The Ultimate Guide to Daily Fantasy Hockey

The Ultimate Guide to Daily Fantasy Hockey

Transcript

Hey, guys. This is max Steinberg. I’m a partner at SaberSim, and a daily fantasy professional, and I’m here to bring you a video that’s all about hockey. So SaberSim is well-equipped to help you build great hockey lineups quickly and easily, without having to go through the tedious process of creating a bunch of build rules, trying to accurately put players into groups, or spending hours upon hours trying to [inaudible 00:00:32] rig an outdated lineup optimizer to create good lineups.

SaberSim does all of the heavy lifting for you. We simulate every game thousands of times, play-by-play, using an advanced machine learning model, which gives us a lot of really great data. And we leverage this really great simulation data to quickly and easily create great lineups for you while you only have to worry about doing the fun stuff, like doing research or adjusting player projection and fine-tuning your exposure.

So every DFS sport has a lot of similarities. Right? Whether it’s baseball, football, hockey, or basketball, or whatever you’re playing. We want to build great lineups with proper construction that are going to maximize our profitability for the contest we’re entering. And the way we do this with SaberSim is through using the tools that SaberSim provides you, and going through what we call a three-step build process.

So the first step of the process is adjusting your player projections, which I’m going to get into in a little bit. And this is where you’re probably going to spend most of your time using our product. The second step is setting your build settings, which essentially is just thinking what contest I’ve been playing, which is, is it a GPP? Is it a cash game? Is it multiplier? Is it satellite? What’s the entry limit of the contest? And how many entrants are in the contest?

We do a lot of stuff behind the scenes that are going to maximize your builds for the proper correlation and upside for the contest that you’re playing. And then we’re going to build our lineup pool, and it’s going to get to a page like this. And this page is going to be where we’re going to do step three of our process, which we call the quality control process, where we’re going to adjust player exposures.

We’re going to adjust the types of team stacks we’re getting and the stack types we’re getting, and adjust these min and max exposures, to make sure that our lineups are fine-tuned and as perfect as we possibly can get them. So let’s talk about what SaberSim has in place for you, and what you need to do. So because of those simulation, that everything we do is built on a simulator, which I talked about before, we have a lot of good data based on the simulation. Right?

And we have range of outcomes for players, we have how players are correlated to each other. And in hockey, those correlations are really strong because it’s kind of similar to baseball. In hockey, there’s two assists for every goal, or two possible assists for every goal. And the same way in baseball. If a player got to hit, he might get an RBI while two other players get a run.

Players are going to kind of score together in hockey. Right? If a player scores the goal, two players who are playing with him, [inaudible 00:03:25] assist. And it’s going to build up that score for everyone. And so just like baseball, we’re going to want to stack players. Right? And in hockey specifically, the players we want to stack are players who are in the same line. Those are the players who are going to be most highly correlated.

And luckily for you, we have really accurate line data. It’s something we spent a lot of time on, and we have created a model that basically gives the most accurate line data you can basically find anywhere. And this is really important because it’s actually really tough to know who’s playing, and what line. There’s not an announcement of starting lineups like there is in basketball or baseball or anything like that.

This is something that you have to do a lot of research to get. And because we have this great line data, it allows everything else to work really well. Right? We don’t have to worry about trying to make the perfect lines ourselves. And what you have to do with a lot of optimizers is put players in groups. You can just use our lineup builder that takes advantage of the correlation data.

And these correlation data is really going to give us an accurate representation of what players you want to play together, and we’re just going to do all of that for you. So we have a lot of great info that even if you don’t know hockey, our lineup builder is going to build you great lineups using all the baselines we have. And we also have great baseline projections and all that good stuff.

So we already have a great framework so that even if you don’t know hockey very well, you’re going to be set up really well to make great hockey lineups without having to do much. And that’s important because hockey is a lesser played fantasy sport. Right? It’s not as popular, there’s not as many pros, there’s not as much information out there.

And because of that, if you have a great lineup builder, like SaberSim offers and you can add a little value to it, you’re going to probably pretty easily make profitable lineups, especially in low stakes contests. Right? So let’s talk about what you can do to add value. Right? Because if you’re like me, hockey is not your main sport, and you’re not going to spend hours upon hours researching it.

So we want to find ways that we can quickly and easily add value by adjusting projections or adjusting lines, or doing something. Right? In the step one of the process. I think the easiest way to adjust projections is to do it on a team level. So SaberSim offers something really cool where we allow you to adjust average scoring projections for different teams, on a team level.

So let’s say the Chicago Blackhawks, we project them to score an average 2.9 goals. Well, we also give you the ability to adjust this projection up and down. And what we’re going to do when we do that is going to adjust the players accordingly, to build them up to if this team was supposed to score this many goals on average, how that might affect the players.

And I like doing this a lot because if you look at bigger sports books, especially if it’s close to when the game is going to start, the lines you can count on are pretty accurate. Right? And so if we can see how we differ from those, we’re going to be able to add value to our model really easily. Right?

So you can do this in two ways. You go to a place like Vegas Insider or maybe an online sports book you’re subscribed to, and look at their lines, and look how they differ from these lines. But I subscribed to sports betting or obviously, I’m an investor in this company, so I get it for free. And so if you do subscribe to the sports betting side, we have a really good visual for you here. Right?

We want to look for is how we’re differing from online and Vegas sports books. Right? And we’re looking for something that stands out where we might have some inaccurate projections here. Right? Because we have a really great model, but not every model is going to have some inaccuracies. Right? And we want to see if we can fight any of them.

And so one thing that stands out here immediately is how much different we’re valuing this Vancouver/Ottawa game than some of the Vegas sports books. We have Vancouver as an underdog, and sports books have them as a nice favorite. Vegas has and sports books have the game total here as 6.5 goals, we have it way under. And so I’m going to guess that we’re actually probably not projecting Vancouver accurately here. So what I’m going to do is raise their team goal projection to 3.3, raise it a little bit.

And by doing this and applying these changes, we’re just going to raise all the players accordingly. And so then if we look at the players on Vancouver… And we’re just going to go to utility, players, go to Vancouver. And you can see all these players are green. We’ve adjusted them all upward, and it’s going to match what probably is a more accurate goal projection. Right?

So that’s one really easy way you can do this for a lot of different teams and adjust this so it matches the sports books a little more. And that’s a way that you’re going to really easily be able to add value to your model. Right? So what are some other ways? I forgot if I mentioned this before, but we don’t… We have ownership projections for most sports, but we don’t have it for hockey.

And there’s a couple of reasons for this. One is, we don’t feel like it’s that important. Usually, you’re going to be able to get low on stacks, but it’s just by using our product. I think a lot of times you find a lot of good diamond in the rough low-end players by doing that. Player ownerships don’t spike as much as they do in football and basketball. And so usually, they are a little bit flatter.

And so we just don’t think it’s as important. We plan to add it eventually, but for the time being, we have at blank. But another way you can add value is to upload your own ownership projections. Right? And in the same way, you could use another player projections source and use it to adjust the player projections a little bit.

And then also if you’re really, really into hockey and you follow it religiously, and you actually feel like you have better data about what these lines are, you actually have the ability to adjust this line data yourself. Right? If you think that we have Brent Burns on the first line and because of injuries or maybe he got demoted and we’re not reflecting it accurately, he’s actually in the second line, you can just adjust that yourself, and that gives you a little bit more power.

So in general, this is the step here to spend the most time on. You spend a lot of time on it, or you spend a little time on it. Right? But I think the important thing is, find the ways that you have knowledge, that you can add value in the simple ways. And you’re going to really, really help yourself and help make even more profitable lineups.

So let’s get into part two. So this is going to be the build settings. So this is a process where you’re not going to spend a lot of time on. Right? And you actually don’t even need to understand that much. We’re doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes that basically are tailoring our slider settings that were formally your slider settings.

They give you the correlation and upside settings that you want for whatever contest you’re playing. And so all you have to do here is, is set the settings for the type of contests that you want. So if you’re playing cash games, you’re going to want to set this to cash games. If you’re playing TPPs, which I normally play, you’re going to set this to TPP. You’re going to say the entry limit of the contest.

So if you’re entering something like the Millionaire Maker or a big contest, you [inaudible 00:11:23] 150 max. For NHL, even if the 150 max contest, people are probably not entering that much. So I’m usually going to do… And I’m building this for the low stakes 20 max contests [inaudible 00:11:36] so I’m going to do 20 max. And then entrance. Again, these contests are a little smaller, so we’re going to do 1,000, 10,000. You can adjust these mid salary settings.

I like to just in case there’s some optimal lineups that leave some salary on the table, so you need to lower them in salary. And that’s about it. There are videos about doing this in a more advanced way and really fine-tuning the correlation range of outcome, smart diversity settings, and all the other settings using the advanced settings right here.

But if you don’t have that much knowledge of it, I would go by the numbers that we’ve preset for you. We’ve put a lot of thought into them. They’re based on really strong logic and math. And I would just worry about the content style. But if you are interested in that, there’s a lot of videos on our YouTube, specifically from our Ask The Sharks series that talk about this quite a bit, and you can watch that.

But so for step two, all you have to do really is do all these things, and you’re ready to go. So we’re going to build our lineup pool. Right? And when this build is done, which I’ll just show you what the finished product is once again, it’s going to look like this. Right? It’s going to have all of your player exposures in a list right here. It has what your lineups actually look like here. It has your team stacks and your stack times.

You know what? I’m just going to work from this build right now. Right? So just to make it quicker and easier. So one thing to notice immediately is we’ve requested 20 lineups. Right? And one thing that’s special about SaberSim, is when you request 20 lineups, we actually build you a lot more. In this case, we’ve built you 500. And the reason that’s important is it gives you a lot of quick control over your lineups.

So if you want to change an exposure round, instead of just having to do the builds all over again, we can quickly and easily just swap one lineup with that player out, and get a another lineup from this bigger pool. So let’s say we have a hundred percent Brent Burns and I want just 90% Brent Burns, I want to take him out of [inaudible 00:13:53] our lineups. We can do that, and it will immediately just get rid of two of the worst lineups with Brent Burns in them, and put in two of the next best lineups. Right?

And so this gives you a lot of control. You can do this with team stacks as well. Maybe we don’t want as much exposure to San Jose, or we can do this stack type as well. Maybe we don’t want to stand on five stack being [inaudible 00:14:17] this, or we can raise the amount of five twos or things like that. So let’s talk about what we’d actually do here. Right?

So I think the thing that’s important in hockey is not really thinking more about an individual level as, again, thinking about things on more of a team level. Right? And so I think at a team level, I like to get a balance of stacks. We want a nice balance because every day we don’t want to be too risky. And since SaberSim is so good at building lineups for us, I’m happy with sacrificing a little value and not just overdoing with the best team and spreading out a little bit.

So I might set this max exposure to 60%, and then we’re going to get a little more off-balance and maybe set Montreal to 40, and just make sure we’re getting a balanced range of team stacks. Also here, maybe if you don’t want a standalone five stack and you just really want to maximize having a lineup that has a lot of correlation, we can just set this max exposure to zero.

And suddenly, we’re only including stacks that have multiple stacks from different teams. Right? And that’s what these numbers mean. That first number is your main stack, that straight vertical line is just a separator, and the thing after the line is a stack from another team. And sometimes you’ll see two vertical lines. And what this means is a four stack from [inaudible 00:15:40] team, a two stack from another team and a two stack from even another team. Right?

And so you can look at these lineups too. We can see in this, we have a four stack right here, and then a three stack right here. So this is a four three because we have three players from Florida, and four players from San Jose. And that’s what a lot of our lineups look like. I think for player exposures, I think the thing that I’m most concerned about is just getting a wide variety of goalies.

Goalie play is pretty random. Right? If you look at our goalie projections, there’s a couple of guys who stand out quite a bit, but for the most part, they’re bunched together. Right? And I think that’s a good thing to look at is, we’d see these goalies are projected a lot higher than a lot of goalies, and they are some really great value.

So initially your instinct might be like, “Oh, let’s spread out the goalie exposure,” but in this case, I actually don’t really want to do it. I think I’m going to keep mostly having these two guys because they are really so much better than the field. But I think when you’re adjusting exposures like this, I think from an individual level, that’s the only reason you want to do it is, if you want a wider variety of goalies.

So you might lower this to 55, you might lower this guy to 30, and then we’re going to pop up with a wider spread of goalies, which might be helpful to us. Right? And so in general, I don’t like doing too much in this part of the process and this part three of the build process because if there’s something that you really want to do, like you just don’t think San Jose is a good stack for one reason or another or basically something like that, then that means you should probably go back to these projections.

Look at San Jose’s team projections, say, “Does this not look right? Is there something wrong?” And by the way, it seems like it does seem pretty accurate, but maybe you’re like, “Oh, this player is injured,” or something like that. You should go back to the projections and adjust from there. You should not just try to control everything from this post-build quality control process.

I think this process is best for quality control. It’s about fine-tuning. If you don’t want to fine-tune, I suggest you go back and do more wholesale adjustments to projections. But in general, I’m going to trust SaberSim’s projections more than my small amount of knowledge. Right? So I think in general, use this part of the process as quality control, as fine-tuning, and it’s going to serve you really, really well.

So I think that was about 20 minutes. And as you can see, if you look at these lineups, it’s a lot of amazing stack types, the type of correlation that we want in our lineups that are going to win us a big GPP. And we did not have to do any of that tedious work that you probably do not even have time for playing daily fantasy hockey, which is probably your secondary sport. Right?

And so SaberSim, we have a lot of good data. We have amazing line data we have, and because of that, we have amazing correlation data because of our simulator. And we have a lot to offer a hockey that actually makes it so you can realistically build great lineups in a very, very short period of time. So if you haven’t tried hockey before, I really recommend it because SaberSim really, really is well-equipped to make great hockey lineups.

And luckily for you, you can try us out. If you want to try us out for hockey, there’s a three day free trial to any new user, and you can try us out for free. No money at all. Try us for free. You don’t like us? Stop. If you do, subscribe. Whatever you want to do. But I really suggest you try us out because we really are a great hockey builder. So thank you so much for watching this video, and good luck with DFS, whichever sport you’re playing and whatever you’re doing. And hope you win some money. Thanks.

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