Beat DFS Using The SaberSystem: 5 Principles for Maximum Profitability

Welcome to the Saber System, your roadmap to DFS profit. This isn't your typical DFS strategy guide. This is a proven framework that we've developed by combining rigorous backtesting by our data scientists, hours of interviews and conversations with some of the best DFS players in the world, And a combined decades of profitable DFS experience within our team here at SaberSim.

My name is Jordan Chand. I'm SaberSim's head coach. And in this video, I'll lay out the fundamental principles of the Saber System. The five key ideas you need to be successful playing DFS. In the future videos in this series, I'll show you step by step how I apply these principles in my DFS process. From entering contests, to building lineups, to late swapping, and finally studying past slates.

But to take full advantage of the Saber System and properly unlock your DFS ceiling, you need to understand the core ideas, how they fit together, and how SaberSim gives you a head start on implementing them into your DFS process. So let's go ahead and dive in. The five fundamental principles are, 1.

Understand the odds and DFS variants. 2. Optimize your DFS portfolio. 3. Keep your lineup building process simple. 4. Stay on top of the news. And 5. Study the sharks. Let's start with understanding the odds. DFS, specifically tournaments, is a high variance game. Because so much of the prize pool in tournaments is at the very top you.

Our profits come from big, outlier, top 1 percent outcomes where we reach those payout positions. No one wins every night. In fact, even the most profitable players in the DFS lobby lose money most nights they play DFS. Our backtesting shows that the average long term profitable DFS player should expect to profit not win a tournament, just end up in the green about 6 or 7 days a month playing every single day.

And 90 percent of a profitable player's profit for an entire season is generally expected to come on one or two slates a season when you pull that 0. 1 percent outlier outcome out. It is massively important to understand that these are the odds of the game that we're playing and set expectations for what the swings look like.

The perception from DFS social media or just glancing at the top of the leaderboards each night. may give you the impression that if you lost a slate or had a down week, month, or even season, that you must be doing something wrong and that is simply not the case. Your goal with your DFS play is to survive this variance and the slow stream of frankly losing, to give yourself time to achieve the top 0.

1 percent outcomes and lock in the big profits that come with them. Understanding the odds of DFS tournaments will help you better allocate your bankroll to avoid risk of ruin. Avoid day to day mental tilt and stay in the game long enough to achieve your profit potential. But we can play an active role in fighting against this variance of DFS, which brings me to the second principle, which is optimize your DFS portfolio.

Well, it is obviously important that we play good lineups into our contests, and I'll touch on that in a sec. Not enough DFS players think about their DFS action on the whole as a portfolio, how the lineups in your portfolio fit together, how the contest you're playing on a slate fit together, how all the different slates you're playing in a day fit together, and how all the different sports and days you play DFS fit together.

The overall action that you play in DFS is essentially an investment portfolio, and there are two real levers that we can pull to affect that portfolio. In a way that reduces our variance and puts real money in our pocket sooner. The first is by raising our ROI. In other words, raising the quality of our investments.

The easiest way to do this in DFS is to find the fish or play against bad players. Another common misconception in DFS is that we need to outsmart and outplay all the best players to be successful, and that's not the case. Our profits come from getting our fair share of earnings from the weakest players in the lobby, and the more weak players we can get into our contests, the more beatable the games will be.

The easiest way to do this is by simply playing contests that the best players cannot enter. Players on both DraftKings and FanDuel that have reached a certain threshold of lifetime winnings or entry fees cannot enter contests under 3, and on DraftKings they can't enter contests under 5. With less than 25, 000 total prize pools.

Our contest sims show that there is a massive difference in potential profitability between contests under this threshold and over this threshold. So we should be trying to play as many entries into these contests as possible to increase our potential ROI. The other way to beat variants is to increase our sample size.

While top 0. 1 percent outcomes are rare, we can get to those outcomes more quickly by simply playing more. And by more, I really mean more in every way. Playing DFS more often, playing more slates and sports on the days we play, playing more contests in the slates that we're playing. Playing more lineups into each slate we're playing and also by diversifying our lineups we're playing into any given slate, making sure each shot we get to fire on that top 0.

1 percent outcome is different enough from the other shots we're taking as a part of any investment portfolio. We also of course need to make sure we're not taking on too much risk for any given slate or day of DFS. We'd recommend playing 2. 5 to 5 percent of your bankroll per main slate, and not exceeding around 10 percent of your total bankroll per day if you're playing multiple slates.

In terms of practical contest selection advice, here's what we'd recommend to mitigate variance as much as possible. First, play DFS more often. Not all of us can afford to become full time grinders of every sport in the lobby, but do what you can to get entered into more sports and more slates to help increase your sample size of DFS play in that way.

Second, play more slates on the days you're playing DFS, especially if playing two and a half to five percent of your bankroll on a main slate is more than what it would cost to fill all the GPPs below the 3 threshold I mentioned before. Spreading out your action into turbo slates, night slates, and showdown slates.

Under 3, instead of jamming additional action into the main slate above 3, helps to de correlate the money you're spending in the side slates from the main slates, helping to reduce your overall variance for a given day. Within a given slate, when entering contests, fill contests from lowest to highest entry fee.

This will again help you play against the easiest competition first. but also spread your money out into as many lineups and contests as possible. The goal here should be playing roughly an even mix of single entry in 3 max and 20 max and 150 max contests. And finally, within a given slate, you should be focusing on intentionally playing lineups that are different from one another.

By putting all of these different unique lineups in play, our goal is to give ourselves as many unique shots on goal as possible. But playing 150 lineups that are all very similar to each other does not have that impact. Avoid heavily restricting your player pool, overexposing yourself to core or top plays, and diversify using tools like MinUniques, to make your lineups different from each other.

Now, if this seems like information overload, don't worry. Again, I'll walk through step by step exactly what this looks like for me in the next videos in this series, and it's a lot simpler than you think. But the main takeaway here is that you should be thinking about your DFS play as an investment portfolio designed to extract profit from this high variance investment.

The best way to do that is to manage risk, play against the weakest opponents, and increase your sample size of shots taken as much as possible. Of course, the only way for us to realize any profit at all is to play strong lineups into our contests, which brings me to the next principle, which is, enter strong lineups, but keep your lineup building process simple.

What makes a good DFS lineup? First, the lineup needs to have high raw scoring upside. We can't just play a bunch of scrubs. But, this goes beyond a lineup that is just projected highly on average. A lineup scoring its average projection isn't going to be enough to win any tournament. We need to know what the players on the slate score when they really hit, and how often they get there.

We also need to make sure our lineups have the right correlations and stacks. A lineup needs to tell the story of the slate, and the different individual pieces of a lineup should all be working together so they all benefit when different game scripts play out. And finally, we need to balance ownership.

We're not trying to reach an arbitrary number of fantasy points in tournaments, we're trying to beat other lineups that use the same player pool we are. So fantasy points scored by lower owned players have more relative value than fantasy points scored by higher owned players. The balance of how these different lineup characteristics come together to make a good lineup vary based on sport.

In NBA, we care more about projections. In MLB, we care more about stacks and ownership. And they also vary based on the contest structures. In large field tournaments, we need to get more contrarian to beat more lineups. And in smaller field tournaments, we can play more chalk. The traditional optimizers most players have used to build DFS lineups for years have taught players that they need a very complicated system to build lineups balancing all of these factors.

These optimizers have no idea on their own what makes a good lineup, Because they assume players score their average projection 100 percent of the time, they assume players are all independent from each other and have no correlations, and they assume ownership does not matter. All of these things require complicated rules, groups, and optimizer settings to factor in.

And this is actually a good thing for us. The fact that most optimizers are pretty bad at building lineups makes it much easier for us to win. But the fact is that you don't need to, and shouldn't, build lineups. Try to apply the traditional optimizer process with a modern simulation tool like Sabersim.

Every single lineup you build on Sabersim is the best possible GPP lineup for a given way the slate can play out in our simulations, which means it's appropriately balanced for the sport and contest you're playing. We'll have the right stacks, and be capable of the raw scoring upside you need to win.

The single biggest mistake most players make with SaberSim is overcomplicating their processes with rigid player pools, custom exposures, lineup rules, and so on. You still have plenty of ways to apply your research and takes, and again I'll show you how in the next video, but know that treating SaberSim like a traditional optimizer will reduce your ROI.

At best, layering in a bunch of restrictive rules on your builds is time consuming, meaning you spend more time for a similar result. But at worst, you'll ruin the potential quality of your lineups with these rules, by either double counting certain factors, overgeneralizing a slate using rules of thumb about stacks or ownership, or by just eliminating great lineups from contention with a player group.

You should think about SaberSim as a sharp advisor that lays out the foundation for your slate. Automating about 80 percent of the work, letting you focus on the more valuable 20%. Now, what makes a good lineup for a given slate can change very quickly when the slate is about to lock, which brings me to the next principle, which is, of course, staying on top of the news.

Taking a zero by playing a player who isn't even playing is an obvious error. But staying up to date with news goes beyond that. Starting lineups, weather, and injuries can dramatically affect the way teams are projected, the upside of individual players, projected ownership, and the correlations between players in the same game.

So building lineups with the most up to date information is crucial to building strong lineups. Not only do we need to make sure we're building lineups before lock with the most up to date information as possible, And also making sure that our process is time efficient enough to react to breaking news when it comes out.

But we also need to make sure we're late swapping during the slate to account for news when it comes out after lock, to make sure we're adjusting to the most recent projections. And the final principle here is to study the sharks to review and improve your process. The foundations I've outlined up to this point will make you a more profitable player today, but you need a plan for continued improvement.

The best way to do that is to learn from what the best are doing with their process. Not just looking at the winning lineup from last night's slate and trying to reverse engineer what they were thinking, but identifying the most consistently profitable players in the lobby and studying how they're building their lineups.

From looking at stacks, to their stands and player exposures, to their diversification, while we can't go back in time and replay past slates and copy the best players, we can pick up patterns that we see in their play and apply it to our future contests. In fact, some of the cornerstones for my lineup building processes for different sports that I discuss in our sports specific strategy guides, are ideas that I picked up from seeing what the top 150 maxers by SimROI in our contest flashback tool were doing.

Now, at this point, applying all of these principles into your DFS play may seem a little intimidating, but here's the good news. SaberSim was built for this, and it gives you a massive head start. It starts with our game simulations. We go beyond average projections by simulating every game on the slate thousands of times, tracking the score, the clock, player and coach tendencies, rotations, matchups, everything that matters to projecting the game.

Your lineups are directly powered by these simulations. Each lineup you build on SaberSim is the best possible lineup for a given wave of slate to play out. And our builder naturally incorporates the important strategies for different sports and contest types. These simulations allow you to solve the DFS puzzle of projection, correlation, and ownership, circumventing the need to build out a complicated lineup building process just to get lineups that make sense.

We can build out 5, 000 lineups based on these simulations for you in 30 seconds or less, making it easy to get a wide, diversified pool for your entire portfolio of entries. Plus, these simulations update in just a few minutes anytime news breaks that shakes up the slate, and we keep you posted when you need to take action.

Our desktop and mobile push notifications will give you a heads up when you have a player that is out in your entries file, or when a player's projection drops by a large enough threshold. When you jump into action and use our late swap tool, we'll take each original lineup you played and build dozens of potential swap options for it based on the new simulations.

And our late swap contest sims will take into account how players are actually performing in your DFS contest so far to identify the most profitable swap you can make for each lineup. Our contest flashback tool lets you track how you are playing and steal strategies from the best. We simulate every contest on DraftKings 100, 000 times, using the real lineups played and the payout structure of the contest.

Essentially replaying every contest 100, 000 times, calculating the expected ROI of every lineup and every player that played it. In a game where the average outcome is losing money, It's incredibly hard to see if you're playing well or not. Contest Flashback will do exactly that, regardless of your short term results.

It will let you know if you are expected to be a profitable DFS player over the long term. SimROI will give you your expected return on investment for a given contest, while data like the SimMediumProfit and Sim99thPercentile will keep your expectations in check on what the average And the huge Knights look like contest flashback also makes it easy to identify the actual best players in DFS and show you their lineups Exposures and stacks if you've ever had a question about how to approach a specific spot on a slate There's no better way to see what the right way to attack that situation was then by looking at how the highest sim ROI players on the slate the next day handled it.

And finally, at SaberSim, we don't hang you out to dry and figure all this out yourself. We have an entire team of full time DFS coaches whose job it is to help you make more money playing DFS, myself included. We have live Office Hours streams on our YouTube channel every day, but Sunday, where you can ask any questions you have about Saversim or DFS to one of our coaches.

Office Hours is an elite resource, but if you need more one on one help, our Ultimate Subscriptions go one step further. For Ultimate Subscribers, we offer one on one Asynchronous coaching over email where you can email us a question and a coach will get back to you within 24 hours with a personalized video response.

Ultimate subscribers may also submit their builds for a review from a DFS coach. Just email us letting us know what slate you played and a coach will pull up your build on the next stream, go over your process and talk about things that you can improve and the things that you're already doing right.

The Saber System is a battle tested framework that will help you make more money playing DFS. And Saber Sam is the perfect tool and team to help give you a head start on applying it to your DFS play today. To wrap up, let's summarize the five key principles. First, understand the odds and variants of DFS.

Second, optimize your DFS portfolio. Third, keep your process simple and build strong lineups. Fourth, stay on top of the news and finally study the sharks. In the next videos in this series. I'll walk through step by step exactly how I enter contests, build lineups, late swap, and review, all while applying the saver system throughout.

You can check that out here, and in the meantime, thanks for watching and good luck.