How to Beat Single Entry GPPs

How to Beat Single Entry GPPs

Transcript

Hey guys, this is Max Steinberg. I am a Daily Fantasy Professional and a partner at SaberSim. This video is going to be all about single entry tournaments. Single entry tournaments can be some of the most profitable tournaments in Daily Fantasy, but a lot of players approach these in a strange way that I don’t think is right and I think SaberSim actually has a platform and tools in our lineup builder. It’s actually really well equipped to making great single entry tournament lineups.

Let’s just talk about single entry for a sec. So these are tournaments that limit players to only one entry. Basically, there’s a lot of pros that in a tournament like the Millionaire Maker would be entering 150 times and doing the full entries, and you have to play against a lot of their lineups. But in these tournaments, each pro is only limited to one lineup. Each player’s only limited to one lineup. And this makes the tournament a lot easier because, in this tournament, like the Fair Catch, for example, there’s 20,000 entries, and there probably aren’t even 10,000 Daily Fantasy pros in the world, especially not pros you need to worry about if you’re using a tool like SaberSim.

So these tournaments are pretty profitable, you can win a good amount of money, $12 and $20,000 is nothing to sniff at. And I think a lot of people approach these really in the wrong way. And I think there’s two ways people usually approach this. It’s A: they just make a lineup by hand, and that gives you a lot of control. You can pick your favorite players and make the “perfect lineup” and that’s all nice. You can Tyler Lockett, Adam Thielin, get all the players that you want. Great.

However, what ends up happening is you aren’t building the best lineups that have game stacks you want, that take advantage of correlation, that take into account upside. A lot of people are just making handmade lineup or using their cash game lineup, which the fact of the matter is these are still tournaments and while the structure is different, they’re not as top heavy. They’re still top heavy and that means that optimal lineup construction to win the GPP is going to be really, really, really useful. So SaberSim is built really well to make the GPP lineups. And the reason that is, is everything we do is built on our simulator, which simulates every game thousands of times and gives us a lot of great data that you can see here. You can see we get range of outcomes for players, we get players correlations to each other, players correlations to each other on the other teams.

And we end up using this data in our lineup builder in order to construct the best GPP lineups you can make. And while this is really good for making 20, 50 or 150 lineups really well, it’s also made it good for just making one lineup really well. Let’s just go over some of the aspects of the lineup filter. So a lot of lineup optimizers, these outdated optimizers you’ll see out there, they optimize on average projection. They say, “Okay, on average Patrick Mahomes is supoposed to score 26 points.” [inaudible 00:03:34] is supposed to score 19. Let’s build a line up that’s going to give you the highest average projection. And how would they try to take into account correlation and ownership faded upside is they have you set a lot of rules, right? They say, okay group these players together don’t play all of these high on players in the same lineup. And you end up having to waste a ton of time trying to make sure you don’t have reverse correlated players.

You have a lot of correlation. You have game stacks. You have all the good stuff that makes a good GPP lineup and even then it’s not going to be optimal. So our approach is way different. We leverage our simulation data, right? And we then just let you decide how much you want to value these things that help you in a GPP. And as we all know, how you win is get a correlator lineup that fades ownership in the right way and has high upside. And that’s what all these sliders do, right? So correlation, this is considering, this is basically how much you want our lineup builder to consider these correlations that I showed you before that we get from simulating all the games. So if correlation is set to high, that’s going to mean you’re going to get a lot of stacks. You’re going to get a lot of game stacks, what you’ll actually see in these lineups and about, so we want to say correlation.

If we want to make a good GPP lineup, you want a set correlation to high. And again, if we’re building lineups for a tournament like the Millionaire Maker, where it’s a large field GPP, we’re going to want all these things pretty high. We want high correlation, we want high upside. We want to fade ownership. And if we’re doing cash games, we’re going to want reverse correlation. We don’t really care about ownership. We just want the highest average projection because we just want to eke over 50% of the field or win a head-to-head. But these tournaments are kind of in between those two things. There’s still GPPs, they’re not massively top heavy ones with 33% of the price pull in first place, but they still need, you’re still going to make the most money making lineups that do all these things that we consider if we’re entering a massive field GPP.

So we want to consider correlation a lot. We want to consider ownership fade at least some. And then we want to consider this thing called smart diversity, which is basically our way of using simulation data to take into account upside by actually taking what is happening in the simulations, some buckets of simulations, to account for what could be some real world outcomes that could happen on a given weekend. And smart diversity is kind of hard to explain, but I think it’s best explained actually after we make a build because you’ll see exactly how our builder works and how it’s different. The normal lineup optimizer. So we’re building our lineups right now and we’re going to see all our lineups being built on this right hand corner. It’s going to show a visual of all our lineups. And what you would normally see in a lineup optimizer. And what lineup optimizers do is they say, okay, they try to give you the best lineup based on the highest average score.

And that’s what we call [inaudible 00:06:47] score. So you add up their average projection of each player and that’s the score you get. And there we go. You have the highest projection score for that lineup. But you don’t want to build your lineups maximizing for average score. You want to maximize for correlation, upside, and ownership fade. And that’s where saber score comes in. So saber score quantifies all those things and the reason that saber score is higher than it is has to do, actually, or higher than [inaudible 00:07:19] score has actually to do with smart diversity. Because what smart diversity does is it takes a couple simulations from every game and looks at the actual outcomes from those two, three or even one simulations that it looks at. And if the average ending projection or average score of that player in those little simulations becomes really high, then the lineup builder is going to favor those players and actually just treat the average score from those few simulations as their average score instead of just taking what their average would be over a thousands of lineups.

And what ends up happening is you actually get what a true range of outcomes for an actual player is and what they could actually happen, how much upside they could actually have. So in this lineup, my guess is Houston and Kansas City might go end up over time. It begins a huge shootout and as you can see, this is just a massive Chief’s-Houston game stack. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Obviously this is a high over under. Both our teams that pass quite a bit, are fast paced teams. So this lineup is legitimately the best lineup in a situation where Houston-Kansas city is a game stack and maybe other games don’t quite go up to snuff and there’s not really actually a better player in another game. And so what this ends up doing is gives us basically some lineups given a certain range of outcome.

So and as you can see, if you actually look at projection score there, it’s ordered in the way you’d think. Sometimes this is the third best lineup, the projection score is really low, but the saber score is the third best score. And that’s because this lineup, although the average score is low on a haul, can have some pretty high upside games. And when I’m making a single entry lineup and I’m just making one lineup for a given slate, which is something I might do on just a four games slate like this one, what I like to do is just look through these lineups and just use my intuition, use my gut and then say, does this make sense on top of what saber is already giving me? And they’re sort of giving me some choices here. There’s not that huge of a difference in terms of saber score from these top three lineups.

So I really can choose, or top four lineups, so I can really go wherever I want with it. And so this one is interesting too. I think, this Jimmy Garoppolo one probably is going to be pretty contrarian. We get some high upside running backs here. I think that’s certainly an interesting play. We’re just punting at the tight end and defense position. We can go up here with just the Kansas City-Houston onslaught. We can temper that Kansas City-Houston onslaught a little bit. And throw in some David Moore at wide receiver or we can go a different route with that Houston-Kansas city onslaught and use the Deshaun Watson at QB instead. And so there’s different ways we can go. And I think SaberSim is really great for mass multi entry obviously because we’ve just built 150 lineups and they’re using that correlation.

It’s taking the account upside and we’re getting a great balance of players. But it’s also helpful for the single entry because it gives us some very good lineups that are based on some real outcomes that can actually happen in a given weekend and builds us the best lineups given those outcomes. And so when I make single entry lineups, what I usually do is adjust some players up and down, see what I like maybe take a stand in some way. And then I just let the builder do its work and then choose from one of the top five or so lineups and use my gut and intuition to see what I liked the best. So if you’re doing single entry and you’re thinking, okay, how do I use SaberSim to make the best single entry lineup, it’s going to be the same process you’re going to do as mass multi entry.

But you can also use your God and intuition to sort of decipher from the stop five lineups because they are going to be pretty close together. So I really hope you enjoyed this video. I think single entry really is a profitable way to play tournaments. It’s what they’re one of the most profitable tournaments. And using a cash lineup or making a handmade lineup is not going to be as good as using SaberSim and getting that high upside game stack that SaberSim is going to really create for you. And I think that’s really important to consider when you’re making single entry and not just hand make or use your cash lineup because that’s not going to be as profitable as doing something that’s safer [inaudible 00:12:01]. That really gives you those best lineups for GPPs even when they’re not as top heavy, let’s say the Millionaire Maker.

So we are offering a free three day trial. So for anyone, if you tried us before, you’re welcome to try us again and that’s completely free. Try us out, try the lineup builder, look at our projections. If you like it, you’d like it, you can subscribe or you don’t. You don’t. And it’s totally fine. I really recommend you trying us out because the [inaudible 00:12:29] filter is really cool. It’s really fast and it’s really easy. So good luck this weekend with your NFL lineups and good luck in DFS, and thanks for watching.

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