The Stokastic DFS Simulation tools are the best in the industry for those looking to take their DFS game to the next level. For years, DFS pros have been leveraging simulations to consistently put themselves in a position to capitalize on the inherent randomness that is associated with daily fantasy sports. That randomness is arguably the most prevalent in PGA, where an infinite number of variables come into play on every single shot. Let’s discuss how to use Stokastic’s PGA DFS Sims as I dive into my golf DFS strategy guide for profitable play.
How to Use PGA DFS Sims: Expert Golf DFS Strategy Guide
Why You Should Use PGA DFS Sims
To achieve sustained success in PGA DFS, you must account for the range of outcomes of every golfer in the field — along with what your competitors’ lineups will look like. There are several ways you can achieve these ends. Fantasy point projections offer insight into what a golfer can accomplish on a given weekend, while ownership projections estimate how popular they’ll be.
At Stokastic, we have industry-leading PGA DFS projections and PGA DFS ownership projections. Our top golfers tool synthesizes these numbers into a more intuitive webpage, which may make your life easier. We even have a PGA weather splits tool to help you project golfers during the weekend. All of these are available with our PGA DFS data package.
However, if you’re just looking at raw data, you’re falling behind your competitors. The popularity of DFS simulation tools has risen exponentially in recent years, and players with Stokastic’s PGA DFS Sims tool can take things a step further by using our projections to estimate the return on investment (ROI) of specific lineups and individual golfers based on the DFS contest in question.
Our industry-leading PGA Sims tool works on a hole-by-hole basis to find the best combinations and configurations for any contest. You can even customize it based on the golfers that you want the most (or least!) exposure to on a given slate. Let’s dive into how it works.
How to Use Stokastic’s PGA DFS Sims & Expert Strategy: Contest Generator
I already mentioned the importance of taking a golfer’s range of outcomes into consideration. While that is certainly a big piece of the puzzle, DFS at its core is a competitive peer-to-peer game. That means the way that our competition is building their lineups is of equal, if not greater, importance than the actual results that take place in a given golf tournament.
If we could accurately predict what our competition’s lineups look like before the slate locks, it would provide us with a massive advantage, especially when combined with simulations. Our PGA DFS Contest Generator is designed to do just that.
Using our industry-leading ownership projection data, our Contest Generator quickly builds a pool of lineups that closely reflect the actual lineups we are likely to face from our competition in our selected slate.
To build your contest pool, simply select the slate in which you’ll be playing and the pool size that most closely reflects the size of the contest you’ll be entering. Finally, you can adjust the “Contest Archetype” slider to further tune your pool — we know that a high-stakes contest ($100-plus buy-in) will feature more condensed ownership on the top point-per-dollar plays than a low-stakes tournament.
By using this slider, you can account for the varying player concentration based on your contest buy-in to build more accurate pools. Once your settings are selected, hit the “Generate Lineups” button to build your contest pool.
How to Use Stokastic’s PGA DFS Sims & Expert Strategy: Pre-Contest Simulator
After building your contest pool, now it’s time to leverage the power of Stokastic’s proprietary simulation software. You can navigate to the tool by selecting “Simulate Lineups” from the Contest Generator or by clicking the “Pre-Contest Simulator” option in the navigation bar.
Before you begin your simulation, ensure that the proper slate is selected. Then select the “Percent to First” payout structure that most closely mirrors the structure of the contest you’ll be entering. To determine the percent to first, take the first-place prize of the contest you’re entering and divide it by the total guaranteed prize pool. For example, a $100,000 guaranteed contest with $20,000 to first place would mean a 20%-to-first payout structure. Once that is selected, you can now run your very own custom simulation.
Upon hitting the “Run Contest Simulation” button, Stokastic’s hole-by-hole simulation technology goes to work. It plays out the entire golf tournament thousands of times. After every simulation run, point totals for each player are calculated based on birdies, pars, bogeys and finishing position just like a real PGA DFS contest!
These totals are then assigned to the lineups built with the Contest Generator. From there, each lineup is ranked from most to fewest total fantasy points and assigned the appropriate dollar amount based on your selected payout structure. This process is repeated thousands of times in a matter of minutes. The result is a table that displays all the lineups and their associated metrics from all of the simulation runs. These metrics include:
- Simulated ROI% – The gold standard metric on this page, essentially ranking the lineups from best to worst. This metric is the theoretical return on investment that lineup had, on average, over the course of all the simulation runs. This is the default sort upon load and the one we recommend the most, as it is all-encompassing.
- Projected FP – The lineup’s total projected fantasy points.
- OwnSum – The lineup’s total projected ownership sum.
- Win% – The percentage of time the lineup finished first place across all simulation runs.
- Top 10% – The percentage of time the lineup finished inside the top 10 across all simulation runs.
- Cash% – The percentage of time the lineup received a placement payout across all the simulation runs.
- Dupes – The number of times the lineup is duplicated within the created contest pool.
To select your lineups, you can favorite them individually or use the quick favorite dropdown in the top right to quickly select the number of lineups you wish to export. Once your lineups are selected, hit the “Export Favorites” button to export your lineups to CSV for easy uploading to your desired site.
For a more intricate breakdown of the Stokastic PGA DFS Sim tools, check out the video below that Greg Ehrenberg and I put together:
