Imagine you’ve been sitting at the poker table for hours and just played one of the biggest pots of the night. Did you play it right? Could you have gotten more money from the table? Now, picture having a personal coach right beside you, meticulously analyzing each play, pointing out your strengths and weaknesses, and showing you how to elevate your game. This is precisely what our Post-Contest Sims offer: An expert breakdown of your recent contest performance, providing invaluable insights to refine your strategy and DFS lineup study as well as to enhance your skills.
How Post-Contest Sims Can Improve Your DFS Results and Lineup Study
In poker and other areas of our life, we are constantly assessing the work we did. But in DFS, this assessment often ends up getting overlooked.
One of the biggest differences I see between successful and not-so-successful DFS players is the research they do after the slate ends to evaluate how they played that specific slate. The biggest reason I’ve heard from casual players on why they don’t evaluate their lineups is they don’t have the tools to do so and, in some cases, don’t know the right areas to look. Because of these constraints, we made some really robust tools that are easy to use and give you the metrics you need to analyze your play so you don’t make the same mistakes slate after slate and begin to improve your game.
What Is the Post-Contest Simulator and How Is it Valuable?
The Post-Contest Simulator is a tool to help you see how your lineups are performing in the contest you are playing. It starts by using the same simulations that we use in our popular Pre-Contest Sims. Here we simulate a slate of games thousands of times to see how a player and team would perform if they had a chance to play the same game again and again. Sometimes a player hits three homers and the pitcher they are facing busts, and the next time they strike out four times and the opposing pitcher is a slate breaker. Then for every simulation, we take the actual lineups from the contest played on DraftKings and grade how the lineups would have performed each time to determine a Sim Lineup ROI.
This analysis tells you how much your lineup would be expected to win over the course of thousands of slates. This is very powerful because the variance is so large in DFS, as I discussed in my recent bankroll management article. With the variance being so large, it is very difficult to tell how well you are really doing without playing for years. This speeds up that process greatly and saves you money along the way!
What Do I Look at When Using the Post-Contest Simulator?
Now that we’ve established how valuable analyzing your lineups is, what do I specifically like to look at in the Post-Contest Sims?
Analyzing My Portfolio of Lineups
The first thing I am looking at is my portfolio of lineups in total, in particular, I start with my Sim Lineup ROI as described above. This gives you a single metric that you can use to compare how you are doing to other people putting in a similar number of lineups as you. The higher you score on this metric the better, but I am mainly looking to be around those players that are entering a similar number of lineups as me. There isn’t a more direct way to see how your set of lineups is doing in any given contest.
Continuing to look at my portfolio of lineups, I like to look at what is my average projected points and ownership sum. These are basic metrics, but it is a good way to quickly understand if my lineups are too chalky or too contrarian compared to other good players. I can also compare the Sim ROIs for each of these different players to see if players that are scoring higher in the Post-Contest Simulator tend to be chalkier, more contrarian, etc. Do I fall into the group of lineups that are performing well or not so well? These metrics are especially helpful when I am trying new strategies or making major adjustments for the specific slate to see if I’ve gone too far in any given direction.
Breaking Down the Best and Worst Lineups
After looking at my portfolio of lineups I like to look at my individual lineups on the Lineup ROI tab. In particular, I like to look at my worst performing lineups so that I can see what went wrong with those lineups. Were they duped, were they too chalky, were they too contrarian, was the correlation not high enough, did I play specific players in these lineups that weren’t as successful? I also like to look at the lineups that were the most successful, but I spend less time on these. In my experience, it is a lot easier to eliminate trends on bad lineups than it is to duplicate trends in the best lineups. The edges are tight in DFS, and if I can eliminate just a few bad lineups a day, my ROI can skyrocket.
Assessing the Quality of Individual Plays
Now that I know how my portfolio of lineups performed compared to others as well as why some specific lineups performed really poorly or really well, I like to look at the Player ROI tab to see what players in particular did well. I like to take this step each morning so that the slate is still fresh in my mind and I know what I was thinking about certain players. I am trying to see if players that I liked had a good Sim Player ROI and players that I didn’t like had a poor Sim Player ROI. In this case, a Sim Player ROI is the average ROI for all the lineups that the specific player was included in. What I’ve found is, the more I study these pages, I can start to find trends with certain players that have high or low ROIs so that I can give players ROI boosts in the future, or if you aren’t using the Sims to build your lineups, which types of players you should populate it with. Getting a better feel for which players are good and bad plays is one of the quickest ways to improve the quality of your lineups and make money.
Here is a list of some of the highest-ROI players for the May 28 MLB Mega 8’s contest, along with their Field Ownership and my personal ownership. It looks like I did a good job of being overweight on some of the highest-ROI plays. However I didn’t have enough Matt Waldron, as he was 44.5% owned by the field and I had 28.6% ownership of him. With that type of ROI, I would have liked to be overweight on him with somewhere between a 50% and 60% share. If I see multiple days in a row that low-cost pitchers, or even Waldron in particular, are showing better than what I have them, I make tweaks to my process while trying to ensure I don’t throw off the performance of my portfolio of lineups.
Our Post-Contest Simulator is your personal coach, meticulously analyzing each play, pointing out strengths and weaknesses, and showing you how to elevate your game. Don’t let variance and guesswork dictate your success. Use our robust, fun tools to analyze your performance, gain valuable insights and refine your strategies. Start using the Post-Contest Simulator today and improve your DFS game tomorrow.
