How to Beat College Football DFS

Hello, everyone. My name is Jordan. I'm the head coach here at SaberSim. And in this video, I'll be giving a step by step walkthrough of how you can beat college football DFS this season with SaberSim. I'll be walking through each of the steps of my actual process, from entering contests to play, to building lineups, to talking about how to late swap, all while focusing on the five principles of the Saber system.

The Sabre System is a proven framework for how you can think about DFS to be a successful player in the long run. And in this video, we'll be applying those principles and walking through exactly how it works in the college football environment in 2024. The five principles of the Sabre System are first, understand the odds and variance of DFS.

Second, optimize your portfolio to minimize that variance and maximize the actual profit you're able to earn. Third, Third, keep your lineup building process simple. Don't overcomplicate the process of building good lineups and rely heavily on the simulations to put you in a good spot. Fourth, stay on top of the news, which is very important in college football, mostly in the form of making sure you're building late enough, close enough to lock to capture the latest news before you enter your lineups, but also late swap and making sure you're reacting to news as the slate is playing out.

And finally, five, study and learn from the Sharks, which we'll mostly focus on in a future video since I'm recording this here well before the main slate locks on Saturday. So let's jump right into this here and talk about the process of entering the contest we want to play, which is mostly going to be focused around understanding the odds and the variance of DFS here and optimizing a strong portfolio to counteract that variance and maximize our profit achieved here.

We need to understand that when it comes to college football DFS, just like any other DFS sport, Our big profit potential comes from big outlier 0. 1 percent finishes. So it's not like we're going to win every week. In fact, based on our backtesting. It shows that profitable players should really only expect to have a profitable day about 15 to 20 percent of the time.

That's not even a bink, that's not even a first place finish, that's just a profit. So we want to build a portfolio of contests and slates and lineups that allows us to get as many shots on goal against the weakest competition as possible. to minimize the effect that the variance has and put ourselves in a position where we can achieve our profit as quickly as possible.

So let me walk through exactly how I would go about entering contest for the week one slate here on Saturday. So I'm going to first set a bankroll. This is the amount of money I'm willing to commit to this sport for this season, starting at about 5, 000 here for the 2024 season. And my goal is going to be to put anywhere from two and a half to 5 percent of that bankroll in the week one main slate.

And also be willing to put up to anywhere from 10 percent total of my bankroll across slates that are correlated to that main slate that are also going on on Saturday. So this could be showdowns, which aren't posted yet here. This could be turbo or smaller versions of those slates. Spreading out into some of these extra slates can be a good way to de correlate some of our action that we're playing on the main slate here.

So I'm going to essentially say two and a half to 5%. Of my action onto this Saturday main slate and up to five to 10 percent of my bankroll total on games or slates that are correlated to that Saturday main slate. Now, I'm also going to probably be playing the Thursday slates, the Friday slates here, the Saturday night slate, and I would encourage you to play those as well.

One of the other ways that you can counter variants here in college football, knowing that we only have 14 or so regular season main slate weeks, is to play these other slates that show up during the week. The Thursdays, the Fridays, the Saturday night slates. It's just going to increase your sample size dramatically of how many shots on goal you get over the course of the season.

When it comes to actually entering the contest here, What I'm going to do is first focus on entering contests from lowest to highest entry fee. That's going to do two things. One, that's going to mean that I'm playing against the weakest competition first, because players that have over a certain threshold of lifetime winnings can't enter contests above, under 3 or under 5 with lower entry fees.

Under a 25, 000 prize pool. It's also going to mean that I'm getting as many lineups in play as possible. I'm making each dollar I spend on DFS here enter into as many different lineups as possible, which again is more shots on goal, more opportunities for a big win. So I'll cap that at 5 maximum here.

and look at tournaments and look at guaranteed prize pool and then sort your lowest highest entry fee. We will go ahead and get started here by entering this dime time contest. So I'll drop my first entry into this dime time here and this is just going to be a placeholder. I'm not going to sweat too much who actually goes in here.

I just want to fill a lineup quickly here and we'll get that entered. And then we can use the bulk enter tool to fill out the rest of our portfolio here. So again, we're hoping to end up somewhere with a 5, 000 bankroll between 125 and 250 on this slate. So let's keep looking through this here. We'll put another 19 into the dime time.

I'm going to focus mostly on tournaments, not satellites, cash games, or the, the league type formats here. I want to just focus on the GPPs where the softest competition is. So we'll enter the quarter jukebox next. I'm going to enter the minimax here and then keep moving with the first down. So you can see I've already got 209 unique lineups that I'm going to be playing on this slate here for just a little over a hundred dollars.

So we're getting a ton of unique lineups, a ton of shots at a top finish in here for relatively cheaply. We'll get our daily dollar in as well. And then we get to, uh, another contest here that is a bit of an interesting one. This is a 150 max 2 contest here. I think you could certainly justify entering this, some lineups, into this contest here.

I don't want to max it. That would be 300 additional dollars. That would put me at 400. That's a little bit too much exposure to this particular slate for me. Instead, what I'm going to do though is I'm going to look to see if there's some other contests further down the list here that I can max that are just a better spot for that money to go.

So I can at least play this contest here. And then we start to get to other contests that the sharp players are going to be able to enter. This is a 4 contest that is 30, 000 prize pool. So this, anyone can play this contest here. If this was a 20, 000 prize pool, I'd be more inclined to play it. But given that this is a 30, 000 prize pool, we're going to have sharps playing this contest here.

And then we're at the 5 range. So what I'm going to do here is I think maybe dump. 50 or so entries into this contest, which is going to get me pretty close to where I wanted to be for this slate. I'll have 263 total unique lineups, 211. I wanted to be between 125 and 250. This is feeling pretty good. This looks like a strong portfolio here of lineups for this slate.

Now again, it seems like DraftKings is still waiting a bit to load the rest of the contest that they're probably going to have for this Saturday week one here. We don't see any showdowns up yet but I would certainly be interested in playing any potential showdown contests here that they have for week one here.

I would also probably be pretty interested in playing any turbo slates made or an afternoon slate made up of some of the same games on the main slate just as a way to get a little bit of extra action down but in a way that's decorrelated against the main slate action. I'm also not going to walk through it totally on this video but plan on playing the Thursday night slate.

The probably the Thursday night slate as a part of that, the Friday slate and the Saturday night slate, again, just as ways to get additional action down here in a way that they're just extra slates that you can play rather than just exclusively focusing on the main slates, you just get additional opportunities to To win, to be successful playing.

So let's bounce over to the app here and actually start building some lineups for this slate. Now I will mention I'm using a new version of the app here. Depending on when you watch this video, this may be the version of the app that is on our production site. When you go to log in, this may be exactly what you see, which is great.

If you're watching this short after this video comes out, it's more than likely that this version of the app is at beta. sabersim. com. So if you want to use this version of the app to build your college football lineups or any other lineups on Sabersim, you can access it at beta. sabersim. com. Now, when it comes to actually building your lineups here, The two principles that are going to come into play is obviously keep your lineup building process simple, but also staying on top of the news, and those two things do really go hand in hand here.

There is quite a bit of news in college football. A lot of times it ends up coming from a last second tweet from a beat reporter. There aren't as consistent injury reports or just reporting in general about whether players are practicing or healthy or if they're expected to suit up or start. So a lot of times this news breaks pretty late once players actually get on the field to warm up.

And it can shift up the slate dramatically here. So for that reason, one, you want to have a process for building lineups that is lean and simple and can be repeated quickly. If your process takes an hour to run all the way through to do any necessary research, you're often going to be in a situation where you have to redo a lot of that when some final projection updates and sim updates happen right before lock and require you to start over.

Second, because college football is so diverse in terms of the different play styles of teams and the different strategies and sometimes even just the spread and team totals, the types of game scripts that you get are so wide, the rules of thumb that even can be somewhat useful in NFL DFS really don't apply here because we can't count on correlations being consistent enough team to team and game to game to get away with that.

So for those two reasons, I recommend really keeping your process lean. You'll see just how lean I keep it here in just a second. making sure that you're capturing the latest news, letting the sims handle a lot of the busy work for you, and mostly applying any takes that you have in the form of making exposure adjustments post build.

So all I'm going to do here, first things first, is go ahead and just get my entries file uploaded here. So we'll go ahead here and click upload entries, download the template file from Draftkings, and go ahead and get that uploaded here. These are two old contest sims here, so we can just ignore these.

One of the cool new features of this update here now is when you upload an entries file, we automatically create the appropriate contest sims for each contest you've uploaded here. So you can see all of the contests we just entered here. These are the contest sim settings for each of those contests.

You can ignore the two contest sims that are here at the bottom. Those are ones that I was playing around with here before I went live. We won't actually end up using them here, but we automatically created all the contest sims for the different contests that we're playing. So we can go ahead and create a new build and get our build process started here.

I'm not going to do anything with rules or projections or exposures or anything like that before the build. The main thing that is if I was actually building before lock here, I would want to make sure that it was probably no earlier than about 9. 30 my time here with the slate locking at 10 o'clock. I want to make sure that I have the most up to date information.

My process is not going to take too long to do, and I want to make sure I'm capturing the latest sims. I would also be taking a look here at the SaberSim Discord here, the College Football Lineup Alerts channel, as well as just the College Football channel. In general here, to see if there's any news, anything going on, Eric and the other people on our team that are in charge of the models do a pretty good job of keeping everybody up to date on what's going on, why new sims are running, things like that.

But by around 9. even ish, I would want to make sure I'm building my lineups. We'll make two changes here to adjust to the DraftKings requirements here and then go ahead and kick off a build. And while this is building, I want to reinforce what's actually going on behind the scenes here because it's really what allows us to keep our lineup building process simple.

Instead of optimizing by average projections and following any lineup rules or anything like that that you've set, we're actually simulating out this 12 game slate 5, 000 times. And each lineup you end up getting in your pool, your portfolio here, is the best possible GPP lineup for a given way that the slate can play out.

So it's going to take into account things like what is the actual upside condition for different players? What do players need to score to end up in the winning lineup for a given slate? How correlated are different players? When do you want to stack potentially quarterbacks that have a lot of rushing potential with their pass catchers?

Which running backs make sense to be stacked with quarterbacks? All of this naturally ends up coming through in the lineups that you're building here because they're built on simulations. They're not just built on the projections. If a running back has a projection of 13 DraftKings points, but is often very involved in the passing game, the simulations understand that and are more willing to use that running back in a stack with the quarterback.

On the flip side, if there's a running back that's projected for 13 points that never catches any passes, that player's not as likely to be stacked with the quarterback because the sims get that. And all of the other complicated relationships that each player on the field has with one another are captured in the sims here.

So we're going to get a very viable, a very functional pool of 5, 000 lineups that we can use. Okay, now that our build is complete, the next step we want to do here is to run our contest sims, which is going to be Take each of our lineups in our pool and see how that lineup would grade out if it were actually played into all of the different contests that we've entered on this slate.

The goal here, and I'll show you how this looks and works out here in just a sec, is we want to make sure that we're taking the best lineups from our portfolio. And playing them into the best possible contest we can from our contest portfolio. We want to make sure that the lineups that score particularly well in single entry contests end up in our single entry contests.

And some of the lineups that are very good fits for our 150 max large field tournaments end up into our 150 max large field tournaments. So the contest sim is checking for all seven of the contests that we're playing here, which lineups fare the best, which lineups are expected to have the most profitability in each of our contests here.

Okay, now that our contest sims are complete, you'll see all of the ROIs start to slowly show up for all the different contests that we're playing here. One thing that I like to do here is change the sorting method to the ROI of save to. And really what this is going to do is this is basically going to show us our lineups sorted by their average ROI across all of our different contests.

So you'll get a sense of what your contest portfolio looks like, your lineup portfolio looks like overall across your build. Now it is at this point in the process where you do have a little bit of an opportunity to leave some of your own takes and opinions on the slate. The way I would recommend going about doing this is mostly looking at your exposure and your leverage columns here.

and making adjustments to min and max exposure to make your favorite plays your highest leverage plays and make your favorite fades your lowest leverage plays. For example, let's say there's a particular player that you really like on this slate. Well, Sabersim is saying it makes the most sense to be about 40 percent overexposed to your top player on the slate in the form of leverage, right?

We're seeing our top leverage player is Alan Bowman at 41. 9 percent leverage. If you wanted a to be your highest overall stand on the slate. Just set the min exposure such that their leverage becomes 40 percent or so. That's the way that I would recommend thinking about your stands. You don't need to have an opinion on every single game, every single team, every single player.

But if you do want a little bit more or less exposure here, just think about working within the bands that you're naturally getting to with the leverage column already. You don't want to necessarily overuse the lock or exclude buttons when you don't need to, but you can use the leverage column as a guide post there.

This is also the opportunity where you can use minuniques to further diversify your builds. As of our most recent update to contest sims, your contest sims themselves now actually do a good job of naturally diversifying your portfolio. So I've been using minuniques quite a bit less here in my overall play.

But if you are a little bit more risk averse, or maybe if you're playing a little bit on the higher side of your bankroll threshold and you want to get additionally diversified, you can use minuniques to make sure that the lineups that are selected for your contest here are a little bit more additionally diversified beyond just what the contest sim is naturally going to pick up on.

It's worth noting that if you're not on the SaberSim Ultimate plan and you're building either on Starter or the SaberSim Pro plans, you'll probably want to use a little bit of MinUniques since SaberScore on its own isn't going to have any naturally diversifying elements baked in there. The best way to use MinUniques here is going to be to just slowly tick this up and see the impact that this has on the aggregate metric average projection here.

And our plan is to add some other aggregate metrics here to give you a little bit more of a full view Of the impact that you're having as you're diversifying your portfolio. But I would typically just look for where there's a big drop off here or something like this that says you can't reach enough lineups here, and then going one or two less than that.

So landing it, maybe three min uniques or something like that for this portfolio would work totally fine. Now for me personally, I'm not going to be a very opinionated player here in terms of individual player takes, and I'm probably not planning on using min uniques at least to start the season, just to see how, you know, The new SaberSim ROI calculates that diversification and naturally diversifies my portfolio.

So I'm actually probably ready to enter these lineups here, and if the slate were locking right now, I'd be totally happy to do that. So let me show you how to do that here, which has changed a little bit on this version. It's gotten a lot easier to get the right lineups into the right contests. So we can see that I have 264 lineups here, and I'm going to be saving to all seven contests that I'm playing here.

I want to go in here and I want to change this to use the multi fill selection. And then I'm going to sort these contests here by the highest to lowest entry fee. So what this is going to do here with this method here is once I click save, it's going to put the best possible lineup sorted by the ROI of the contest sims for that lineup here.

and then move on to the next contest. Let me explain it a little bit more clear here. The first contest that's going to be filled here, and this is why I sort by highest to lowest entry fee, is this 3. 03 max here. This contest is going to get the best three lineups from my pool sorted by ROI from the contest sim for this contest.

Then I'm going to get the next best 50 lineups sorted by the ROI for this contest sim. excluding any of the three lineups that have already been used into this contest. So you're getting to play lineups that are unique. You're not going to dupe yourself across any of your different contests following this system here, and you're always playing the best possible lineup that hasn't been chosen for another contest yet here, sorted by the ROI for that contest sim.

So we'll go ahead here and just click save, which is going to Get all of my, it takes a second to run here just because it's going through the process of sorting and filtering and removing lineups from your pool here as you're going. But now I've saved all 264 lineups from my build and I can go ahead and download my entries file which is moved up here into the upper left.

And get this uploaded into DraftKings. So that is the process of building your lineups before lock. That is exactly what it will look like here for me on this Saturday. Again, the main thing to keep in mind there is making sure that you are accounting for the most recent news by making sure that build takes place.

Say 30, 20, 20 to 30 minutes before lock and being prepared to potentially rebuild if there is a final SIM or some late news that breaks here for one of these 10 o'clock games at the very last second. But of course there are games on this slate that take place later. We have a noon game and then we have a bunch of 1.

30 games here as well. So I'm going to be making sure that I'm making myself available at around 11. 40 here and again like 1. 10 or so and coming back to do a late swap. There is all kinds of news that's going to break in college football. Sometimes there's going to be a big flashy, this player that was expected to play is just straight up not playing.

Other times there's going to be usage tweaks as we just get news and information about how players are going to be utilized on the field. My general rule of thumb when it comes to late swapping in college football DFS here is that if a sim has run and you can again check that here in the college football lineup alerts channel.

If a sim has run since you last built, you should just be doing a late swap. Because a lot of times there's enough value in those final sims of the way that usage adjusts, things like that, that even if you don't see news about a player having gotten ruled out, you should be doing a late swap. So let's assume that it was about 1140 here, and I'm coming back to get prepared for this SDSU and Oklahoma State.

The very first thing I would check on here is the quick swap icon. If this button is red, it means there's a player that is in my entries file in one of these contests here, that has since been ruled out. The very first thing I need to do is just get that player out. So I would go ahead here, Replace all out players with the best available player.

Click apply, download the entries and get this uploaded to DraftKings quickly, just to make sure I'm not taking a zero in any lineup. Now, after that is complete, then I'm going to go ahead here and late swap. And this process is very similar to how it looks when you're building before lock. So I'll come in here.

I'll click the late swap button, late swap seven contests. And this is going to take you back to a, another build here. Virtually looks identical to how it does before lock. This time, it's just going to have in theory, the games that have already started actually locked in your window here. So if it was 1140, you would see that these games were locked and all the players for those games would be great.

What we'll do here now is again, make the two changes to player projections and we will build out our swaps. And this is going to basically make as many different swaps as we can here for each lineup that was in our pool. Okay. It actually looks like it's going to make a hundred different swaps here for each original lineup we played.

So we played 264 unique lineups. We're getting a hundred swaps per lineup back. So we'll get a hundred new versions and then we can rerun those through the contest sim to see which ones are the best ones to play now at this point in the slate based on the new updated projections. Okay, once all of your swaps are finished there, the next step here is to run the contest sim again.

So this is going to take each of the swaps here and now simulate, which are the, how the lineups are performing now in with the new updated projections in the contest. Sim here, this is a little bit different at this point than it theoretically works pre build because now. Each lineup is already played into a given contest.

So really we just want to find the best possible swap option for each original lineup we played rather than trying to identify what the best contest is for each lineup. But either way, we still want to find that best swap here. So we'll go ahead and run those contest Sims and give those a second to finish up.

Okay. Once the contest Sims are complete again, this time we just want to, uh, change this to the ROI, the save to ROI here. Okay. Which is going to find the best possible lineup swap for each original that we played. And then, once again, just click save here. Which will save 264. It'll take the best swap option for each original lineup that we played.

We can take this here now and upload that over into DraftKings. And now we've captured any information that has changed since lock and this 12 o'clock game starting. And I would want to do the exact same thing here at around 110, 115 before the final game's on the slate lock. Now, one thing to note here is at the time I'm recording this video, the late swap contest, Sam's for college football.

Do not have the live sims built into them. They also don't have the live field lineups That is something we're hoping to bring later this season, but it's not implemented here at least at the time I'm recording this video for week one So what that means is that when you run your late swap and you run your contest sims you are accounting for any changing news For the upcoming games if a player has been ruled out you're accounting for the changing projections related to that player not playing But you are not accounting for what has happened in the games that are already in progress or what your actual opponent's fields, what your opponent's lineups look like in the contest you're playing.

We're still using the original assumptions. of how the games are going to go for the games in progress and the original sets of field lineups at this time. Now that is essentially the process here of playing lineups and keeping them up to date throughout the slate. The last component of being a successful college football DFS player this season is to review your work and also to study the Sharks play.

Now, I'm probably going to come back with a more fleshed out video later this season here talking about this in more detail because we're at the very start of the season here. I didn't play the week zero slate, so I don't really have anything to review of my own builds just yet. We'll probably do that as the season goes along.

We've got a little bit more to work with there. But I wanted to show you what this process should look like, and generally what you should be looking at each time you play college football at the FS, and also what other sharp players are doing. So, we've got the week zero slate pulled up here. What I would recommend doing, is coming back in here and looking at contests that you actually played and checking to see how you graded out here amongst other players.

So we'll pull this up here. And specifically what I like to look at here is the sim ROI amongst other players that maxed the contest. And again, this isn't a contest that I played. But if I had played it, I would want to see that I had a positive sim ROI here, an expectation of profit, even if I lost money on this slate.

This is really one of the more valuable parts of having contest flashback, because our average outcomes when we play DFS most of the time is going to be losing money. It's hard over the course of even a few slates or a week or a month of play to know if you're on the right track if you have been losing.

SimROI is going to show you if the slate played out a hundred thousand times what would be your expected ROI, what would be your expected profit here and let you know if in general you're on the right track or maybe you need to work on some things or resolve some things there. You're not necessarily going to have A positive SIM ROI every single time you play.

I think you want to have SIM ROI that is above zero, probably most of the time, maybe about 70 to 80 percent of the slates that you play, but it's a really good benchmark here to look at and make sure that you're on the right track. The other thing that you can do is look at the large field flagship GPPs and see how sharp players, especially sharp maxers of that contest are approaching their lineups and use it as a way to learn and improve your particular play.

The main things that I like to look at here. Is I'll take a flagship GPP, and again, this is a little bit of a smaller one since this was such a small slate here. This was actually a 50 max. So we'll look at players that were a 50 max here on this particular slate. And then look at the highest sim ROI players.

The main things that I like to look at when studying the lineups of these players here, is checking to see how diversified they were, what types of stacks they particularly used, and if they reacted to any late information here or any kind of late, important late swap considerations that took place throughout the slate.

Most of the time, the top players, the players that you will see that have very high SIM ROIs that are 150 maxing the flagship tournament are not reinventing the wheel or doing anything that is far and away impossible for somebody else to mimic. They're really just extremely strong at the fundamentals.

They play a very good line of constructions. Their stacks look very good. They're often going to be very well diversified and they're going to take into account the latest news and making sure that they're accounting for late swaps. So, I would go through and look at some of the top players here, and see what their constructions look like, how they compare to yours, look at their exposures, both from the standpoint of how diversified were they, but also, was there a player that ended up becoming a much better value because of a late swap opportunity that you didn't late swap for?

And then finally, if there were any particular stands that you took on the sleet, are there other sharp 150 maxers that you can see that followed the same stand, that they maybe potentially take the opposite direction? You can use that as a way to check your work and see if your stands were on the right track as well.

Now, if you're finding that your sim ROI is coming back negative in a lot of the sleets that you're playing, or you're just looking for some extra help, or potentially maybe looking at some of these sharp players and can't quite figure out what they're doing differently than you are, You can always register for a SaberSim build review.

If you're on the SaberSim Ultimate plan, you can email us support at sabersim. com and ask for us to review your build. Just email us from the account associated with your SaberSim account. Let us know what call it football slate you played. And one of our coaches will review the build on our next build review live stream, talk through anything that we see that could be improved or any leaks or mistakes that are showing up in your build.

If you're not on the SaberSim Ultimate plan, you can always tune into our public office hours live streams. Those take place every Monday through Saturday on our YouTube channel. You can ask one of our coaches any questions you have about college football DFS strategy, anything that you've seen or had questions on the last time you played and weren't sure how to approach a situation or just how to get the most out of certain features, things like that.

But that's it, that is a full summary, a full walkthrough of how I will be building my lineups and approaching my college football DFS play this season. I'm extremely excited for this year, and I think it's going to be a really profitable one for everyone here at the SaberSim team. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us at support at SaberSim.

com. And we do, of course, have a free five day trial on our site at SaberSim. com if you want to come check us out for five days this college football season. In the meantime, thank you for watching and good luck.

‍