With a Stokastic+ membership, you’re tapping into top-notch advice and strategies straight from the pros, like our perennial winner Steve “dacoltz” Buzzard and the rest of the Stokastic crew. Plus, you’ll be part of our Stokastic Discord community, where our users and pros bounce DFS advice and questions off of each other. It’s not just MLB DFS we’re talking about here. We’re diving into all things fantasy, with insights from the minds who’ve hit the big bucks.
Every Thursday, Steve will hold court on Discord, ready to tackle your burning DFS questions. Whether you want to dive deep into strategy, explore our tools or fine-tune your game, he’s got you covered. Here we will cover some of the best DFS discussions and advice from this week’s Office Hours.
Discord Office Hours Recap – DFS Advice & Strategy
Steve “dacoltz” Buzzard is a name you frequently see at the top of the leaderboards in all sorts of DFS sports, and he is one of the masterminds behind Stokastic Sims. He has weekly Office Hours on Discord to answer questions and give DFS advice, whether it’s about any slate past or future or advice on how to use our tools and content.
Below are some of the best questions and answers from this week’s Office Hours with Steve “dacoltz” Buzzard.
MLB DFS Strategy: Contest Selection for Specific Bankroll Size
Mincashmerchant asked: What contest selection would you recommend for a $10,000 bankroll?
dacoltz: A $10,000 bankroll is awesome! What I always tell folks on how they should allocate bankroll is to figure out what you are best at between cash games and tournaments. I specialize in tournaments, so I will play pretty much only them. But if you are better at cash games, you should put some of those in there as well. But cash games are challenging these days and don’t have as much upside, so I haven’t focused on them as much.
From there I would say you probably don’t want to put much more than, say, 5% of your money in play on a given day because of the wild fluctuations in GPPs. If you feel like that is too high, I would caution lower as well. You can put a bit more in play with cash games, though. I would start out by playing in contests that are less than $3 because pro players can’t play those and are softer in general. If you are good at multi-entering contests, you can max-enter a lot of contests in this price point and fill up a good amount of the money you want to put in play. If you tend to build only 1 to 5 lineups per day, you will have to keep expanding up.
The second-best option is the big contest of the day. It’s normally somewhere around $10 to $25 and has a first-place prize pool of $50,000 to $100,000. This is the next-softest prize pool because of how big it is. I think even building 5 to 10 entries in this contest could be a good strategy for that type of bankroll. Hopefully that helps. The main things I would ask myself are, 1) Do I want to play cash games? 2) Do I want to enter a bunch of lineups per day or just a few and start working up from there? My answer is no cash games, other than NFL, and a bunch of lineups, but that varies depending on your expertise.
MLB DFS Advice: How to Start Lineups When Hand Building
Vitonation23 asked: When I’m hand building my 1 to 2 lineups, should I start with my main stack or pick a top pitcher from the slate first?
dacoltz: I think either of those two options are a good first step. You could ideally get both and fit your one-offs and secondary pitcher around that. I think, even if both your favorite pitcher and favorite stack are chalky, you can pick enough other contrarian options with the rest of your lineup spots — or vice versa; if the stack and pitcher are contrarian you can find chalky options elsewhere. If you really wanted me to pick one, I would probably say your stack since they are going to be the biggest difference maker on most slates.
One of our best deals here at Stokastic is our MLB Lineup Generator sale. For a limited time, you can get seven days of MLB Lineup Generator for just $3 when you use the promo code MLBLGWEEK!
The MLB Lineup Generator is one of our easiest-to-use but also most effective tools we offer. All you need to do is select the DFS site and slate you plan to play, choose your stack type, the level of ownership you want from your lineups (chalky, contrarian, balanced or all) and players you wish to lock in. Once you’re satisfied, Lineup Generator will churn out high-ROI lineups and give you the information to determine how you want to proceed.
Check out the included screenshot for an example of a lineup that we generated for a DraftKings weekday main slate.
MLB DFS Strategy: Boosting Stack/Player ROI
Clayton E asked: Still working through Sims management. When you are boosting stack/player ROI, aren’t you just more or less imposing your will on the outcome? Not sure what the strategies are behind it.
dacoltz: Exactly. The purpose of the boosts is to give your opinions on players. While we think our projections are super accurate, there are just sometimes players that you think you know the situation better than us. Maybe you see something you think we overlooked and you want to take advantage of it either by going heavier on that player or lighter. Another example is you just don’t feel comfortable going with a super-high exposure to a certain player, so you can boost them down, or again on the flip side, you don’t want to completely fade a player that you think might have a good game.
MLB DFS Strategy: How Pros Review MLB Slates
monkeyprick asked: How often do you or other pros finish top 1% in marquee MLB tournaments? How do you go about reviewing your MLB DFS play when all of the top pros seem to play something so different? In nba there at least seems to be some consensus of what plays are good when I review, but I am really struggling to learn anything from reviewing MLB slates. Also, does top 1% even matter in MLB, or should I only worry about top 0.1%?
dacoltz: I think top 1% is what you want to look at. It looks like I am at about 1.7% to start the MLB season, but that is probably a bit lucky, as I’m around 1.5% the last couple of years in MLB.
For reviewing my play, I do like to look at what other pros are doing. I agree there is a lot more variance on their strategies across the board in MLB, but I think you can still garner a lot of information there, especially where they end up agreeing. I am not looking at individual hitters quite as much as I do stacks and pitchers. I also look at my lineups in the Post-Contest Sims to see where they rank in terms of ROI, average projection, average ownership, etc. I think if you are getting better than say 1.25% to first, you are probably in a pretty good spot, but you are going to see swings, of course.
