Avoid These 4 Costly NFL DFS Mistakes

With only 18 weeks in the NFL regular season, you can't afford to spend one of your Sundays having made a costly mistake with your NFL DFS lineups. Week two is coming up on us quickly here. My name's Jordan Chand. I'm the head coach here at SaberSim. And in this video, we're I'll be walking through the four most common mistakes I see NFL DFS players make with their lineups.

I want to save you from making one of these big mistakes here this Sunday, so I'll be walking through the easiest ways to avoid them. Let's go ahead and dive right in. Number one is playing a bad portfolio of contests, and this generally comes in the form of people allocating too much of their bankroll to expensive contests.

This has two negative effects on your contest portfolio. First, when you are playing a hundred dollar 50, 20 entries. Instead of entering those contests into lower dollar entries, you are condensing your bankroll your you've invested. into fewer shots on goal. You are increasing your variance because instead of having maybe 150, 200, 300 different unique lineups in play on an NFL Sunday, you may only have 10, 15, 5, 1.

Your shot of winning a big prize is obviously going to be higher when you are playing more entries here. You're going to reduce your variance. and get more different unique lineups in play. So playing at these high dollar contests ahead of the low dollar contests that allow you to play more unique entries is a bad idea.

Also draft Kings and FanDuel do not allow the most skilled players in their lobbies to enter contests under the 3 entry fee and under the 5 entry fee. With less than a 25, 000 prize pool, you can literally compete against softer competition by focusing your entries into the lower entry fee contests first.

And I see so many players that just ignore this massive edge. At the end of the day, DFS is a peer to peer game. We are trying to beat the other players that play in our contests. So if you can play in contests where your opponents are weaker, you are going to make more money. Now I have a separate video on our YouTube channel.

I've linked it in the description of this one that is timestamped to take you right to the point of the video in question, where I go through and enter the exact contests that I play on an NFL main slate, but as a very simple rule of thumb that will put you on the right track here before you enter any other contests on an NFL main slate, you should be making sure that you are playing the best.

best tournaments under the 3 entry fee and under the 5 entry fee with less than a 25, 000 total prize pool. This is going to spread out your action, get a bunch more lineups in play, as well as making sure most of your action is against the easiest competition in the lobby. Now, with that said, it is totally fine to take a couple lottery shot tickets at the Millie maker or other contests that you enjoy playing just for the sweat.

But if you're serious about growing your bankroll this NFL season, you should be making sure your contest portfolio is set up correctly. First, pulling up my contest portfolio for the NFL main slate on draft Kings on Sunday here, you can see that I have about 325 in play and this is allocated all the way to Almost entirely to those contests that are under the 3 range and under the 5 range under the 25, 000 prize pool, where I can now, I have a couple of contests that are above that here, like the 3 20 max, like the 4 20 max, but most of this action here.

Is against the softest competition in the lobby, and I'm getting 284 unique lineups in play this Sunday. Now, again, there's only 18 weeks in the NFL regular season. So I want to make sure I'm taking advantage of each and every one with as many unique shots at first each week. Now that brings me to mistake number two, which has to do with building your lineups.

And it is. over using outdated lineup rules of thumb. And this has to do a lot with people having gotten used to traditional optimizers. And frankly, it makes a lot of sense. Traditional optimizers are pretty dumb. They don't understand what makes a good GPP lineup on their own. These traditional optimizers assume that players are completely uncorrelated and they assume that players score their average projections 100 percent of the time.

Neither of those things are actually true. We want to build stacks to create positive correlations in our lineups, like combining our quarterback and wide receiver together. And we want to choose players that have high upside, that may be independent of those players average projection. We all know that sometimes a player that isn't projected as well can go off in a game and become the guy that you need in your lineups.

As a result of these things, DFS players get accustomed to having to put in a bunch of line up rules to get a traditional optimizer to do these kinds of things. But the problem is, is football is a complicated game. Different teams play different ways. Different players, even those that share the same position, have different skill sets and are utilized in different ways.

The game scripts of what might happen in any given game on the slate vary dramatically. But to save time, most players just stick to rules of thumb about how players should be combined together. With things like, if you are using two players from the same team, you must use the quarterback on that team.

Or limiting how certain players may be allocated to your flex positions. Or restricting running backs from showing up in your stacks. Or making sure that your running backs are already always correlated to your defense. These are very rough rules of thumb about how players should be combined together to build correlated lineups.

When using tools like traditional optimizers that otherwise have no sense of what those correlations look like and what players individual upside looks like when you are building with a play by play game simulator, like SaberSim, we know what upside looks like because each lineup you build on SaberSim.

is the optimal GPP lineup for a given set of simulations of the way that the slate may play out. Your lineups will naturally have the kinds of stacks and occasionally sneak in the lower projected, lower owned players in because we have a sense of what upside actually looks like on the football field.

I commonly see players on Sunday mornings building their lineups on Saber Sim, bringing over good players, Dozens and dozens of different rules that they've gotten used to using on traditional optimizers and causing a lot of problems for their lineups. Now, at a very practical level, these rules are by definition, pretty unwieldy and complicated, and it can take longer to build your lineups, or it can take longer to understand why your build isn't doing the exact thing you expected when you're trying to understand how 12 different lineup rules are all working together, but at perhaps a more detailed level.

dangerous level. These rules often cause sacrifices to be made in the quality of your lineups. Creating a bunch of different lineup rules may be sacrificing projected score or ROI in your contest sims as you continue to lay on, layer on additional rules of thumb about how SaberSim must construct your lineups.

Now, this isn't to say that we get everything perfect for every single lineup we build, and you may still have some opinions about how you want your lineups to look. I do too. If you've watched my other NFL strategy guides from this season, you'll see that one of the things that I tend to do most times I build lineups with Saber Sim is uncheck most of the stack types here and go back through and check in only a specific set of stack types that I want to play.

Typically QB. 3. Plus three or QB plus two all the way down to QB plus one with a handful of runbacks on either side. But in general, if you are building your NFL lineups with more than a couple or a handful of rules or getting into individual team specific correlations and trying to control how certain players are grouped together, you may simply just be overthinking it, making your comp, your process far more complicated and time consuming than it needs to be and potentially sacrificing a lot of projection or ROI in your lineup.

Number three has more to do with how you review your build after your lineups have been created and how you take your stands on that particular slate. And the main mistake I see people make here is taking far over leveraged positions on individual players. I almost never lock a player into my portfolio.

It would take that player already having a massive portfolio. projection and probably a very large ownership projection where I would take that large of a position here. This goes hand in hand with playing a strong contest portfolio here with 284 lineups in play. I want to make sure that I am well diversified across those entries, but I frequently see players taking enormous stands in their overall portfolios.

And don't get me wrong, doing your research and applying your takes in your portfolio is a good thing. Our models are not perfect, we put a ton of effort into making sure our projections are as accurate as possible, but you may pick up on things that we're missing with the way that we project games. And at the very least, no one's going to take the exact same stands you are, so applying your takes on a few different players or games is a very good way to differentiate you from the rest of the field.

But that said, you should be doing so in a balanced way. If you're following my recommendations on your overall contest portfolio and playing a wide variety of entries on the NFL Sunday Main Slate, I don't see any reason why you should ever be getting over, say, three 30 to 35 percent leverage on your overall top play on the slate.

And similarly, you probably should not be getting any more than that much negative leverage on whatever your favorite fades are on the slate. Now, when I'm talking about leverage, I'm defining it specifically as how we have it in the saver SIM app, which is your current exposure minus the ownership projection.

And you can see after running a default build here for the week to slate here, running my contest SIM and sorting by ROI. Bye. My maximum top leverage player right now is Jordan Mason expecting Christian McCaffrey to sit this week, and we have about a 31 percent leverage. On the flip side, one of my bigger fades at the moment here is Amon Ross St.

Brown. We are negative 11 percent on him. We are expecting a 24 percent ownership projection, and I have 12%. Now, some combination of the Saber Sim contest Sims or just using Saber score and adding in some minuniques here is going to do a pretty good job of making sure that you are diversified. But the main thing is, is to not ruin that diversification as you start to add in your particular stance on individual players.

Now let me give you an example of how this should be done correctly. Let's say I've done some research on this particular slate and I'm quite liking Jonathan Taylor here as a low owned high upside running back. Especially if Jordan loves out this week. I think this is a game that the Colt should be extremely successful pushing the ball, stopping the Packers on offense here, and I could see it.

Jonathan Taylor, just getting a ton of rushes as the clock gets bled out in this game. And I want to be well over the field on him. How much exposure should I get? I commonly see players make a big mistake here by just slamming that lock button along with maybe a couple of other players, creating this core group of players, but then you are extremely over leveraged in 284 different lineups on this particular player.

Jonathan Taylor is only going to be 5% owned, at least based on our projected ownership. At this point in time, I don't need a hundred percent exposure or even over 50% exposure to take a strong position over the field on him. How much exposure should I get to Jonathan Taylor in this particular spot?

Well, my current highest leverage play is 31%, followed by 26%, followed by 21%. So if Jonathan Taylor is say, a top three player for me, a top three target on this particular slate. I want to be about 25 percent over the field on him. So if I find Jonathan Taylor here and again, see that his current ownership projection is 5%, I can get that by simply setting a minimum exposure to about 30 percent here.

Once I click apply, Saberson will find a new set of 284 lineups. The most profitable ones in our contest SIM. but where Jonathan Taylor is showing up in at least 30 percent of him, making him my now second biggest stand on the slate. A good way to know that you're generally on the right track here is if you're playing a large number of lineups, your leverage curve should be pretty smooth.

It should incorporate the players that you like the most on the slate. You don't want to abandon your takes and research completely just to play whatever you get out of the SaberSim optimizer. But when you're looking at your leverage curve sorted highest to lowest, and lowest to highest, it should have a pretty clear, clean curve.

If you have a very bumpy curve where you have players that are 85 percent leverage and then 70 percent leverage and 60 percent leverage, and then it drops all the way down to 20 percent leverage, you're probably going overboard on a few of your top place. Balancing your exposures like this is a good way to incorporate your takes and research about the slate, but doing so in a way that is still diversified and gives you a wide variety of different shots that you may have.

for that particular slate. Now, mistake number four that I see people make is not late swapping. Now I know it is early in the season. In week one, we really had no unforeseen news come out. Teams are mostly healthy. We generally knew who was going to play here in week two. We're starting to see a little bit more of those questionable players crop up.

But on this particular slate, we have 10 early games. We're Only three afternoon games and most of the truly questionable players on the slate are playing in the early games. So we're going to probably know before the lock if those players are playing or not. With that said, late swap is still hugely important here.

We never know when there's going to be surprise news. We do have a couple questionable players on the late slate here. We've got Josh Reynolds for the Broncos, a couple Broncos receivers here, and you never know when something's going to pop up and potentially change the projections dramatically for the afternoon games.

Peace. But probably the biggest reason you want to late swap in every NFL main slate that you play, regardless of if the projections have changed at all, is because of how SaberSim's late swap contest sims work. When you run a late swap on SaberSim, we're taking each original lineup you played, rebuilding a variety of different swap options.

options around the players who are in that lineup whose games have already started. But here's the kicker. When you're in a late swap build on SaberSim and you click that run contest sim button, not only are we accounting for any changing projections for those afternoon games based on player news, inactives, injury reports, things like that, but we are also now reacting to what actually took place on the field for all of the early games and the actual lineups you're competing against in your DFS contests.

This is a massive opportunity that frankly most people just ignore completely, and I honestly don't think even SaberSim users understand how useful this is. When you build your lineups at lock, none of the actual information of how the slate is going to play out is known to you at that point in time.

We have to use projections about every single game on the slate, and also every single contest you're playing, to assess what the best possible are. But after, for example, on this particular slate, 10 of the 13 games are in the fourth quarter. We are starting to have a very good sense of what's going on on the slate.

Now, while a lot of players in your lineups are already going to be locked in and they can't be added or removed, any of the players that you had in your lineups that are playing in those afternoon games are still eligible to be swapped. We have a probably approximately 25 percent or so of our lineups on average that we can still change around, move players in or out.

And when you run those contest sims on your late swaps in SaberSim, we're taking each individual swap options for each of your original lineups and grading what the most profitable outcomes are for those lineups, the most profitable swaps for the remainder of the slate. We're automatically going to pick up on things, for example, like a lineup that is underperforming may be able to win back some additional min cash equity by swapping into a lower owned running back in the afternoon games.

Or a lineup with a significant sweat, one that has a very low owned stack that has gone completely off in the afternoon games, in the early games, can now swap to a higher projected shockier player in the afternoon games to secure that big win. We're handling all of these micro decisions on a per lineup basis.

Again, in this particular example, I might be playing 284 unique lineups. It's figuring out how to optimally swap 284 lineups by hand, or just by gut feel would be almost impossible. SaberSim lets you do it in just a few clicks. So the mistake I see here is really just people not taking advantage of this at all, assuming that they don't need to late swap unless there is a player that is out in their entries, when in practice you should really be doing this late swap process no matter what.

Even if you're not on the ultimate plan and not using contest sims here, it is still going to be best practice to run these late swap builds, because you never know what might have changed, even from minor changes when the actual inactives reports come out for the afternoon games. But if you are running contest Sims, you should absolutely be taking advantage of this every single slate to make sure you are maximizing your ROI with the information you have between the early and the afternoon games that you didn't have at lock.

Now, I know we've covered a lot of information here quickly today, so let's sum up my top four most common mistakes DFS players make, and some of the easiest ways you can fix them. The first mistake was playing a bad portfolio of contests. And the easiest way to simplify this here is to just focus on playing the contest under the 3 entry fee or under the 5 entry fee with less than a 25, 000 total price pool.

First, that's going to mean you get a lot more unique entries into play, and you're going to be playing most of your bankroll or. The first part of your bankroll into the contest against the softest competition. It is a free way to increase your ROI for your lineups and reduce your variance and everyone should be doing that.

The second mistake to avoid is building with too many lineup rules of thumb, especially if you are used to building on a traditional optimizer, remember that SaberSim is not just an optimizer. It is a play by play game simulator. So our lineups automatically have a very strong sense of what the right constructions are to get upside.

It doesn't mean you can't ever set a rule in the SaberSim app, but you should take a lighter touch there. Really just applying your rules for the deal breakers that you know, you want to see in every single lineup. I typically recommend just sticking to a handful of rules. If you are adding a bunch of different rules or especially starting to get into very specific team by team micro correlations, you're going to make your lineup building process take way more time.

be way more complicated and harder to figure out what happened when something doesn't build the way you expected, but also you might be sacrificing projected points or ROI and not even be realizing it. Mistake number three was taking over leveraged positions. You should still be researching and applying your takes about individual players and games on the slate, but you should be doing so in such a way that you still have a diversified portfolio of lineups, especially if you're doing a good job.

creating a large contest portfolio and playing a wide variety of entries. As a very general rule of thumb, you probably want your top exposed players to only have probably about a 30 percent leverage max and your most negative leverage players, your biggest fades to have a similar. maximum negative leverage.

When you apply your stands, you should be doing so by adjusting the min and max exposures to fit players into your leverage curve, where they fit in with your opinion of them on the slate. If you are slamming that lock button or exclude button over and over and over again on a bunch of different players, you are taking an extremely narrow position, increasing your variance dramatically, and basically creating this massive parlay of players that all need to hit across all of your entries just to have a profitable day.

And mistake number four is not late swapping. Obviously we want to be late swapping here to get out players out of our lineups and react to any changing news in the afternoon games, but there is a increased edge here by using our late swap contest sims. When you run late swaps on SaberSim, we identify the most profitable lineups that you can swap to, not only based on the changing information for those afternoon games, but.

But how the players in the early games are actually performing on the field and what your opponents are doing in your DFS contests to identify on a per lineup basis, the most profitable swap you can make. There are only 17 weeks left in the NFL regular season. At the time I'm recording this video, and I promise you, it's going to go faster than you think.

You can't afford to waste any of your Sundays, making a costly mistake. If you want to make this season as profitable as possible. So avoid the mistakes I mentioned in this video. If you are looking for a full breakdown of my NFL DFS process for an NFL Sunday main slate from entering my contests to building to late swapping to reviewing my lineups later, check out this video.

And in the meantime, thanks for watching. Good luck this Sunday, and I'll see you next time.

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