The Ultimate Guide to Daily Fantasy Baseball

The Ultimate Guide to Daily Fantasy Baseball

Transcript

Andy Baldacci:
Guys, what’s going on? Thank you so much for joining us as we walk through everything that you need to know to beat daily fantasy baseball in 2020. It’s obviously a bit of an interesting abbreviated season, but I can probably speak for Max and Danny in that we’re all incredibly excited for the season to start up, and to get back into the swing of things. My name’s Andy Baldacci. I’m the CEO of SaberSim and I’m joined by DFS pros, SaberSim partners and twin brothers, Max and Danny Steinberg. How’s it going guys?

Max Steinberg:
Hey, it’s going well.

Andy Baldacci:
So, what we’re going to cover today is, we are going to go over the fundamentals of daily fantasy baseball, just at the basic level of scoring, of how the different sites differ, of what makes a valid roster, all those types of things. Then we’re going to really dig into the secrets of winning lineups. And then max is going to walk through his build process step by step. And then I will wrap up by just summarizing the main points that you’ll have some actionable takeaways to walk away from this video with, but let’s just dive into those fundamentals.

Andy Baldacci:
When it comes to scoring the four main sites, DraftKings FanDuel, FantasyDraft, and Yahoo are all really similar for the most part. DraftKings and FantasyDraft actually have the exact same scoring. Yahoo is just some weirdly, almost randomly modified version of DraftKings where you just might as well call it the same. And then FanDuel does have higher scoring overall. And in most cases it’s pretty proportional to DraftKings, but at least on three points it actually stands out significantly where it’s just much higher on FanDuel for RBI’s, runs, and walks.

Andy Baldacci:
And so honestly, when it comes to scoring for FanDuel, definitely pay attention to those key pieces of it. But for the most part, the biggest differences, the things that you need to pay the most attention to are the kind of rules and restrictions each of the sites have around what goes into a valid lineup. So on DraftKings, what they say is that your lineup, each of your lineups, must have players from at least two games. So not two teams, but two separate games. And you can have a maximum of five hitters from one team. For FanDuel and FantasyDraft, you have to have players from three teams and you can have a maximum of four hitters.

Andy Baldacci:
And then on Yahoo, they kind of picked a mixture of things where you can have players, you must have players from at least three teams, but you can have up to six players in those. All those six players can be batters. So you can definitely have some pretty aggressive stacks there, but Max and Danny we’ll get into whether or not that might make sense, or just how to think about that in just a little bit. But I want to just kind of lay the foundation for just how things work across those different sites. And then Danny is going to take it from here and dig into secrets of winning lineups. Do you want to jump in Danny?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah, sure. So what are the secrets to winning lineups? So when it comes down to it, the secret to winning lineups is having lineups that are high upside and that’s the key to winning in all daily fantasy sports. And what upside means is just having lineups that relative to their projections perform better than you would believe they would do. So you’re able to separate yourself from the rest of the field and have a chance of winning a really large [inaudible 00:03:27] and hopefully winning, one of the millionaire major contests on FanDuel and DraftKings. [crosstalk 00:03:35]

Andy Baldacci:
And even without those big contests, so these are still just the principles that matter, regardless of the contest size.

Danny Steinberg:
[crosstalk 00:03:40] any top heavy, large GPP upside is going to matter a lot and SaberSim can help you unlock that upside. So there are three real key elements to upside. Correlations, ownership, and variance. And correlations are the measurements of how each player’s performance impacts the other players in the game. And this is really where the value of stacking comes from. So in many sports, especially MLB, there’s a strong correlation between players on the same team that you can take advantage of by stacking those players, which stacking is just playing players on the same team or than the same lineup.

Danny Steinberg:
Your lineups are going to be more boom or bust with stacks, but it’s really a trade off that’s worth it with a GPP payout structure because when your lineup doesn’t do well, you don’t make any profit, but even if your lineup does moderately, well, you’re probably not going to make any profit but you’re giving yourself a higher probability of having like a real upside lineup where it does extremely well. And you’re going to get first or they’re top 1% in a given tournament.

Andy Baldacci:
Right. And that’s really with the tournaments that’s what that ultimately comes down to is you’re not trying to just sneak into the money. It’s very different than in cash games where the top 50% or so double up. In the tournament’s you really do need to optimize around those higher outcome possibilities.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. And I just want to add as well, for cash games as well, kind of the opposite is true. I think a lot of people just sort of put in their best lineup and they’ll stack and whatever. And with cash games now I think an overlooked thing is you actually kind of want reverse correlations. You want a lineup that isn’t correlated to each other because you just want to sneak above that 50% mark. So SaberSim’s going to help you do those things as well.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. That’s a good point, Max. Another element of upside is ownership and ownership refers to how frequently a specific player is rostered in a contest. So if you have a player you play that has a really huge game and that player is 30, 40% owned in that contest you’re in, it doesn’t do you really that much good because everyone kind of had that same guy and everyone has the advantage of having that upside. But if you have a guy who has really low ownership and he has an extremely good game, that’s going to go a really long way in getting you a good possibility of winning the contest or having a really good performance on it.

Danny Steinberg:
The last element is variance and that just refers to how a player’s performance varies from game to game. So two players with the same average projection may have actually very different variance profiles, different floors and ceilings on their production. So in baseball’s example, the home run hitter tends to have a bit of higher ceiling and a bit of a lower floor than someone who gets a bunch of singles or walks.

Andy Baldacci:
And so Danny, let’s jump into kind of talking about what this looks like in baseball specifically. So starting with his correlations, how does this usually play out? What players are correlated? Where do you see positive relationships, negative in all that?

Danny Steinberg:
Right. So in general, just players on the same team have positive correlations. Hitters close to each other in the same lineup, tend to have higher correlations than hitters farther away from each other. But in general, player hitters in the same lineup have pretty strong positive correlations.

Andy Baldacci:
And where do those come from?

Danny Steinberg:
I think there’s a few factors. One is RBIs and runs are really, I think, the bread and butter of it. RBIs and runs account for about, actually don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it’s like 30 to 50% of it on FanDuel at least, it’s like 30, 50% of the total fantasy points you can expect them to score is through runs and RBIs. And runs and RBIs literally means someone ahead of you in the lineup has scored a run, which is good. Or a run means someone behind you in the lineup has batted you in. So you both get fantasy points from the event. And that’s really where the positive correlation comes from.

Max Steinberg:
I think also extra at-bats probably play a small factor because if a team does really well, it means they go through [inaudible 00:08:10] more. They might face worse pitchers, get the starter out early, things like that. So I think that’s probably a small factor as well.

Danny Steinberg:
That’s true. And there’s also like a lot of nuance to it that SaberSim picks up on it really well. That’s kind of hard to, to guess from if you’re just looking at the lineup because it’s good to have good hitters in front of you, but is it good to have like Giancarlo Stanton ahead of you in the lineup? Not really because people have hit a lot of home runs, they’re going to clear the bases and that gives you less chances for RBIs. So there’s really a lot of nuance to the players around you in the order and how that will affect your run and RBI totals and how correlated you are to the other players.

Andy Baldacci:
So when it comes to stacking, I know it’s really hard to give rules of thumb when there’s so much nuance, but in general what does this mean for stacking? What does that they’re being such strong correlations kind of throughout the team mean? How are you interpreting that?

Max Steinberg:
Yeah, so I think the general strategy that most daily fantasy players use is to stack and that’s based on good stuff, players are correlated. So in general when you’re making baseball lineups, you’re going to stack. And you probably are going, especially on a site like FanDuel where RBIs and runs are worth a lot, you’re probably going to do a four stack of one team and a four stack of another team. And that’s a lot of what SaberSim is going to give you as well.

Max Steinberg:
But there’s also nuance to it. And with regards to game stacking as well, there’s some correlation there, but there’s not some general rule of thumb is you just always game stack. And so, I think SaberSim is great because it’s going to capture that nuance where it’s going to game stack when it’s worth it, when you’re not sacrificing other projections elsewhere to do it. And it’s going to stack in the right way. And we’re going to get into that a little later.

Andy Baldacci:
And so when it comes to ownership, Danny, how do you think about it for baseball? Because this is one of those things that I know changes a lot for each sport. Ownership is always important but how you act on it and what you’re looking for matters. It applies differently for each of the sports. So in baseball, how are you thinking about ownership?

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. So I think in some sports you have, like in basketball, it’s easier to predict performance on a day to day basis. And sometimes you’ll have high ownership guys that are really worth playing. With baseball, it’s really, really random, especially for hitters, but also for pitchers. So basically any high owned pitcher or high owned lineup is probably worth fading or even playing the hitters opposing high owned pitcher or a pitcher opposing the high owned hitters. Even though these guys aren’t that highly projected the leverage you get off of that from the random events where that high on stack hitter stack does really badly or the high end pitcher does really badly. You get so much leverage off of that, that it can be really worth it in terms of having an optimal lineup that’s high variance and high upside.

Andy Baldacci:
I think transitions pretty well into just the concept of variance in general. What does variance look like in baseball?

Danny Steinberg:
So it’s really brutal, especially for hitters. I can’t tell you how many times I felt like, “Man, this hitter, there’s everything’s in his favor. He’s going to do so well, guaranteed.” And then he goes oh for five. You cannot predict really with any certainty on a single game, whether team’s going to score a lot of runs even if they’re in the best ballpark facing the worst pitcher in the world. So you definitely have to have a bankroll that allows you to handle the big swings and really you want to take advantage of uncertainty. But even with diversification, you’re not going to be able to avoid [inaudible 00:00:12:02], especially in-

Danny Steinberg:
You’re not going to be able to avoid barons, especially in these top heavy GPPs, but there are a lot of stacks and players that you can play that are going to be plus [inaudible 00:12:12] replaced.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. Can I add something as well, Andy? I was just going to say, you’ll see a lot of people complaining on Twitter about the variants. Every night, it’s like, “Oh, it’s like, Oh my God, I played Max Scherzer and he’d gotten injured or he got pulled after four innings or something.” And it’s like, you have to, when you’re playing baseball, you have to accept the variance and use it to your advantage. It’s part of the game. So if you’re one of those people complaining, maybe baseball is not for you, but you really have to embrace it and use it to your advantage. And that’s how playing off of ownership can really, really help you.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. And I think the fact that baseball has so much variance is one of the reasons why SaberSim is so good at making optimal baseball lineups because simulating the games allows you to have a good idea on what player attributes are high upside and what player attributes are more stable. So for example, a player could hit four home runs in a game. Does that mean that they’re higher upside than other players just because they were able to hit four home runs in the game? Not really because really anyone can hit four home runs in the game if they’re a decent home run hitter. So just because something did happen, a lot of the reasons that did happen is going to be because of luck and historical data can really throw you off on who has true upside and who doesn’t.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. It’s something where, I guess for, for viewers who aren’t familiar with SaberSim, we’ll get into this in a bit more and we don’t let this just turn into a big kind of pitch fest, but the way that we work in what we do differently is that we create our projections by simulating every game thousands and thousands of times play by play. And so rather than just giving you an average projection on how this player is going to do on average, we’re able to see a full range of outcomes and see all the different possible performances that that player may have. And in a game like baseball where outcomes aren’t normally distributed, which means they don’t follow a bell curve, it’s just so valuable to be able to get that kind of clear insight into the frequencies at different things can occur.

Danny Steinberg:
And so kind of on that note, Max, as we are talking about what this actually looks like in practice and how to use SaberSim and just other tools in general, do you want to take things over and just show what this looks like just starting with even the research process?

Max Steinberg:
Sure. You want me to just share the screen?

Danny Steinberg:
Yes.

Max Steinberg:
So yeah, so basically building a lineup is a three step process. So the first thing is you’re going to adjust the projections that SaberSim already has for you, which are very good based on historical data and very sophisticated model, but you can make some adjustments. And I think especially in a season like this, there are certain angles that you can take that really actually call for making some adjustments. So I’ll get into that in a bit. And then we’re going to tune our build settings and then we’re going to make a build and look at the postal process and just do what I call quality control or what we call quality controls. So just looking at the lineups, make sure that they intuitively look like what we want them to look like. Maybe go back and adjust some projections some more or make some tweaks and then we’ll have your lineups. So this is for the two games slate that’s going to start in a few days.

Max Steinberg:
And as you can see with the projections for all the pitchers and hitters, and we allow you to make those adjustments and we don’t have ownerships up right now, but we will have them eventually. And those are things that you can tweak as well. But so we have these projections, and so the first thing we can do is adjust them. So maybe we think, “Okay, early in the season, we had a short spring training or what they’re calling summer camp.” So maybe for a guy like Clayton Kershaw, and it seems like we’re actually handling this well mid season. I would say matchers are probably projected for seven innings pitched a lot of the time, especially in a better matchup. And so we probably are handling this a little bit, but maybe you say Clayton Kershaw. These innings pitch might look a little too high for the first game of the season. And so maybe we just adjust his projection down a little bit.

Danny Steinberg:
So maybe just, I just wanted to make a further point there. Another thing is in general, it’s the first game of the season. So they have people in the bullpen who have literally zero innings pitched. So I think in general, first game of the season, you may see a little less innings in general. And we have a trend in the league of having these huge bullpens and having bullpen games and openers. And it seems like starting pitchers in general are getting less innings overall. So I kind of like the adjustment down for starting pitchers in general.

Max Steinberg:
Another thing that Danny and I love to do is stolen base match ups. And there’s a lot of good places you can do research. So there’s baseball reference, there’s fan graphs. You can look at baseball savant and look at stack gas data. You can just do research yourself. For example, the Cincinnati Reds hired this guy as their pitching coordinator who is really, really smart. So maybe you can be high on those particular pitchers. Maybe someone’s added a new pitch. And these are things that, especially stuff like that, where pitcher adds a new pitch, that’s something our model is just not going to take into account until it starts showing up. So if you predict something, you say, “Oh, this pitcher is throwing a curve ball. I think that’s good. Maybe it could be higher on him.” And there’s no pitcher that I know of for the first two games, so if this is the case, I’m not going to adjust anyone for that, but these are all things to take consideration.

Max Steinberg:
But one obvious one for me is stolen base matchup. And you can look at baseball reference and see this data. Johnny Quedo is very, very, very good against stolen bases and Mookie Betts is a base stealer. And he probably will be a popular player. He’s going to hit lead off for the Dodgers, but because of that stolen base match of not being good, it might limit his upside a little bit. So I’m going to lower him. Okay.

Danny Steinberg:
And also I think the Dodgers in general, they don’t, I remember Adrian Pawlik last year stole almost no basis after stealing like 40 bases, so the change of team may make him … They may just have a philosophy where they’re less aggressive there. So it makes sense to lower him a bit.

Max Steinberg:
Right. So SaberSim has a really, really good baseline for you. I really trust these projections. And you can do more research and do slight adjustments to them and make them even better. So depending on how much time I have, I might do a lot of adjustments. I might do a few adjustments, but you can make these adjustments and it’s a good way to add value to your lineup. So you don’t want to just spit out whatever SaberSim spits out for you. You want to think about it, do research and do the fun stuff and adjust these projections and make even better lineups than we’re going to give you.

Andy Baldacci:
One thing I wanted to ask about is his line movements. I know that you guys pay a lot of attention to the betting markets. And is that something that you’re thinking about or trying to factor in as you’re making some of these adjustments?

Max Steinberg:
Yeah, I would say it is. I mean, I think the good thing about SaberSim is we have a model. And so a lot of people who sports bet sometimes actually don’t have a model. They just are looking at line movements. They’re looking at lines from before. They’re trying to do something intuitive. And when you have a model and you’re looking at line movement, you can actually sort of like tell what’s going on. And so if you’re looking at SaberSim, for example, and you’re seeing, okay, New York and Washington are expected to score three and a half runs, and the line opens at the over, under being seven. If I see that line on a sharp site like pinnacle go to eight or something like that, I’m going to say, “Okay, our model is saying seven. That would be, seems like the conventional thinking. This model does say eight. What or pinnacle has now [inaudible 00:20:16]. What is going on?”

Max Steinberg:
And my sense would be, “Okay, there is something. I can try to figure out what it is. Maybe they think the juice ball is back, something like that.” And I might then say, “Okay, I’m going to lower these pitchers and adjust these hitters,” which you can actually do just on a team level, which I think is really cool. You can just sort of adjust the line to a different line. You can say, “Apply these changes.” And then these teams are actually going to … We’re just going to change all this projections for you, which I think is really, really important. And you don’t have to do it on an individual level, which would be really, really difficult. So you can see Gerrit Cole, his projection is lower, Max Scherzer, his projection is lowered. And some of these Washington hitters have higher projections. And it’s now changed at a team level, which I think is really great.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. And I think just to stress on this point, we’ve created SaberSim to automate a lot of the busy work away for you so you can focus where you add the most value, and depending on how much time you have, there’s a lot you can do. There’s a lot of deep statistics you can look into to kind of make really fine tuned adjustments. But as Max just showed, you can also just make broader ones where you just say, “I think that SaberSim says Yankees and Washington are each going to get 3.5 runs on average. I think that’s low.” And you can just increase that. And then we’ll still on the backend handle all of those adjustments.

Danny Steinberg:
And so you’re able to kind of just take your intuition and you never want to rely too much on a gut feeling, but sometimes you have a strong feeling you want to go with and by adjusting the projected run total, you’re able to then get the rest of the projections dialed in much closer to the way that you see the games playing out. So there’s a lot different ways that you can approach that.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. I just wanted to add one more thing. I think specifically with what’s going on with Coronavirus, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to get some edge making some adjustments. I think, I mean, certain things that come to mind is home field advantage. There’s not going to be fans. So how much home field advantage is there really going to be? Maybe SaberSim is going to overwrite that historically. I don’t know.

Danny Steinberg:
And I think that those are good points, Danny, because we have built a very strong model that we’re confident in, but there’s so much uncertainty and we just can’t predict how bullpen management will go, how the impact of home field advantage will play out, if it’s still there, if it’s not, whatever it is and all these different variables and that especially now I would be confident going in and using our projections as a baseline, but if you do have the time to do a bit of research or you have strong feelings about maybe you’ve been reading some articles and it’s clear that one team is leaning in this direction versus the other, you can make those adjustments that we may be not necessarily slow to pick up on, but it’s just, we don’t want to kind of build in these new rules for the game when we’re not sure what’s going to last, so we’re going to keep our eye on everything and do our own adjustments to it. But you will always be able to adjust faster on a personal level than we will be able to build that into the model.

Max Steinberg:
So let’s go to build settings. So I think this is going to, especially on a two game slate, I’m really excited for this because this is going to really help illustrate what smart diversity actually is. So if you look at the default settings for this, and I already adjusted these a little bit, but the default settings, interestingly enough, and this is only for two games slide. So you might see this and be like, “Oh, this is some error, right? The correlation is neutral and smart diversity is set to really high. This doesn’t make sense. I’m going to … Correlation’s important. Blah, blah, blah. I’m going to do-”

Max Steinberg:
… that makes sense. So I’m going to correlations for them blah, blah, blah. I’m going to do this and this looks better. And I want you to actually understand why the settings are actually this way, because I think it helps you understand what Smart Diversity is.

Max Steinberg:
So Smart Diversity is our way of diversifying your lineups with taking into account upside. And I would say this is our most unique feature that we have at SabreSim in terms of lineup building. And the reason we’re able to do this is instead of building your lineups on average projection, which a lot of optimizers do is they just take all the average rejections and just give you the best lineups, right? And then you set some rules and you try to take in account ownership and whatever, and you try to raise people’s projections, taking account of upside.

Max Steinberg:
SaberSim, you don’t have to do that, because what we do is because we’re simulating all these games thousands of times, instead of just building an a [inaudible 00:24:58], what we’re going to do is depending on how high you set Smart Diversity to, we’re going to just take the actual result of a simulation to build your line up. So if Smart Diversity is set to very high, and Andy and correct me if this is wrong, I’m pretty sure this is correct. We’re going to take either one or two actual simulations from our pool of thousands and use the result from the simulations to build your lineups.

Max Steinberg:
So let’s say we have a game where Clayton Kershaw gets absolutely shelled, right? And San Francisco has a great game. The Dodgers don’t score runs, the New York Washington game is low scoring. Then if that’s the case, then we’re going to build you a lineup that has a San Francisco stack, probably the pitchers from Washington New York, a few other players.

Max Steinberg:
And that’s what you’re going to get. And this is going to allow us to give you a diversification of lineups that actually takes into account the real upside of your lineups. And the reason that you don’t actually have to have correlation as a setting is because we’re simulating games. So players are correlated already, right? If you’re taking the results of simulation, that’s already taking into account the correlation of the players. Because the correlation is just actually how players score together. And if they’re going to score together in a simulation if you just take the results of one or two.

Max Steinberg:
So for a two games slate, our default settings actually have to do with this. And we don’t have ownership to do accounts. I’m just going to set it to neutral. I personally like to lower Smart Diversity a little more, so it uses a few simulations. And then, we’re going to raise this correlation slider a little bit. You should set them in tandem, right? If you lower Smart Diversity, you still want to take in to account correlation. So you want to raise this correlation slider. And because we do want to take into account correlation, but if you’re using simulations, we don’t really want to double count it as much because that’s not going to be useful to us.

Andy Baldacci:
I think I want to just clarify a little bit is on the idea of Smart Diversity. Because you are right that at the highest end, Smart Diversity uses a single simulation. So what that actually means is that for each of the lineups that we’re building, we’re going to randomly pick a simulation, which will literally just be here is a game that we played out and here’s what happened. And here’s what each of those players got for fantasy points in that game. And we’ll use those points to build your lineup.

Andy Baldacci:
And as you go further to the left, as you turn Smart Diversity down, we then basically start adding in more simulations for each lineup and average those together. So the easiest way in my mind to think about it is that the farther to the right you go, the higher you set your Smart Diversity, the more your lineups are going to be following a true game script of saying like here is how a game actually played out.

Andy Baldacci:
And when you do that, you don’t need to think about correlations as much because as Max said, like it already happened, this is how the game played out. So when these correlated players played well together, like it’s already reflected in the fact that their points are higher for each of them. And as you go lower with Smart Diversity, you’re lessening the impact of any individual game script and getting closer to the average. And if you turn it off entirely, you will just use the averages. And so rather than randomly adjusting projections to get some diversity in your lineups, this is by far the most advanced way of doing it. And we’re really the only site that can do this because we actually simulate out all the games and that’s just the value there.

Andy Baldacci:
But the last thing to add is just, these are things that we’ve put a lot of thought into. And so Max, do you mind opening up the build window again?

Max Steinberg:
Yeah, of course.

Andy Baldacci:
And so, when you are starting your build at the very top you can pick the style, the entry limit, and the number of entrance in the contest, and will automatically adjust these advanced settings sliders for you to give you just like with the projections, a strong baseline. And this is something that I think people often spend too much time on this step. I think Max and Dan, tell me if I’m wrong on this, but like at this point now, you’re spending less than like a minute on this. Like you’ve done enough thought about this, you know how it works. Like you will make some adjustments here or there, but like it’s not like you’re stressing about, oh, is this exactly right? Because even if you’re a couple of ticks off, one, there is no correct thing, but we’re going to get you the closest to what we feel is optimal with those defaults.

Andy Baldacci:
So if you feel like you’d have limited amounts of time, don’t stress about these, leave the defaults, and spend your time getting those projections dialed in. But if you do want to have more time or you just want to have more control of the process, I think what Max has been walking you through here will give you a good framework for how to think about that. But again, we’ve done a lot of that in that work ahead of time for you, so that if you don’t want to mess with these, you’ll still be in pretty good standing.

Max Steinberg:
Right. But I think in terms of… I usually lower max salary to below the maximum, because it’s been shown in basically every sport that you’re going to get duplicate lineups if you fill up the salary. And that can really kill your expectation. If your lineup is going to split first place with someone, that’s a really bad for the value of your lineup. So I like lowering this max salary number to at least just like a little below. So we leave some money on the table and I did $200 for this build, but let’s get into the post build process.

Max Steinberg:
So we’ve done a build for 20 lineups. And as you can see, as we illustrated before, so this is based on basically two or three simulations. And you can see that this is not intuitive, right? If you’re setting settings for this, you might say-

Andy Baldacci:
Like if you’re creating rules.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah, if you’re creating rules, like you’re using some other optimizer, you might say, okay, maybe let’s not use players to pose in the picture. Or maybe we just use one or I don’t know. And say, I’m just going to do that for you. So you can see in the top line up actually. And I think there’s actually has to do with saving salary as well, because this is close to the top, right? So we need to save some salary somewhere. And because in these particular simulations we’re looking at, some of these San Francisco players that do do well, like Maricio Dublon and Alex Sacrason. We ought to be using two San Francisco players in the lineup. And that seems kind of strange, but in the actual results of the simulation, especially on a two game slate, like you’re almost never going to see this on like a four or five game slate, but in two game slate, the actual results dictate that you’re going to have some San Francisco players.

Andy Baldacci:
Even though you’re playing a Kershaw.

Max Steinberg:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. This one, we use a game stack, right? We were talking about how game stacking is valuable. We have Dodgers and San Francisco. We have Garrett Cole and Max Scherzer, hoping this is just a pitcher’s duel, which it might be. This one uses Clayton Kershaw and has one San Francisco player. Okay. So it uses a wide array of lineups. And I think these are going to be just more optimal lineups than if you try to just set the roles yourself, because if you set the rules yourself, you’re going to say, okay, well, I just want game stacks. It’s like, okay, well, one of these lines is a game stack, so that’s good, but you don’t want all of your lineups to be game stacks. That’s going to actually also just raise your variance quite a bit because you’re not getting a good diversity of lineups. But the great thing about Smart Diversity is you’re going to get a diversification of types of lineups of lineups and still have really optimal lineups. Right?

Andy Baldacci:
Yeah. And it’s definitely a different way of thinking about things. And Max, we’ll talk in just a minute about the quality control role that you’ll play in all of this, but the idea behind it is while we do let you set rules and create groups and all of that, we think that a lot of times those can be overused. And it’s because that’s how traditionally optimized this has been built, is you have to tell it how to do absolutely everything. So you have to come up with rules of thumbs. You have to figure out, okay, I want 60% game stacks. And then I want to have 5-2 stack and I want to have this and that. Like you have to pick everything because if you don’t, it’s just going to give you horrible lineups.

Andy Baldacci:
And because we’re able to leverage our simulation data, we’re able to just naturally give smarter lineups, smart lineups that actually reflect the way games can play out. And that makes it so that again, if you want the control, you can put it in there. You can put the rules in there, define what you want, but we don’t think that’s the highest leverage use of your time. We think the first part of it is on making those adjustments and on getting the projections dialed into where you want. And then in this last phase is doing the quality control of just really getting it dialed into what you’re looking for.

Max Steinberg:
Yeah. And I’m just showing you some of the rules that you can set here, but I usually don’t use them unless I’m trying to do something with making a really unique lineup type. But you can also do them post-build process too. So let’s look at this. We have player exposures, we have team stack exposures, and we have stack types, right?

Max Steinberg:
And so what we allow to you to do, because what we end up doing is if you request to build 20 lineups, we actually build you a whole lot more than that. In this case, 608. And I think if this was a full slate, it might even be a thousand. And what this is going to allow you to do is cap exposures or raise exposures of particular players or teams or stack types. And it’s essentially going to swap out or trade out one of those lineups, the worst lineup with that player and stack type, and replace it with a new one with the different players stack type, right?

Max Steinberg:
So let’s say, okay, Will Smith, 95%. I don’t want to go too crazy on him. I’m going to lower the max exposure at 80% and suddenly we only have in 80% of our lineups. I think this is useful for fine tuning your lineup if you don’t want to do another build. But if you’re seeing someone that you’re getting a lot and I would say you want to definitely examine his projection, right? Because you’re saying, okay, 7.5. Looking at relative to Corey Seager and Matt [inaudible 00:11:31], this doesn’t really seem like that outrageous of projection. So you might want to think, okay, maybe Will Smith is just simply the best play and want to keep him a lot. But I think in terms of just lowering variants and making a bigger balance of lineup, capping the max exposure can be a good idea.

Max Steinberg:
You can also do this with team stacks, right? We got the Dodger stack 100% and maybe say, okay, I don’t really want to do that. Okay. We can cap the max of Dodger stack as well, and you’ll get a more balance array of line ups. And then finally you can also do stack types, right? So this has to do-

Max Steinberg:
But finally, you can also do stack types, right? So this has to do with players on the same team. So we have one lineup that’s a … we have 85% of our lineups that are what are called five two stacks. So five players on the same team with two players on the same team. We have some five three, so five players on the same team with three players on another team, same team, and then four three. It’s all intuitive like that. For stack types as well, you can cap them max exposure or raise them in exposure in the same way you can do team stacks and players. So again, this is what we call quality control. It’s for fine tuning your build settings. It’s not for just making ridiculous changes to your lineups. I think if you think something doesn’t match the projection, like the projection doesn’t make sense to you, then I would adjust the projection and rebuild.

Max Steinberg:
Otherwise I would just use this to fine tune your lineups and make them the amount of balance that you want and your variety of lineups that you want, and that’s really it. That’s the quality control process. You can download these lineups, upload them to DraftKings and FanDuel, and then they’re basically ready, and that’s really the whole process. It takes about 10 minutes, and depending on how much you want to adjust, right? SaberSim really cuts down on the time that you were doing all these settings and rules and blah, blah, blah, and spending 30 plus minutes, an hour trying to get your settings right to build lineups. You get to do the fun stuff, which is you get to just do research, you get to adjust projections, which is my favorite part. I don’t want to spend all this time making all these settings to make my lineups right. SaberSim is really going to do that for you.

Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, and it’s back to the point Max made about not wanting to make any huge adjustments in this quality control phase. The reason for that is because what we’ve done is basically take all these projections, take all of our correlation data, take all of our simulation data, just everything that we have and said, “Okay, with what you’re telling us with these projections and any rules you may have set, or whatever it may be, these are the lines that are the best ones that match that,” and so if you’re surprised that you’re getting way more of someone than you think you should, or you’re not getting enough of someone that you really want, you don’t want to just kind of force them in there, because you’re kind of skipping over the fundamental assumptions that got you to that point, and that’s why we say go back to those projections, edit them if they seem far off, but at the same time, if you have to double someone’s projection or get close to that, then that’s probably not a good idea.

Max Steinberg:
So I think that’s also one extra point to make, is it’s important to just go back and forth between looking at the projections and making builds, because doing a build and seeing what players you’re actually getting is going to allow you to focus on actually adjusting the players that matter. So we’ve got a hundred percent Clayton Kershaw and this new build. So that means, okay, I want to focus on making sure that Clayton Kershaw’s projection is correct. Mookie Betts, I want to make sure his projection is correct and all these players. Maybe also when … and we’ll have ownership projections up in a few days and we have them for every site, but looking at ownership projection, being like, “Okay, well I’m getting a Dodger stack, but are the Dodgers going to be really high owned? And if so, maybe I should raise these ownership projections.” So going back and forth between looking at the projections and doing some builds, I think is also just a really important factor in really fine tuning your process and getting your lineups just right.

Andy Baldacci:
Right, and that’s why it kind of goes back to the term use of quality control. You’re not trying to … to be a winning player, you really want to minimize the number of assumptions that you’re coming in with. You don’t want to just force everything to match what you have in your head. You definitely want to come in with opinions and research, but you want to test those and you want to see, okay, what actually makes sense, and if you’re making these massive adjustments, SaberSim might be trying to tell you, “Hey, we think there’s something that you’re not picking up on it,” but it also goes the other way.

Andy Baldacci:
And so it’s coming in with a kind of a curious mindset of saying, okay, who does SaberSim like? Who do they dislike? I’m going to focus my research on those, the places where I agree, the places where I disagree, so that I can come in and not have to research the hundreds of players on the slate. I can just focus on the key ones that are really standing out to me and go from there, and I mean Max and Danny too, on a normal slate … I get we walked through this in 10 minutes and you truly could put in decent lineups in this amount of time, but on a normal site where you’re putting thousands, if not tens of thousand dollars on the line, how much time would you guys each say that you’re spending within SaberSim?

Max Steinberg:
Within the actual product?

Andy Baldacci:
Well, I guess including the research phase. Including that, how much time are you spending at that point?

Max Steinberg:
I mean, it can vary it. Sometimes it can just be an hour and sometimes it can be multiple hours and sometimes it can be 30 minutes. I think sometimes it’s really clear to me when looking at a slide and I’m like, “I know what to do. I know this team is going to be high owned and I think they should not be high owned, and I’m just going to jack up their ownership,” and let’s say [inaudible 00:41:33] do the work and know that those signups are profitable. Sometimes I’m going to do a lot of research, especially on a really big day and do a lot of projection adjustments and try to really just make the best lineups, but it just depends on the day.

Andy Baldacci:
The same with you, Danny?

Danny Steinberg:
I mean, I would say I’m kind of researching sports all the time. It never stops. I don’t think you have to do that to win, but yeah, I mean I’m spending a lot of my time coding in R using the free baseball statistics packages that are available and just doing research on players that are playing that day. And if there’s anything and their recent performance or news with regards to injuries or something that is important to take into consideration.

Max Steinberg:
I also just want to say one thing. Is it’s all about adding value. Danny is a good computer programmer. I am a good computer programmer. That’s one way to add value, right? You could be really good at looking at line movement. You could really be good at being up on the injury news and seeing, “Okay, this player is playing through an injury. This player is not.” You can look at specific data. You can be an expert on stolen bases. Find a way that you can add value that’s reasonable and that’s going to help you win. It’s any way you can add value to SaberSim’s projections and build process, that’s going to really help you win. Raising ownership projections, being an ownership expert. There’s so many ways to do it. It doesn’t have to be that complicated, but anyone can add value to this model if you are just doing some research and looking at the ways.

Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, and that’s ultimately why we built SaberSim, is that so much of the DFS process was spent on things that didn’t add value. It was spent defining dozens or hundreds of groups and all these different rules and then starting over and over again because you just couldn’t get it exactly right, because you just kept getting these crazy lineups because you’re ultimately fighting what traditional optimizers were built to do, and this is a lot easier than those traditional optimizers use, because a lot of that work you were doing before was just pointless, busy work and we were able to automate that away, and so this isn’t to say this is some kind of money printing machine, because it still does take work to win, but we have set this up in a way that you’re able to focus on the areas where you can add the most value, and even if that’s just in 10, 15, 20 minutes a day, that is still going to be able to help you get an edge if you apply the concepts that Max and Danny and I talked about today. So to kind of wrap all of this up and summarize what we’ve covered here, I think we can just break it down into six keys to beating MLB.

Andy Baldacci:
The first one is stacking. Correlations are definitely strong, but they also just spread throughout the team. There are so many players that are correlated that it is crucial that you have some sort of stacks in your lineups, especially for the big GPPs. Then two, game stacking works, but don’t try to force it. With SaberSim, it’s a lot easier to let us kind of point you in the right direction, but just in general, if you’re using one of those traditional optimizers, don’t feel as though you have to force the game stacks. If you identify conditions that may seem like it would be a good fit for that, go for it, but again, it’s not an all or nothing thing. Because of how high the variance is, you want to look at playing opponents of highly owned teams, and this can mean playing the hitters against a highly owned pitcher.

Andy Baldacci:
It can mean playing the pitcher against a highly own stack, whatever that may be. It’s just trying to find those leverage spots so you can get as much upside into your lineup as possible, and while you do want to spread out your lines and do want to have diversity in them, you can’t avoid variance. It is just a high variance game and that’s part of the game, and that brings us to that last key and that is using the right tools. Because again, we’ve shown you that this doesn’t have to be that complicated, but if you try to do all this on your own, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to quantify some of the things that our computers and algorithms and everything else are able to do, and so if you’re interested in trying out SaberSim, we have a free three day trial.

Andy Baldacci:
So you can check it out, kick the tires, see if it’s right for you before paying us a single cent, and when you sign up for that trial, you will get access to all of the sports we have to offer. I think now we’re going on nearly a dozen, if not more. If one of the major sites offers it, we have it, and so go over to sabersim.com to check it out, sign up for your free trial. If you have any questions along the way, you can always shoot us an email at [email protected]. You can email me personally at [email protected], and Max and Daniel, what are the best ways for people to get ahold of you guys?

Danny Steinberg:
Hey there. Yeah, I’m @DanielSingerS and Max is at @MaxJSteinberg, right?

Max Steinberg:
That’s correct, yeah.

Danny Steinberg:
Yeah. Hit us up anytime, or on SaberSim’s slack.

Andy Baldacci:
Perfect. Well, we hope to see you guys inside and we really appreciate the time.

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