deaths of the players. I don’t know, [crosstalk 00:27:43] .

Danny:
It’s interesting because sometimes correlations can not, do not necessarily match my intuitions. With NBA, you’re right, like if a game goes into double and triple overtime, that’s right for a game stack. But there’s also situations where a team gets blown out, there’s also negative correlation events-

Alex:
Absolutely. It’s not a good idea. Like I tell everyone, it’s not a good idea, but if you want to run a few I don’t hold it against you.

Danny:
I’m hoping to see more data on the Korean and Chinese leagues because in those it actually may make sense to game stack. In the European and American leagues, I would strongly recommend against that. I think based on the super strong correlations, the optimal lineup construction is going to involve whoever’s in your captain position. You should have four players on the team, without [crosstalk 00:00:28:29].

Alex:
Yeah. That’s generally how I build mine.

Kyle:
Yeah, me too. Yep.

Alex:
Yeah. Fourth… yeah.

Danny:
And then, for draftings you only have to use two different teams so it makes sense to do a four and a three stack. But for Vandal or tier one also makes sense.

Kyle:
Dan, Dan, back to your correlation point about Jungle and ADC. You said it was 1.94 which is the highest you’ve seen. That the site that [inaudible 00:28:52] was sharing earlier, the Oracle’s Elixir, he was on the team section. There’s a player section for each team for each league and to dive in further, and this kind of goes along with actually watching the games, but there’s a, when you look at individual player data, there’s a kill participation header… column.

Kyle:
And that’s key to look at because not… Just like any sport, any game, not all players are considered equal, right? And they have a different style. So it was 62, 63 games sample. There’s a good chance that maybe a couple of those Junglers that are influencing that correlation are really high kill participation people, whereas others aren’t. So it’s not to say it’s black and white when you go to builds a lineup, right? That you’re going to want your Jungler with your ADC. I think it really depends on which teams at which players are playing, if that makes sense.

Danny:
Okay, that’s fascinating. It actually sounds-

Alex:
Yeah. Sometimes you have your Tony Snell of the team.

Danny:
I kind of want to get back to this. But that actually makes me think that players who have higher kill participation historically are going to be higher correlated with the rest of their team [crosstalk 00:06:52].

Alex:
Absolutely.

Kyle:
Yeah.

Danny:
Okay, cool. Going to research that idea.

Andy:
But yeah, I think there’s this nuance to how to build those stacks, but it seems like when correlations are that strong you’re trying to just build… The top priority is building the biggest stack with the captain that the site allows. And then so in fan duel rather than having a three two, two. A four, two, one makes more sense because that one stack it just has so much more upside than splitting it up into three stacks. Is that accurate?

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
It is. And I would even take that, and this is we’re, going past 101 here we’re going to League 103, but if you look at the screenshots of the lineups that I’ve posted recently where I’ve had success, it’s been a four stack with the captain, right? So either a Mid or ADC in that captain spot. And because of the slate and because of the price of the other stack, I would have two people from one team and then I basically just punt the team position.

Kyle:
So if we use teams for an example, if we use that IG gaming thing that [inaudible 00:31:00] just had up, I would have four people, the ADC and the captain spot, two people from some other team, but then my team position would just be the cheapest team on the slate to make that lineup work.

Kyle:
Because the points you get, an [inaudible 00:31:12] talked about the fantasy points you get from the team rights of Dragons Barons, all that stuff. I mean it’s, the range of outcomes is small. It’s not like an actual player. So punting that, the difference that you get by upgrading a position player is much better than [crosstalk 00:31:28] that team.

Andy:
Is the logic similar to how you approach defense in football, Danny?

Kyle:
Yes. Yeah.

Danny:
Yeah. I think that was really well said by Kyle. Yeah, it’s very similar. I think that sort of logic does make sense. You really just want to… But with football you can often in optimal lineups you’re paying way down for defense because there’s just not as much payoff from paying up the defense [inaudible 00:31:53] players have much higher projected scoring into the lineup with higher tolerance [inaudible 00:31:59] yeah it’s a very [inaudible 00:32:01].

Andy:
and Kyle, one of the things that you had mentioned to me before we started recording and that we touched on a little bit ago, is just ownership in general. How are you thinking about ownership when it’s just still such a new… It’s not a new DFS sport, it’s been around for years, but this amount of interest is irregular and is bringing in a ton of new players to it. So how are you approaching ownership right now?

Kyle:
Yeah, ownership has always been, I think my foremost thing when looking at a slate and the way I look at it is, and it goes into recency bias, right? I’ve been playing DFS now for, I don’t know, eight years and at the start of DFS, if you remember, recency bias was huge and people were building lineups off of box scores. And that’s basically how it went. And [crosstalk 00:32:50].

Andy:
And by recency bias you mean whoever had a big game last game, we’re just going to play them.

Kyle:
Yeah. I mean if, I don’t know, Kobe Bryant went off for [inaudible 00:09:57], but if you went off for 50 fantasy points there’s a good chance he’s going to be 50% owned that next game. And it’s huge in NFL too, but I think as DFS matured over time. People have caught on that that’s an edge that could be had.

Kyle:
But in league it’s different and it really hasn’t changed. And we got all these new people now, but I’ve always looked at recency bias and box scores as a way to differentiate myself from other people. And a good example here, right? If you played the slate over the weekend for LCS on Saturday, 100 thieves was playing TSM. Now if you look at the data, it wasn’t a great game to play, but a 100 Thieves came in I think at about two to 5% owned, I think their top player was like four point something percent owned.

Alex:
Super low.

Kyle:
Super low and they ended up winning the game versus TSM. They scored really well. They were on a lineup I had that did really well. And if you look at, because LCS plays Saturday and Sunday, if you look at the Sunday slate, a 100 Thieves went up to 25 to 40% owned on their highest people.

Alex:
Yeah. Cody Sun was 43% owned in the three two three.

Kyle:
We’re talking about 30% ownership increase, probably more than 30% [crosstalk 00:34:04].

Alex:
30% points.

Kyle:
Right. Yeah, off of one day. One slate, right? And it’s just insane to me that that happens and if you look at the game, 100 Thieves didn’t end up winning, but they shouldn’t have CLG had a huge lead and should have been a dud and should have been a huge edge for myself, right? Who basically evaded 100 Thieves all together and was huge on CLG, but that’s a huge way to get an advantage, right? And a lot of people are just, they see that one big game, those this huge kills or they remember the person that won that contest from the previous day and they’re going to be huge the next day.

Alex:
Or there are teams that are just always heavily owned. Like G2 on the LAC. On the European league G2 is always just… Granted they generally have the most kills but there are always heavily owned, I’m talking like 20, 30, 40% owned in some of these five game slates where there’s just a bunch of games going on and they are just the majority of the ownership.

Andy:
How high is the variance for individual positions or teams? How, from match to match, how consistent is it? Because in traditional sports you have basketball where outcomes typically do follow almost a normal distribution where it’s going to be pretty stable with performance, just varying the majority of the time plus or minus within a small range of that average. And then you have baseball, and hockey, and golf where there’s not at all like that. Where on the variance range does league of legends fall? Or at least in your kind of opinions on this? I don’t know if you’ve punched up the numbers.

Alex:
Let me [crosstalk 00:35:30] right here on the math, you can jump in. But it goes back into what I think Alex was saying near the beginning there, right? Is that the different champions that are in play. And I think that plays a huge part. So if we look at, forget a win loss, but based on the champions to get played, a good example would be a Mid Laner, right? Now we talk about Meta before and what’s popular, but a Mid Laner is typically a strong scoring position. Someone that deals a lot of damage, they can put up a lot of fantasy points.

Alex:
But the Meta now is to almost put a Mid Laner on a tank player and there’s a champion called Ornn, which is pretty popular in the Mid Lane. There’s other ones too, but I mean a tank isn’t going to put up a lot of fantasy points. He might be lucky to get a lot of assists, but that’s not his role on the team to help the actual team win. So I think the variance is different by position. I think on ADC it’s probably tighter but on something like Mid Lane where there’s a wide range of potential champions but not just the champion, the type of champion that you can play.

Alex:
Whereas you can increase that variance. So someone like PerkZ the Mid Laner on G2 in the LEC league, he’s one of the highest damage output people in the worlds at Mid Lane. But if he gets put on a tank champion during the draft selection, you’re going to be lucky to get 30 fantasy points out of him. [crosstalk 00:36:44] Blow out.

Andy:
To make sure I’m thinking about this right. It sounds like that for some positions, a lot of the reason for their variance or the increase in variance isn’t because of in game dynamics, it’s because of the fact that there’s that draft where the champion and who the champion is changes significantly and based on that it’s going to… Their role is going to change significantly amongst different positions.

Alex:
Yeah. Absolutely. A coach is going to go into a game with a game plan. Obviously, he’s going to be like, “Okay, this is how I want the game to go out and go and if it doesn’t go that way, you guys might need to pivot. But if it does go that way, let’s just run it that way.” So Top Lane can have a lot of variance because sometimes they’ll be put on a tank champion who’s not going to get a lot of kills and sometimes they’re going to be put on what’s called a split pusher and they may never join team fights. All they’re going to do is just try to push that Top Lane over and over and over again and never join a team fight and just let the other team try to [inaudible 00:37:49] or pull someone up there constantly and they’re just not involved at all.

Alex:
Different players have a varied pool of players that they’re comfortable on. Generally about, I’d say the average player probably has a pool of about five to 10 player or five to 10 champions that they’re pretty comfortable on and depending on what they pick, yeah, the draft just throws everything for a loop. Especially in these best of one games, you can just have a bad draft where you just draft horribly and it’s just not good against the other team. And you can have the top team drop a game to the worst team in the site, like the worst team in the league. It happens like that sometimes, so the variance can be, this team should just absolutely crush this other team. They go in, you look at the draft, you’re like, what were they thinking? How are they going to pull this off? And then they don’t. And then your top team, who you invested all this money in just scores horribly.

Kyle:
Which is why I hate league for cash [crosstalk 00:15:47].

Alex:
Yeah. I refuse to play cash in league just because of that reason too.

Danny:
Random question on the same point. So let’s say, just to consider the variance between the team performances, let’s say Cloud 9 plays Counter Logic. This the best team of the league versus the worst team. What percentage of the time do you think Cloud 9 wins the one [crosstalk 00:16:06].

Alex:
90% of the time. And then there’s going to be one game where Cloud 9’s going to mess around or they’re going to draft something super wonky, and Pobelter who is the Mid Laner on CLG? He tends to be the person who carries for that team. They’re going to mess up and they’re going to feed them too many kills and he’s actually going to carry that team. Because if you actually look at the skill level between the top players and the mid players and the bottom players, it’s not that huge. I think all of them play so much that they’re within a close enough spectrum that if they mess around too much, they’re definitely able to just give away games and let other teams win.

Andy:
They’re still professionals. Like at the end of the day, they’re all still, they might be like the worst team, but they’re not just absolute trash.

Alex:
Yeah, they’re still better than I am. That’s for sure.

Kyle:
Any team can win any game in any slate is what it comes down to.

Alex:
I absolutely 100% believe that. I mean Team Liquid who looks like one of the worst teams in the slate should have beat Cloud 9. CLG should have won their game yesterday too, they just didn’t play their plan properly, but it was definitely in the cards for it to happen.

Andy:
So to me it seems like, to draw some parallels, this is closer for different reasons, but like because of the variance, because of the strength of stacks, this is relatively similar to baseball in the sense of going super heavy on just one team. If you’re doing your 150 lineups is probably bad. Even if it might be theoretically plus EV, just the value of diversification in a high variance game goes up. Is that a reasonable kind of parallel to draw?

Alex:
I think so. I think this is where Kyle and I tend to be a little bit different in our lineup construction. Yeah. If I feel very strongly that a team’s going to be the top team or the highest scoring team on that slate and I’m playing 20 lineups. I have no problem going all in on that team and then just mixing up my smaller stacks with that one giant stack. My ceiling goes really high, but my floor can just be like, I completely break the slate and if I’m not super comfortable, then yeah, I mix it up. Especially-

Andy:
That’s a risk tolerance question. It’s like, Giant Squid going ham on, I forget even who, but in week 15 last year and just getting wrecked in NFL. And there might’ve been plus EV but it increases your risk dramatically. So that’s where those, the diversification comes in where it might not add ROI to diversify but potentially in the increase in stability, it might be have a positive outcome for you I guess is [inaudible 00:41:56].

Kyle:
I think I tend to hedge more than the average person that’s been doing league for more often. If you look at that one that I posted a couple of days ago, if you look at my, on my mobile phone, all the different contents I was in. The lineup that won in first place was basically a hedge lineup. [crosstalk 00:42:11] I thought it would be the highest scoring one, but I just got lucky that my hedge hit and it was low on.

Andy:
Okay. And the last point I want to talk about here before we get into some of the other kind of unique considerations around the game is just when it comes to projections. I mean right now there really aren’t many out there, but when something is so high variance, when correlations are so strong, what role do projections actually play in your process?

Alex:
I know Matt’s going to hate me for this, but I don’t use any projections. I’ve watched the game for the past 10 years. I can generally look at two teams and generally know the outcome in terms of how that game is going to play out. If I could see the draft before I made the lineups, I’d cash like 80% of my lineups. But that’s the biggest variance [crosstalk 00:43:13].

Andy:
Right. That’s where the variance comes from.

Alex:
The draft is just such, it’s… There are times when the draft happens and I just turn off the game. I’m like, this is just, I don’t even know what you’re thinking. I have no chance of winning this one because that draft is just god awful. But for me, I don’t use projections. If I was a brand new player and I didn’t know what, what was the strongest position, how teams generally play, how to correlate the pace of the game to the teams that are playing. I’d use projections 100% but just for me personally, since I’ve been playing for so long, I have a very good idea of what’s generally going to happen in the games.

Andy:
Kyle, how do you approach? Is it similarly?

Kyle:
Similar yeah, I mean I’ve never been big on projections in this. I mean there’s been various sites over the years that have tried to come up with projections and I’ve tried to importing those into different tools I’ve used over the years and I’ve never found it successful. But I think it goes to Matt’s point of really understanding the teams. For me, my work goes into the pre-work on SS my player pool. So for instance, my captain spot, I’m going to… I basically sort it by team and then I go, I uncheck everyone that I know I wouldn’t want to captain, [inaudible 00:44:23] an EDC. But depending on the team I’m at, if I’m at 100 Thieves I’m going to want Ssumday as a potential captain because he’s a carry on that team.

Kyle:
So for me it’s if, and I think I said this in Slack support to you Andy, but if there was a smart diversity thing I’d jack that mother all the way up [crosstalk 00:44:39].

Alex:
Yeah, for real.

Kyle:
You know, I want that randomization into my lineups and the different permutations that are possible for a given stack. So, I’m not going to do projections. I’m just going adjust my player pool to fit those.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
And Danny, let me know what you think about this. But to me it seems like when correlations are that strong, by getting that right and you can be more qualitative with how you’ve… Like if you know the positions, how they’re correlated. By just taking advantage of the right stacks, you can be more qualitative on who to put in there and still have a significant edge because they are just so strong.

Danny:
Yeah. I would say maybe heuristic based, you could say. I think with heuristics, the stuff you’re talking about where we’ve talked about where the guy in your captain spot, you’re using four guys in the same team, and you’re prioritizing that and because there’s such strong correlations, we know that that’s going to be optimal. You’re right. I think you can be a little more qualitative about it for sure.

Andy:
Yeah, and this is something where right now we don’t have projections up because we don’t feel like we have enough data to do them accurately. We are going to be working on this, but I think what we’re really trying to emphasize here is that if you don’t have a way to more qualitatively kind of.

Andy:
If you don’t have a way to more qualitatively kind of pick who are the best plays out of this. If you don’t have as much of a background projections, assuming they’re accurate are going to be as, good way to get pointed in the right direction. But as long as you have that strong kind of template for how you’re building lives to take advantage of correlations, it doesn’t make as much difference and what really matters is just taking advantage of those correlations. But what I want to kind of transition to is just some of the… For me coming in with no League of Legends background, the things that are just like… Kind of blow my mind. When do substitutions happen? What are the likely scenarios to be aware of this? And, if unexpected things happen, how do you respond?

Kyle:
I’ll say this, and Alex jump in after, but it’s not like other quote unquote real sports, right? Where they have to disclose information. NBAs could sometimes be, what? A couple of minutes before tip that you get news. League, they don’t have to do that. And I can’t tell you and it’s just, if you’re going to get into League, you’re going to get burned. It’s going to happen to everyone, I saw people in Slack yesterday talking about the Solo V1per thing and-

Alex:
Super tilted.

Kyle:
… I mean it sucks, right? And it happens to everyone, but everyone’s in the same playing fields. There’s no one that… Unless they’re in that pregame locker room that, that knows information that no one else does. I just, I think you’ve got to kind of roll with the punches with that. I will say Twitter, just like most sports is probably your best friend when it comes to getting this information early and I’ve been working on a Twitter list for each different region.

Kyle:
I have a Twitter list that I use for NFL with all the different beat writers that I trust and so forth. But for league, there’s a couple of things. Each team basically has their own Twitter page where they will sometimes put Roster updates and news before a game. There are some… there’s the big ones like C9 and ATL, which are across multiple games. It can be tricky because they’re posting information for all the different esports they have and different lineups and whatnot. But there are, like C9, they have a coach named Reapered who’s huge on Twitter and usually posts his substitutions and whatnot before the games or even a day before, which is good. I think a Twitter list is the way to go. You just have to know the right people to add. That’s something I’ve been involved in over the years and I’d be happy to share it. But there’s no site that you can go to that’s going to tell you-

Andy:
Right.

Kyle:
… who’s in it and that’s the bottom line.

Alex:
No. It’s really tough. Reasons subs would happen. In NA and, and Europe, it doesn’t happen that often be because they don’t carry the full 10 players in their teams. In LCK, you’re going to get burned and you’re just going to have to learn to deal with it. I tend to have a little bit of a player if I’m worried about it. T1 they’ve always run two junglers. It used to be SKT now they’re just T1 and right now they’re running Cuzz and Ellim, I think is how you pronounce his name. Ellim is a rookie who they’re trying to get some screen time and Cuzz is kind of the veteran. And if-

Kyle:
Danny’s laughing.

Danny:
I’m laughing at how this is just analogous-

Alex:
… if-

Danny:
… it’s like, get the rookie QB and the guard-

Alex:
I think it was the last match, T1 played, they dropped a game to Hanwha Life, who is a lower tier team. They immediately subbed out Ellim who’s a rookie because he didn’t look great there and they put in Cuzz and then Cuzz came in and just dominated that game and won the match for them. If a player has a bad game and they have a sub who sometimes comes in, they’re going to sub. But sometimes they’ll just have a player on the roster who looks like he’s a sub, but he’s really not a sub. He just doesn’t play all that much. He comes in once every two months, they’ll bring him in. But sometimes in LCK if the best team is going against the worst team, they’ll want to get someone just some time. They’ll just sub him in randomly and you’re like, “No!” And-

Andy:
How do you differentiate? Because it seems like ultimately there’s this kind of two situations. There’s the random ones where it’s like in NBA where it’s just truly like some guy who’s listed as healthy just out. Just didn’t start and they might not even put it out, just a game time decision, didn’t come out before lock, anything like that. In those ones there’s nothing you can really do other than-

Alex:
No.

Andy:
… than kind of bite the bullet. But then there’s those other situations that you seem to be talking about where you might have some idea of, they might try to work this guy in, in certain situations. What are the things you’re looking for to try to identify the ones that you can actually try to act on in some way?

Kyle:
This is one of my favorite ways to get an edge because you think, the average person that’s going into DraftKings and building a League of Legends lineup, they’re going to pick two teams to stack because they’re knowledgeable enough to do that. But say they get to mid lane, right? And one team has two mid laners and the other team that you’re stacking has one mid laner. 95% of the people are going to play that team with the one midlaner in their stack and they’re going to avoid the team that has two potential mid laners in that stack. What I like to do is… Kind of goes in your question, you’re just asking, Andy is first look at, when was the last time that sub played, right?

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
The other thing to look at is, is this a meaningful game? The example Maav just gave, where they have this rookie jungler on the bench, I forget the game that it was, but it was a bottom tier team that they were playing. If you look at it that way, there’s probably a good chance they’re going to want to get that guy screen-time, a game that doesn’t mean much-

Andy:
Really is similar to traditional sports where like, in maybe a blowout or in-

Alex:
Exactly.

Andy:
… just like completely lopsided match up. They’re going to try… The likelihood of subbing goes up and I guess if you can tell in advance the lopsided matches. For the others where there’s a blowout, is harder to predict that. But what you can say is that would probably lower the ceiling obviously and of the people that would be getting subbed out. Some guy who is probably going to benefit the most in that game, if he has a high likelihood of getting pulled out, then-

Alex:
Feeding [crosstalk 00:52:16] someone wouldn’t be a bad idea-

Andy:
… that’s someone that you probably don’t want to value as much.

Kyle:
Even if we look at the slate today, right? I think it’s 3:00 Eastern, but we talked about the FlyQuest team in that top laners situation that’s come up between V1per and Solo. I mean when I look at the slate today and I look at that, to me that’s the edge, right? If I want a FlyQuest stack, I’m going to have that top laner or a combination of both in different lineups in those stacks because I guarantee you most of the people that are going to stack FlyQuest today are going to probably avoid top lane and just take the top laner from the other team they’re stacking just to avoid that risk. But I think that risk is an edge to be had. That’s just something that I look at and I’ve always found useful over the years.

Danny:
And that, that makes a lot of sense. I mean given the fact you’re saying that everyone gets burned on subs. That’s definitely means that if it’s hard to… If you can do some deep analysis to figure out, “Oh this guy’s more likely to get subbed than people think or less likely to get subbed.” Or “This person is probably going to be subbed in.” That’s definitely going to be a big source of edge-

Alex:
It is. It is definitely an edge.

Danny:
… And I’ve probably kind of summarized what I’ve heard from you guys and let me know if I’m getting it right. For Europe and America, you have less than 10-man rosters and-

Alex:
No-

Danny:
… they’re best out of one game.

Alex:
They’re allowed to have 10-man rosters. Just a lot of the teams –

Danny:
[crosstalk 00:53:31] but they-

Alex:
… don’t bring in 10.

Danny:
Europe and America it is clear that you don’t have to worry about subs as much?

Alex:
Not nearly as much.

Danny:
For you [crosstalk 00:53:41] –

Kyle:
I would say this just, before you go on to the next part Danny because it’s important, is these any, NA and LEC teams have a Academy teams, is what they’re called and they’re essentially the minor league team-

Danny:
I think minor league?

Kyle:
… Yeah, of that professional team. But for any given slate, they could pull someone up, especially now, right? Where people are playing at home, they’re not in a giant arena where they could call up someone that’s on their Academy team to take the spot of someone else at any given time. And DK isn’t going to show all those players all the time as potential playable people.

Danny:
Interesting-

Andy:
If you’re aware of that they pulled someone up, then that immediately increases the likelihood of a substitution for that team?

Kyle:
Sure.

Danny:
[inaudible 00:54:17] for Korea and China we have best out of three. Basically after the first game is played or after the second game is played, you may get a substitution, right?

Kyle:
You have some. Yeah-

Danny:
It’s possible that someone who’s in the starting lineup won’t play all three games?

Kyle:
Correct.

Alex:
Right.

Kyle:
If that team gets blown… This is typically the way LPL and LCK do it. If a team gets blown out, I mean they’re probably going to make a sub. Right?

Danny:
Right. [crosstalk 00:54:39]-

Kyle:
… And if the team wins, just normal logic, they’re not going to sub anyone out if they won the game-

Danny:
And in general, is it, is it pretty linear when considering the risk of someone being subbed, is based on how skilled they are as a player. The really good players on given teams are not going to get subbed, right?

Alex:
Generally yeah.

Danny:
But, but the guys who are not as good, maybe the worst guy in starting lineup or the worst three guys, those are the guys who are really at a risk? Probably?

Kyle:
Yeah. But they do give rest to those star players. I mean that’s the other thing. [crosstalk 00:55:10] It sounds silly to say rest and I know-

Danny:
But… Then the other thing you were saying was the block consideration, which is if one team is facing the worst team, if the really good team is facing the worst team we really have to worry about them. Worst players.

Alex:
Thankfully for LPL they actually put out their lineups every time. You know who’s going to be starting for that day. They’re the only league to do that. But I think a lot of it has to do with competitive edge too. Korea is super competitive so they don’t want to give out who they’re going to be playing to try to hold a small edge over it.

Danny:
Interesting.

Kyle:
And even if they’re starting doesn’t mean they play all three games.

Andy:
Kind of moving into some of the other considerations, Kyle, you had talked a bit about just what you’re going through when you, when you’re picking the captain or at least like narrowing the player pool there. Just in general, what roles tend to, in your experience, make the best captains and why is that?

Kyle:
Yeah, I mean the ADC and mid laner are always the two… I’d probably put ADCs with a slight edge. I mean their role in the game, just if you look at the game is to deal damage and kill as many people as possible. A mid laner is kind of the same thing. I’m always going to have mid lane and ADC just looking at the, the games recently and kind of what people are doing.

Kyle:
I’m just trying to figure out what the general public is doing. I mean it seems like most people are sticking with ADC. I think the couple of lineups I had, well, that did well yesterday had a midlaner in there and then when I’m in SS and I’m going through my player pool and the captain spot-

Andy:
And SS just being SaberSim.

Kyle:
Sorry. Yeah, I’ll speak no more acronyms. I said I sort it by team because it really is team by team basis and like Maav said, we’ve been doing it a while so we kind of know the teams but if you pull up Oracle’s Elixir at the same time, if a jungler has a high kill participation, I’m probably going to keep him in the, as a potential captain spot. And then there are even people we talked about earlier, where top lane is kind of isolated. They do their own thing.

Kyle:
But there are some teams that really play through their top laner because he’s the best player on their team. And, 100 Thieves is a good example. There’s a guy and their top laner on that team is Ssumday. And if you look at his kill participation, I think it’s one of the highest in the league just because he’s their best player and they’re going to try and play through him. From a team perspective, they’re going to try and do whatever’s best for the team and the best way for them to win. And sometimes that game theory is playing through a position that isn’t typically meta for DFS, which is ADC or mid.

Andy:
Interesting.

Kyle:
I go team by team. It’s really-

Andy:
Alex does that roughly align with kind of your approach?

Alex:
Yeah, I mean there are definitely teams, if you look at Dignitas, Huni, granted he has been not great lately, but he is known for sometimes having these hard carry performances where he just takes over the game because they play through top lane and he comes down and he smashes the game and gets most of the kills. Or if you… Or if you look at Dig recently, the past few games, they’ve changed their approach. Now it’s Froggen in the mid lane and Johnsun in the bot lane who have been doing the majority of the work. Sometimes it really just depends on the approach. There are some top laners, yes, I’ll have as captain, but generally, it’s mid, ADC. Every once in a while I’ll have a jungler in there if they’re really aggressive. Jungler, Blaber from C9 tends to sometimes have ridiculous scores because he’s in everything. The dude is just running the show right now. Generally ADC, mid and then I try not to put support in there unless I’m almost 100% positive. Only the favorites are going to win that day.

Andy:
And-

Danny:
Actually will you guys… You’re mentioning the term carry or carrying hard. Will you just talk a little bit about… it seems in general, the highest scoring person on the team is the one you would call it the carry, right? The person whose –

Alex:
Yeah, they’re doing the work.

Danny:
… And what does that mean? Does that mean the team tries to pump this person up or let them get the kills or-

Kyle:
Keep them alive.

Danny:
In general, would you say whoever is the carry on a given team should probably be the captain or it’s going to be the highest scoring guy?

Kyle:
Yeah. But typically-

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
… you don’t know who that is until the draft happens. Right?

Alex:
Yeah.

Danny:
Which means with the team stats, you can kind of guess based on kill participation, right?

Kyle:
Yeah.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
… the carry it’s going to be. That’s interesting. Thank you.

Andy:
And I like what we’ve kind of been talking about is that we’ve talked about what, what Kyle calls it and like what is called more in directly League of Legends. The meta of the kind of heuristics for stacks of these the typical positions here. And I think knowing those will give newer players a very strong baseline where it’s like, “It’s hard to go wrong if you follow this, but if you do have more time, if you are interested in this, here are the ways where you can get edges by finding the sport set, kind of violate those heuristics or where are these wrong?” And that goes back to a lot of what Danny and Max have talked about and kind of all the videos they put out for the different sports of here are kind of the rules of thumb. Here are how to take advantage of those when they’re wrong.

Andy:
And here’s what you should be looking for and here’s how to adapt to get that extra edge on the field. And one thing I wanted to touch on this is because we did talk about how to kind of adjust for the different leagues, but how are you generally adjusting your strategy based on the size of the slate? Is it just kind of, I’m assuming it’s similar where it would be with any DFS sport where it’s the smaller the slate, the more upside you kind of have to factor in because you need to… The realm of possibilities is much smaller so you need to really focus as being different because it’s going to be a lot harder to be different. Is that accurate and I guess how do you do that?

Kyle:
Yeah, I absolutely Maav kind of… and I kind of talked about this but if you look at the slate today at three rate, which is two games, it’s a completely different strategy for me. And I would do things in this league that I would never consider in a five, six games slate. Just because, I mean, and this has come up a lot and I know SaberSim recently added that feature to remove the game stack. But I mean in a two games slate and if you, especially the one tonight, if you look at the data behind it, it’s a perfect scenario for a game stack because if you look at the… We talked about the CPKM, right? You have two have the highest CPKM teams in LCS going against each other tonight and two of the bottom CPKM teams going against each other.

Kyle:
Just, in theory a game stack would make sense there because it’s a best of one and there’s a good chance that this is just going to be a bloody game with tons of people getting kills on both teams and there’s a good chance the other game is maybe a 10 to one kill game and there’s nothing there. And in that case it would be… You’d need the game stack to have a chance. It just, it depends on the slate, but the smaller it is, the more likely I would be to do a game stack or something like that.

Kyle:
And I know this has come up a lot. The other thing I would say, and then Maav can give his two cents, but I would be more willing to get weird in a captain spot on a two game slate or even a three game slate-

Alex:
I was going to say, I’m probably going to have top in my at least Ssumday and Huni both in my captain slot in some type of lineups today.

Kyle:
Right. And if-

Alex:
Just to be different.

Kyle:
… There are some two game slates to where the pricing is just so vast between the top team to the bottom team where it’s made sense to have a team in the captain spot, although I’m not usually a big fan of that, but it can change vary from slate to slate. But the smaller the slate is the weirder you can get.

Andy:
Is the reason you would have a team like a worst team in the captain spot there is just so you would have more money for, to pay up for the other guys on the other positions? Or-

Kyle:
Kind of. Well it’d be basically if in my range of outcomes you, we talked about C9 or CLG being in 90%. If I was confident in 100% of two different teams on a four or a two game slate and I thought there was no chance for that losing team to win or put up any sort of fantasy relevant points, I would be willing to consider a team and the captain spot for there, as I’ve kind of matured over the years, I found that kind of punting, that team we talked about earlier and getting at least a juggler or a top in that spot with price considered is something I would typically do over having a team in that captain spot. But I’ve seen winning lineups on these small slates with the team in the captain spot for weird reasons.

Alex:
It doesn’t happen often, but maybe the game just went a really long time and they got a whole bunch of objectives and they just scored really well in a low scoring game.

Andy:
And I mean that makes sense. It is finding those ways to differentiate where it’s not just differentiation for its own sake, but it’s trying to take advantage of the different game scripts that, that could play out even if they are rare. Because on those small slates, if you want to win, that’s what you have to have happen, is you kind of have to say, “How could these games play out and what could that look like?” And then-

Alex:
It’s a-

Andy:
… make sure you have a lineup to take advantage of that and kind of building from this, I want to see this kind of tie it all together a bit and just kind of show what this looks like in practice. Alex, or Kyle, whichever, whoever kind of want to jump in. Do you want just kind of walk through just… First just what your research process looks like at a high level?

Andy:
We can talk about the slate coming up today in just a couple of hours. I would just kind of want to hear from you. What specifically are you doing for this slate and what does a build actually look like as you’re making your lineups?

Alex:
Sure. Let me close.

Kyle:
Kind of gave away some of the secrets already between Ssumday and multiple top laners [crosstalk 00:19:18].

Alex:
Exactly.

Kyle:
… As he pulls it up though. I mean that’s kind of what we’re talking about and tying it all together is those key differentiators and what the average person is not going to want to do. Right?

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
They’re not going to want to play a top laner from Fly. They’re not going to want to have Ssumday in the captain’s spot. But someone that takes the time to do the research and understands these teams, those are the place to be at.

Alex:
Exactly. Just looking at this slate. Here’s SaberSim. I’ll go to Oracle’s Elixir. I’ll go to LCS 2020 spring, regular season, have it load up. Just looking at the games today, CKPM we have FlyQuest first, 100 thieves. If you look here, the top three are two out of four, the third and fourth place CKPM. If you look at Dignitas who’s six and then we look at Immortals who’s eighth you can kind of make your ideas on what the two games are going to look like. These two teams like to team fight. They’re probably going to put together team fights or are team comps that go forward. They’re going to want to try to create it so that they can actually fight and win a fight and then take objectives-

Kyle:
And team fight just, is literally what it sounds like-

Alex:
it’s where 5v5. Five people beating on five people.

Kyle:
Right.

Alex:
I know immortals really well. Xmithie is their jungler and he’s been jungling in the LCS for the past eight years. He’s always been the same type of person. He doesn’t have really good mechanics, but his shot calling and his ability to control the map are probably the best in the LCS. He’s going to be more objective-focused. I actually wrote a write-up for the last Immortals game where I said, “This game is going to be really boring. Nothing’s going to happen for the first 20-25 minutes and then team fights will happen and one team will win.” And everyone was like, “This game is so boring. Why is this game so boring?” I’m like, “If you just read my write-up, I talk about it right here. I told you what was going to happen in this game.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, you were spot-on there.”

Alex:
Immortals and Dignitas, Froggen who is the mid laner for Dignitas. He doesn’t like to team fight early. He’s been the same way since he played on CLG EU, nine years ago. He likes to drag the game out for 30 minutes, 40 minutes. All he does is the CS and then once he gets a bunch of items and he’s really powerful, he knows he can team fight with the best of them. Then they’ll group up and then they’ll actually fight. Immortals kind of likes to do the same thing, but they’re more objective focused in the beginning and they’ll try to take the dragons, they’ll try to get the bear and they’ll try to do different things, but they don’t really like to fight either.

Alex:
These two teams are probably going to stare at each other for the first 30 minutes of this game and then stuff is going to happen. If you look at 100 thieves, their jungler is Meteos, who has always been known for being very aggressive and FlyQuest tends to be a more aggressive team also. Look for these teams to actually have more fighting in the beginning. I bet you they’re going to dive top lane. What I mean by dive is they’re going to try to push the top laner under his turret and do stuff under there, and then they’re going to bring, three or four people and try to kill that person over and over again to get him super far behind and get an advantage there.

Alex:
Looking at these, if I’m going to target teams in this one, I’m probably going to target FlyQuest and I’m going to target 100 Thieves.

Kyle:
Game stack.

Alex:
Now… Huh?

Kyle:
Game stack.

Alex:
Game stack. I will 100% have a game stack of this game-

Andy:
One thing, before we jump off this page. We’ve talked a bit about CKPM, but are there any other stats you’re looking at to kind of help get an idea of these are the aggressive teams, this is how they play or does a lot of that just have to come from watching the matches.

Alex:
First blood percentage, right here. If you look at that.

Alex:
First blood percentage right here, if you look at that. Generally first blood percentage sometimes correlates to how aggressive they are, but like you can look at Team SoloMid who has an 81% first blood.

Andy:
What does that mean? 81%.

Alex:
I’m sorry.

Andy:
They draw the first blood?

Alex:
Yeah, they draw the first blood.

Danny:
AGT is average game time?

Alex:
Yeah.

Danny:
Obviously, longer game time, more higher creep score which isn’t as impactful, but should that be…

Alex:
Well if you look here, like Cloud9 has the lowest average game time but they have the highest CKPM.

Danny:
Okay.

Alex:
Why is that? Because Cloud9 is by far the best team in NA. They just run the table so hard, that they do it and then you look here. Here are the two highest game times compared to kill, like CKPM, it’s kind of the lowest, but that’s more because, Immortals likes to just play for objectives. They don’t want a bunch of kills, so their game times are going to go longer because they’re just trying to gain small advantage after small advantage after small advantage. Until they finally get a big enough advantage to push to end the game.

Danny:
Okay. That makes sense.

Kyle:
Mav, can you go to the player stats section for LCS?

Alex:
Yeah, for sure.

Kyle:
This is another key column that I always look at. Yeah go to the, when it loads the damage percent column. Yeah. So, I mean I equivalent this to like the air yards model, maybe in NFL right? Basically, it’s just telling you how often. So separate from kill participation, but how much damage did they deal in compared to the rest of the team. And if you look at, if you scroll back over and look at positions, cause people are probably just starting to get to know these people. It goes back to our previous points about ADC and mid.

Alex:
Middle and ADC. Yep.

Kyle:
But you know, I think if you go to page two or three you’ll start seeing Junglers and top pointers pop up. But if you’re in a small game stack and you’re trying to figure out, and you don’t know these teams, who the impactful people are, I would look at that.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
You know, you look at fly quest power of Eagles, number one, they’re in the whole league. You know, if you watch the games you can see that they play around him. First of all they’ll get it. They’re not going to put him on one of those…

Alex:
They won’t put them on a tank, no.

Kyle:
That we talked about before. He’s going to be on a champion that could potentially carry and the Jungler is also going to be trying to make plays around him to get him ahead. So this is a good thing to look at when you’re starting to get to know teams and who people kind of play around. You talked about, Danny talked about the correlation between Jungler and ADC. If I’m on Golden Guardians, there’s probably a good chance that Closer, the Jungler on Golden Guardians is trying to play through his bottom lane cause he’s going to try and get him ahead.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
Another key thing I look at.

Alex:
Yeah, Closer’s also very aggressive too.

Kyle:
Yep.

Andy:
Awesome. And so having this background in there, we’ve gone over this, how are you translating this into the actual build, Alex?

Alex:
All right, so here we go. We’re going to go to SaberSim, if I can click it and I want to move it over here so I can stop clicking that dumb stuff. All right, here we go. So just looking at this, the first thing I do is I go to the All tab and I X out all the subs. So Alltech isn’t playing today. I’m going to X him out. Greg isn’t playing today. I’m going to X him out.

Kyle:
The question is how do you know all this, right?

Alex:
Yes. Oh, how do I know this?

Kyle:
Yeah, that’s the hardest part.

Alex:
Here’s the easy way to do that. DraftKings is under one of these, I think. So if we look at, let’s look at Toplane right now. I’m going to clear this out. So Solo played 3/28, 3/22, 3/21 so he’s obviously missed some games in there.

Danny:
[crosstalk 01:12:39] every day.

Alex:
There are games twice a week.

Danny:
Okay.

Alex:
So if we look at Viper, last he played was 3/29 but he didn’t play until like a month ago or like 21 days before that. So something is happening where he’s getting subbed in there. Will that scare me a little bit? Maybe, but Kyle was talking about this earlier with me. FlyQuest when Solo has played, they’re 2 and 0. When Viper played last time, they lost the game. It might be a good edge here because Viper played last, to have one or two Solo guys in your lineup. The player Solo. To have a little bit of edge on the field because they may see we lost with Viper but we won the last two with Solo. Let’s put Solo in this time. And that may not be broad news to the public. Besides that…

Danny:
Just to be clear, so basically is one way you can tell if someone’s a sub risk is if DraftKings is listing two people the same night on a [crosstalk 01:13:43]?

Alex:
Yes. Yeah. And it might not be a big risk. I go through and click the players and look at the last time they played. Because sometimes it’s like, two months ago.

Kyle:
Go to Jungle, Mav. This is a good example. So if you look at Dig, right? So, they have two Junglers there. Akaadian and Greg. So you look at the last time Greg played 3/9, and it was a loss and you’ve lost a bunch of games before that.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
Then you’re looking at Akaadian, who’s played the last…

Alex:
All the past last games. [Crosstalk 01:14:06].

Kyle:
With some wins in there.

Danny:
So you would put Akaadian as probably not that much of a sub risk here.

Alex:
No, no, absolutely not. That, and I know Greg is awful, so they’re not going to play him. So, but yeah, you can just let it…

Andy:
That makes sense.

Alex:
Yeah. You can look at the dates and get a real understanding of when people are playing. And besides that, Alltech was playing for awhile and Immortals wasn’t playing that well, if you look at these. 0/1, 0/1, 0/1, 0/1. He lost a bunch of games in a row.

Kyle:
I think also, in order to understand the context of this slate. This is a playoff to get into playoffs.

Alex:
Yeah, exactly.

Kyle:
Teams aren’t going to fool around here and like, they’re putting their best foot forward.

Alex:
They’re going to play their best players by far and even though Immortals has lost the last two games, Apollo was still getting some wins in those games, so they’re going to be playing him.

Andy:
And so we get that information. We unchecked them from, is it from the entire player pool? Just from captain?

Alex:
Hold on, my dog wants [crosstalk 01:15:07].

Andy:
The entire player pool, right?

Kyle:
I would say, yeah. I like just to, cause I’m still going to get used to SaberSim, right? But I go to Toplane first. I don’t do everyone all together. It just makes it more organized for me and my ADD brain. But I’ll go to Toplane and go over Draft Kings, go to the team that I’m sorting by. How many Toplaners did they have? And so just, Mav, click on top for me.

Alex:
It’s not that many.

Kyle:
Yeah. So if I go to click team just to sort it by team.

Danny:
I mean that’s already sorted, so it’s not a big deal.

Kyle:
So yeah. So, obviously I would lead in terms of this being a bigger slate, right? If INT only has one, I’m going to leave him, but then I get to Fly and I only see two there. That’s when I’m going to go over to DraftKings and do that process we just talked about. Right?

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
And figure out who is more likely to play if they’re both in there. Maybe I’m going to limit my exposure for that particular player. Depending on how many lineups I’m playing, if I think there’s a chance they both play. But I would say it was pretty certain today that Solo would play based on what they said on Twitter and also the way the last three games have gone.

Alex:
Yeah.

Kyle:
There’s much risk there and X-ing off Viper.

Alex:
Right. So we click out Viper. Jungle, Greg isn’t going to play, and then I think…

Kyle:
Does that make sense what I just said though?

Danny:
Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Alex:
Yeah, for sure.

Danny:
Basically, what from what we discussed, Toplane was a real iffy one on there’s a possibility we see a sub in that game.

Alex:
Right. Absolutely.

Danny:
Jungle and Mid, it seemed pretty clear you’re not…

Alex:
Everything else is totally fine.

Danny:
Okay, cool.

Andy:
Just to be clear, the way this works right now in the optimizer is that if you exclude someone by unchecking them from their position, they will no longer be eligible that for that position. But there’s a separate entry for them for captain. So, just want to make sure you get him in both spots when you’re doing this.

Alex:
That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Kyle:
Captain, you narrow down different too, we kind of touched upon it, but you’re not going to just remove people that aren’t playing. You’re going to remove people that have no place being in a captain spot. Right. Supports or teams, or whatnot.

Danny:
If you uncheck from the All tab, will it uncheck from… [Crosstalk 01:17:07]

Alex:
It unchecks both.

Andy:
Does it? Okay.

Alex:
Yeah, that’s why I do it from the All tab because it just unchecks them from the captain and the other one. But you know, we all have our different ways of doing it. So, we’ve clicked out Alltech. We got Greg, we’ll take out Viper and I think we got Greg in there. You can search him in here too. Yeah, we’ve got Greg and those are the only ones that I’m really worried about. We got that one, we got that one. So now we’re good to build.

Andy:
And one thing to just add as a quick point of information is that, with our traditional lineup builder for the other sports, we don’t advise spending too much time pruning the player pool because we’re able to, because the fact that we simulate all the games, we’re able to take advantage of correlations and everything else to just not put random people in your lineups. So you don’t need as much control. But right now, especially when there aren’t projections in there, you do want to remove those players that you know you don’t want it all. If you are using projections, this becomes less important because assuming the projections are accurate, the players you don’t want are going to be projected well. But that’s just kind of getting some context around this.

Alex:
That’s right. Because if you don’t unclick them, they will show up in your player pools when you make lineups. So just make sure that you do click them out.

Andy:
Yep.

Alex:
It’s [crosstalk 00:09:30].

Andy:
Jumping into the build settings, Alex.

Alex:
So we just continue with FPGG. Today, we might be allowing the players on opposing teams once we start actually going into the game stacks if I decide to make them.

Kyle:
Let’s talk about salary real quick. Cause this question has come up a bunch in Slack chat about, should I have money left over?

Alex:
This is not something where you’re trying to max out the salary.

Kyle:
Just thinking about the field that’s in there, right? Making lineups manually. They’re going in there picking two stacks. But what they’re doing, and this is the process I used to use when I first started, is I pick a favorite, right? I pick, Cloud9 is my favorite team. And then I would scroll down and figure out based on the team salary, what other stacks I could fit with Cloud9 and I would play those people and that would be it. But what I started is, cause I had more success and figured out different edges to be had. Kind of what Mav just said, is I’d pick two dogs, right? Two lower teams, like below the $5,000 price for a team mark. Play those people, you’re going to have at least 10,000 leftover. But the ownership is going to be tied to that. So even if one of those stacks, the lower price is popular, chances are there’s not many people stacking that other team, that other dog with that team as you would be doing. So there’s an edge to be had there. They’re going to be stacking that chalk low price team with another high priced chalk team per se as well.

Alex:
Yep. That’s where you get the unique lineups.

Andy:
So on that note, like this I think applies similarly as it would in traditional sports where it’s like on a showdown, you probably don’t want to use all of your salary.

Alex:
Right.

Andy:
Because the likelihood of there being a duplicate lineup or the likelihood just being on highly owned players goes up dramatically. And so as variance increases in a sport as the number, as a player pool shrinks, as all these, as a number of entrance in a tournament increases, all those things play in. That’s when you kind of have to force other ways of diversifying in that you may not otherwise. So I think on a large slate, in a smaller tournament, at lower stakes where it’s not going to be as sophisticated, there’s not going to be as clear chalk and this and that, and there’s more options to pick from. If you don’t want to necessarily force a ton of money left on the table, but it’s not a bad option. But as those factors start to change, that’s when you just need to have diversification in almost whatever way you, any way you can get.

Alex:
Yeah, exactly.

Andy:
And so from here, we’ve talked a bit about the salary ranges. The stacking I know is going to be a big piece of what you’re doing. So can we walk through the steps of kind of how you would set those, those rules up for this slate?

Kyle:
I would also check that box in the main tab about the games deck, right?

Alex:
Yeah. If I’m going to make game sects. So generally how I do it, I do it 5 to 10 lineups at a time. I’ll have it just make a multiple different stacks at a time because right now there’s no easy way to limit your player pool in terms of your exposure to them. So right now you can set exposure to a team, but you can’t set exposure to a player. So depending on how I want to make my lineups, I might make five, download that, put it in the CSV, make another five, depending on how I want to do it. But I’m sure that will change as we go.

Andy:
We are recording this on March 30th and the tools that we’ve put out for the optimizer, they’re completely free to use for anybody. You don’t need to put a credit card in or anything at all, but we’re still working on improving it. We want to get it into people’s hands so that we get some feedback and keep working on it. So at the time of the recording, you’re not able to get the fine control over exposures as you can with the rest of our lineup builders, but that will be coming within the next week or two. So keep an eye on that. But for now, this is how Alex is approaching that.

Alex:
Yeah. So I’ll make a 4-3 stack. So I set it at least four players from the same team, at least three players from the same team. Generally I don’t, it really depends on how I’m making my lineups at the time. Sometimes I don’t want the team to be in my fourth stack. I just want four players. So it would be four players, one with the captain slot, and then three players with my team in there, and then I’ll unclick the captain part of it so that the captain isn’t one of the three people. So if you make lineups this way, let’s say we’re going to make 100 thieves Dig lineup. No, I think Dig’s a favorite. No. Yeah. Anyways, we’ll go with that and we’re going to have max exposure. I’ll end up making five lineups and then we’ll build.

Alex:
I’m going to look at the pool it gives me and see how I feel about it. First thing I always do is I’m going to go into the captain, see who’s in there, Cody Sun, Froggen and Johnsun. Great. Mid ADC. Mid. We’re doing okay so far. I’m going to go through the pool to make sure it didn’t accidentally put someone in there who’s not playing. Right now, we’re doing okay.

Andy:
Yeah cause this is one of those kind of just frankly pain in the ass things where there isn’t that official starting lineup put out. So keep that in mind. We do our best to pull in the status and everything from DraftKings but they’re not, they had the same information we do. So it’s not something that we can automatically update. So just keep that in mind as you’re going through this. And Alex as you’re checking to see, is this guy playing or not? Like what are you basing that on? Is it just kind of what we talked about with I guess first following some of the Twitter accounts that Kyle talked about, but also just looking at the sub stuff is like, is that what you’re kind of looking at there?

Alex:
Yeah, just the last dates and stuff that they played and just kind of a knowledge on just from watching the games, the chances that a sub would be going in. Now, looking at this, I think, yeah, so we have all four teams in here. Did I mess something up with my stacking? Oh yeah. Okay. So I messed something up with my stacking. So if I’m going to make 100 thieves Dig lineup, let’s do this correctly. So my four stacks going to be 100 thieves. My three stack is going to be Dig. So when I make my lineups, okay, there we go. So I have all 100 thieves in my captain slot. Ryoma, Meteos, Cody Sun. I’m kind of okay with that. Cody Sun tends to carry the games for 100 thieves. Ryoma tends to be a little more of, he’s not focused on too much cause he’s not the focal point of the team cause he’s really not that good.

Alex:
But Cody Sun does tend to do a lot. If you look at Cody Sun’s stats, he’s actually been playing out of his mind recently with one or two games where he’s not been great. Some day at Toplane, absolutely fine. Jungle, we get a few Akaadian, one Meteos, I’d maybe like a little more Meteos but I’m okay with that because I have him twice in my captain slot. Mid, Froggen is going to be higher exposed than Ryoma and then you know, look through this. Everyone in there is playing, great. I’ve got five lineups that I kind of like and once then I’ll go through, I’ll download it. I can’t get to it as easily right now because it’s hidden behind here. But I’ll download it, put it into my CSV and then I’ll make five more lineups.

Alex:
Now I’m like, all right, what do I want for my next game to be? Maybe I’ll just mix this up so I can have four Dig and three 100 thieves and then I get my Dig captains and I get Froggen and captain and Johnsun and captain and Akaadian and captain. Great. I have five more lineups and then I’ll start switching things around. Sometimes I will allow it to be like a 3-4 where my three is a captain. Like in the LPL slate I had, the only way I could get FPX into the captain slot easily was by having three FPX players, one in the captain because they’re so expensive and four from the cheaper guys. Where one of the fourth one of my guys was my team. So sometimes you have to play around with it to get what you’re looking for.

Andy:
Yeah, and one thing to add is that this shows kind of the level of control that you may want to have if you have very specific exposures that you want. This is currently the most straightforward way of doing it, is just doing separate builds to get those exact exposures and combining them afterwards. But if you don’t have that strong of a preference, if this is something where you’re just getting started with it and you want to do a little bit of research and kind of make some tweaks here or there, but you’re not trying to get things dialed in exactly, you can just set stacking rules that aren’t as restrictive. You can have options for multiple teams in there and just do all of your builds, all of your lineups in one build. And that’s definitely the more traditional approach. But if you want that extra control, if this is something that you really focused on, you can do it this way as well.

Alex:
Yeah, like let’s say I wanted to do 100% 100 thieves stacks in my three spot, but I want to split between Dig and IMT in my four spot, I can put 50% max exposure, click the build, and then if I look at my team stacks, I’ve made five. So you can’t get 50% but you have 100% 100 thieves and then these two are going to be split. If I made six it would be 50/50 but then I can kind of control the exposure a little bit more to the certain teams that I’m looking for to get there. Now let’s say I didn’t want certain people in my captain slot, like I got a jungle in my captain spot and I didn’t want that, I can go back to here and go to the captain spot and click out that person and then it won’t give them to me in my captain spot and I can narrow down who I want in my captain spot a lot more if I really only want ADC and Mid in my captain spot.

Andy:
Yeah, and kind of what Alex is showing you is how our lineup optimizer works today for League of Legends and how you can use that to get basically the exact level of control you’re looking for. This is something that we are offering for completely free until the major sports come back. You can sign up for an account. You don’t need to put your credit card, anything at all. Play around with it. Let us know what you think because we are actively working on this and we have a lot of improvements coming, but I’m sure there is more we can do, so let us know what you think. Once you create an account you can always click that green question Mark in the bottom right corner to shoot us an email. You can email me at [email protected] and let me know what you think.

Andy:
And on that note, the same goes for this content. We really appreciate Kyle and Alex joining us to kind of let us pick their brains and to share what they know about League of Legends. We tried to be as thorough as we could, but I’m sure there are things we missed. So if you still have questions after this, let us know. Once you sign up for an account, if you want to get into our Slack, just shoot us an email. We can get you there and that’s going to be the best place to get ahold of those guys, get ahold of me, whatever it may be. Let us know what you think. Let us know if you have any questions, but I think with all of this out there, this should be more than enough to get you started to get you on the way to building a profitable League of Legends contest. And truly these, these contests are getting huge and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon. So play around with it. Let us know what you think and good luck out there. But guys, thank you again so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Alex:
You got it, man.

Kyle:
This is awesome, yeah.

Danny:
Thanks guys, I learned a lot too.

Andy:
Yeah. And so just head to SaberSim.com to get started and as always, good luck.