How to Beat League of Legends DFS

The League of Legends summer split is in full swing and Sabersim members have been cashing in on League of Legends DFS this year. League DFS is one of the more fun and unique DFS sweats out there with some interesting lineup construction considerations and a perfect sport to get the most out of game and contest simulations.

My name is Jordan Chand, I'm the head coach here at Sabersim, and in this video, I'll give you everything you need to know to beat League DFS, right down to an example build of how I'd approach building for the five game slate tonight. Let's talk about general strategy first, just to set the stage here.

There's a few key elements that drive most of the strategy with building good League of Legends DFS lineups. First, this is a very high correlation sport. In fact, the correlations you'll see in the SaberSim app for League are some of the highest that we get out of a sim in any sport. And there's two reasons why.

First, simultaneous scoring happens frequently here. In large teamfights where all ten of the players in the game are battling it out, each kill a player gets is likely leading to an assist from multiple players on the same team, and teams taking objectives like towers, dragons, and barons often do it as a group, facilitating these big teamfights.

In these situations, almost every player on a given team might be racking up a ton of fantasy points all at the same time. But more importantly, There is a huge amount of team wide correlation that comes from the team just winning or losing in their match. If you're unfamiliar with League of Legends, in the game, players literally get stronger as they're making plays.

Imagine if Patrick Mahomes added 5 percent to his completion percentage every single time he completed a pass. Teams that win their match are significantly more likely to hit their high upside outcomes as a group. Because of this snowball effect. So this is a sport like MLB or NHL where we want to be focused on making big, highly correlated stacks in our lineups.

And second, duplication matters. We always want to avoid being duplicated in DFS because each time someone plays the same lineup as us, we have to share our winnings with that player when we win. With only 6 DFS players usable per League of Legends team that's playing, and a small number of teams on each slate, the number of lineup combinations are often limited.

This is compounded by the fact that we only play 6 players in a lineup, meaning we just have less players to differentiate other players by, And by the fact that some of the games on most slates will have teams so heavily favored that it's very hard to make profitable lineups containing players from the underdog team, which nearly eliminates a team from the usable player pool entirely.

Well, there is a spectrum here on five game slates. Like I'm about to demo here, you are less likely to be duplicated and on two game slates, you are far more likely to be duplicated. Duplication is something that I'm accounting for every time I build lineups. And finally, League of Legends DFS is very much a binary sport.

Players have binary ranges of outcomes, a set of outcomes where they win, and a set of outcomes where they lose, similar to MMA or tennis or even golf with a cut. Because upside is so correlated to a team winning the match, many of your lineup construction considerations are instead centered more around what you're teams you are stacking rather than the individual players you are picking.

There is some nuance around captain selection and using one offs to differentiate your lineup. That'll touch on more in a bit here, but the key decision points are often more about teams than individual players. Now last thing before we actually start building some lineups, because this is a smaller, more niche DFS sport, our contest selection options are going to be more limited.

The DFS profit plan, our contest selection and bankroll management system won't work as well for league DFS because of the limited contest selection options. So we're going to have to jump in with the sharks above the 3 entry fees, most slates, just to get enough action down. And we're not going to be able to safely get as many unique lineups in play just because there are fewer contest options out there to play.

I'd recommend allocating less of your bankroll here than you might following the profit plan for MLB. I typically stick to around 2 percent of my bankroll when I'm playing League DFS, and I do put most of my bullets into the 5 teamkill and the flagship GPP. Reducing your stake you're playing on any given slate will help make up for the increased variance that you're getting by playing fewer lineups and against tougher competition.

And don't worry, There are still plenty of bad lineups played into these contests each night to make League DFS still a profitable part of your overall DFS portfolio. So without much further ado, let's jump into the SaberSim app and start building some lineups here. Now, as I mentioned at the start of the video, League DFS is a perfect sport for Sims because of this high correlation and these binary outcomes for players and teams.

Average projections in traditional optimizers, as well as players building by hand, are woefully unequipped to deal with these types of sports. Optimizers assume players are uncorrelated and independent, and they also assume players score their averages 100 percent of the time. When you're building with a sim, you're able to appropriately account for the real upside of the underdog teams that are probably projected poorly on average, And you'll automatically get the right types of stacks and lineup constructions you want.

Each lineup you build on SaberSim is the best possible GBP lineup for a given simulation in the way that the games could play out. So I'm not going to make a lot of changes to disrupt that early in the process. When it comes to my build, I'll just make the two changes to player projections to abide by DraftKings rules here.

Most of the time I'll be playing around 10 or so lineups for a given slate. So I'll adjust the number of lineups to 10. The only other change that I do tend to make is I will bump up SIM diversity slightly. I like to see it at least nine, mostly because again, duplication matters here. I want to have a very diverse pool, and I like knowing that each of my lineups here is very, very close to an individual single sim optimal of how the entire slate could play out.

So a minor tweak there, but I tend to bump up sim diversity a small bit when it comes to League of Legends here. After that, we're ready to hit build and start building some lineups. Again, what's going on behind the scenes here is we're simulating this slate out play by play 5, 000 times. And each lineup we get in our pool here will be the optimal for an individual sim of the way that this entire slate could play out.

One thing to note when it comes to building on Saber Sim for League of Legends is if you're using the pro plan or the ultimate plan and building a 5, 000 lineup pool, you may not always get 5, 000 lineups and on some slates you actually may end up getting far less than that. Somewhere between 1000 to 1500 lineups that typically is happening when a bunch of our Sims are delivering the same optimal lineup.

It's not a big concern of mine. I'm typically very easily able to still get the number of profitable lineups I want to play for my entries file, but just be aware of that, that you probably should expect to see a little bit of a smaller pool than you're used to. more than likely you won't be seeing the full 5000 lineup pool.

Once your lineups are built, they'll automatically be sorted by saberscore, a custom calculation backtested using our contest sims to identify strong lineups from your pool. Saberscore is a good start, but if you're taking League DFS seriously and want to quickly identify Saberscore. best lineups for your pool, I'd strongly recommend the SaberSim Ultimate Plan to take advantage of the contest sims.

If you just want to get your feet wet, there are still sub 3 contests in the lobby that will have weaker competition and just smaller contests overall, where SaberScore will get the job done. But if you're planning on diving in and maximizing your profit in these tougher contests like the 5 and the flagship GPP, I would say Ultimate and Contest Sims are key here.

Because duplication is such an important factor, we really need to go beyond just the ownership projections that SaberScore takes into account to assess how likely a lineup is to be duplicated, and Contest Sims do exactly that. By simulating each lineup we've built here in the pool against the expected field we expect your opponents to play, you more directly quantify the impact of duplication on each lineup's expected value.

If you're not on Ultimate, you can sign up for a free 5 day trial on our site at sabersim. com or upgrade your current account in the app using the settings menu. Now, let me go ahead and get my contest sim configured here. For the purposes of this, I'm going to assume we're building for the flagship GPP, the 5k to first.

So I'll head over the contest tab and then add a contest sim. You'll see we're pulling in the contest size and the payout structure, as well as an expected field lineup that we think the other players are going to use in their lineups. We'll save that, bounce back over to the build, and get our contest sim started.

So in this case, what's happening here is we're taking each lineup we've prepared in our pool and assuming we played it into the flagship GPP based on what we expect that contest to look like the contest is then played out a hundred thousand times and we'll be able to calculate an ROI for each lineup here.

So the contest SIM is complete. We're seeing our contest SIM metric show up here. I recommend using the risk adjusted return on investment as your scoring method here, which will take into account both upside and downside of your lineups. to give you the overall best lineups you can play. And we're seeing right away, this dupes metric under each lineup.

All of these lineups at the top here are expected to be duped zero times. We see one lineup here that is expected to be duped one time, but immediately we're getting a more direct calculation of the impact on dupes for our lineup selection overall. The only other thing I like to do at this step is to filter out lineups that are expected to be unprofitable.

So I had a filter here. Okay. And add in a filter that says only show me lineups where the risk adjusted return on investment is greater than zero. That will just filter out a chunk of lineups from our pool so we don't accidentally end up playing one of those lineups without realizing it as we start to make adjustments.

The next step after getting your build to this point is to diversify our lineups, and this is gonna make sure that the lineups we're playing are different from each other, and each of our lineups has a unique path to first place. A common misconception I've seen in DFS players is that diversification matters more when you're playing a lot of lineups, and in fact, I think the opposite is true.

Knowing that we're playing quite a few less lineups in league DFS compared to something like MLB or NFL, I might be playing 10 lineups into this slate and be playing 200 or 300 on a typical baseball slate, means that we should be even more interested in making these 10 lineups different from each other.

Because the fact that we're playing fewer lineups means we can more easily make them different. without sacrificing ROI. So I still recommend the one less than the max min uniques rule here. If you haven't seen it before, I'll walk through it. And that's going to give you a nice balance of being diversified while still playing at good lineups from your pool.

So the way this works is I like to stress test the min uniques setting here to see how high it can go where I'm still getting the 10 lineups I need. So we'll try cranking this all the way up to something like five to start. And you see, we're still getting 10 lineups back. If we go to six. That's where I expect it to fail.

Now we're only getting 8 lineups back, so 5 is our maximum. I would probably settle in at 4 minuniques. Means each lineup in our pool here is 4 players different from each other, but our worst lineup that we're playing is still only lineup 41 out of 541 profitable options here. So we're playing very diverse lineups.

We have 10 different lineups that all have a very unique path to first. We're covering a wider range of outcomes here, and we're still playing profitable lineups from our pool. Now at this point in the lineup building process, you would probably be in a great spot if you just took these 10 lineups and entered them.

Taking advantage of the game simulations and the contest sims that have identified a very strong portfolio But there are a few things I like to review in my builds at this point The main things I'm looking at overall here are making sure I'm playing high upside lineups with highly correlated sims stacks while doing something a bit different in each lineup to differentiate myself from the field.

So the first thing I look at at this step is my captain exposures. We want to make sure we're using a player in this 1. 5x multiplier spot that has the potential to be the highest score on the slate. And the sims will put you in a good spot here, but I typically like to do a spot check on the actual player positions that I'm using in the captain spot.

Most teams in game will funnel kills, which is the highest upside stat you can rack up, towards their ADC or their mid laner, and these are the two positions in the game that benefit the most from racking up kills, so they generally deliver high fantasy point totals. I want to see mostly ADCs and mids showing up in my captain spot, but I specifically always glance over here to make sure I'm not playing any support or team positions in the captain.

The support and team positions are some of the lowest upside positions, and while it is possible for them to end up as the top scorer, it's far less likely than a mid or an ADC in a game script where that team is winning the match. Plus, a lot of DFS players will end up creating lineups with a support or team captain as a way to jam in two expensive favorites as their stacks.

They are some of the lower salary positions on the board. And these types of lineup constructions pair both a less likely outcome with a more likely to be duplicated lineup construction. In other words, if someone is playing a support and captain, I think all of the lineups. Using that support are very likely to be similar because you're leaving so much salary on the table It's very likely you're jamming in very expensive plays on the other side This is overall very similar to playing low salary players very low salary players at captain in something like nfl showdown which is something I typically tend to remove completely when they are showing up.

As for the other positions, the jungler and the top laners, I handle it case by case. One consideration here is to note whether or not the matches on that particular slate are best of three games or best of one game. LCS and LEC, which are the US and the European leagues, are generally going to be best of one, and LPL and LCK, which are the Chinese and Korean leagues, are generally going to be best of three, but you can also quickly tell just by looking at the player projections.

Most best of ones will have players projected between like 20 or 40 fantasy points, and best of threes are much higher. So you can see here, this is an LCK LPL slate, and it is clearly a best of three. These are player projections that are for a three game series, or up to three games. In these three game series, these best of three formats, it becomes even more likely that a mid or an ADC on the winning team is the optimal captain because the three game matches, reduce the variance.

A top or a jungler can get there a little more reliably in a single game match, but in a three game series, or even just two games, if it goes 2 0, it becomes far more likely that the teams carries at ADC or mid are the optimal captains. Finally, there are some differences in play style as well from team to team.

Certain teams may have a jungler or a top laner that tends to play more aggressively, more in a high upside style, or is just really So I'm willing to play tops or jungle captains more in those spots, but you don't really need to be an expert on the pro scene to identify them. I typically will just look and see how those players are projected relative to the field.

And if they're showing up with a very high projection, I'm simply more willing to use them at the captain spot. So overall to sum up. I almost always remove, actually, I always remove support and team captains for every slate I'm playing and generally stick to the mid and ADC captains for the best of three formats.

So looking at this here, we do have one jungler that is showing up here as one of our captains. If I sort by projection, I see that he's actually the fourth overall highest projected player on the slate. So I'm probably going to let him stay in there. This is clearly a guy that has the upside in the.

Sims where this team is winning their match to put up quite a bit of points He actually matches up almost one for one with the same team's mid laner. So this is a high upside player at jungler I'm gonna go ahead and keep them in my pool Now, the second thing I like to look at is my stack types. At the very least, I want to see at least a 4 2 in every single lineup.

I want to maximize my correlation with one big team bet, and then grab some extra correlation in the other pieces of my lineups as well. So I will always eliminate any lineups that don't feature at least a 4 2 if they're popping up in my build. You see, just using the game simulations alone, I'm We're basically getting a pool of almost entirely four threes and four twos anyway, so I'm good with that.

I am not all in on the four three stacks. I know some players do like to just force for three into every single one of their lineups. And while this does maximize the correlation effect, adding the extra one offs you get in the four threes. Four two stacks makes it much less likely to be duplicated in those lineups.

The combinations of the ways that you can build four three stacks with any two given teams are way fewer than the four two stack combinations you can make. So I don't particularly force either of these two stacks and will generally trust the sims on how it ends up shaking out. But I want to make sure my portfolio is entirely 4 3 and 4 2 stacks.

And finally, because I'm playing fewer lineups in League DFS than I'd play in baseball for example, or NFL, I will actually spend some time reviewing each lineup that I'm going to play to make sure I'm happy with the construction. Mostly what I'm looking for is making sure that I'm doing one kind of weird thing with each lineup that will help further reduce the probability that I'm duplicated.

So this might be one of a lineup that leaves at least a thousand salary on the table. a lineup that is stacking at least one underdog, a lineup that features a non mid or ADC at the captain spot, or a lineup that uses a one off player. These are all just kind of quick things that I glance through to make sure that lineup does something unique.

So I'll take a quick look at each lineup I'm playing and make sure it fits one of these conditions. And if it doesn't, I will just hit the trash icon here to remove it from my pool. And SaberSim will filter in the next best lineup and I'll keep moving in down the list. Now, because these contests are smaller and we've already mitigated dupes to some extent with the contest sim, we don't need to get crazy here, but I just like to see that each lineup in my portfolio meets the condition that I think makes it a little bit less likely to be duplicated.

So if we just went down the list here, you can kind of quickly get a pretty clear idea of what's going on. First of all, if it's a 4 2 stack, I'm generally going to be pretty happy to play it, just because, again, it's unlikely that somebody pairs the exact same one off as I did with the rest of my lineups.

Uh, this is a lineup construction here that the SaberSim contest sims seem to like quite a bit, and I think it's an interesting approach, especially on the larger slates. where you stack two teams in a four, two type stack, and then your one off is actually the team position, especially, um, this can be useful on four or five game slates because five teams need to win here.

We're basically making the, we're almost making a three team parlay here of assuming TES, OMG, and BLG all win. And at that point, it's perfectly fine to use that team as the one off there, because again, five teams are going to win. It's, it's very likely that this lineup. could be optimal where that team stack, um, where that team one off is, is what you needed there, and maybe is the highest scoring team position.

That's one thing that I see people eliminate from their pool with rules sometimes, forcing the team to be a part of their stack or forcing it to be a part of their four stack, and I think that's unnecessary. And you end up reducing your ability to get to these pretty unique constructions here. So I'm good with that lineup.

As we continue to go down the list here, these are also 4 2 stacks. So I'm going to kind of breeze through them again, assuming that that one off is just enough to make me less likely to be duplicated. And we'll get down to a third stack. In this case, this lineup's already leaving a bunch of salary on the table.

It's stacking an underdog in AL who is a plus 193 to win their game. And then pairing it with a smaller stack of Fox, who is a favorite here. Again, the combination of the underdog team on a five game slate with the lower salary here. I'm happy with that. As we continue to go down the list, this is a 49, 200 salary build.

This uses a four, three stack. Uh, it has the biggest favorite on the slate in BLG. But then also pairs a team that's basically playing in a pick them here in OMG. I'm pretty happy with that. Again, the contest Sims have identified that these lineups are pretty unlikely to be duplicated here in our pool, but as we get to the next lineup, we see one that maybe is one that I would consider eliminating.

First of all, the dupes are already listed at seven here. This is a salary of 49, five in a four, three stack featuring a team that is a favorite in TES. This might be one that I'm still willing to play. This is right on the cusp. I might consider eliminating this here. Uh, just again, because we're predicting seven dupes already.

It's a four, three stack. It's very likely to be popular just to give you the example of what it would look like if I eliminated this build, I'll go ahead and exit out and you can see the lineups go back to 10. All we're doing is filtering in the next best lineup from the bottom of our pool here. If we quickly look at the remaining lineups in our list here, from where we were at, we get back to this one, which is also a four, three, this is an OMG BLG stack.

This might be another one that I would eliminate. Uh, we also, we think this lineup is only going to be duped twice, but I can see this one being duped quite a bit more, uh, just a very easy lineup that comes together naturally. So we'll trash that one here. And then we have four, two stack. We have another four, three stack, another OMG, BLG.

So maybe we'll eliminate that. Again, this is a bit of a case by case basis. I mostly just want to show you what it looks like of eliminating this. And my goal here is basically just to try to find lineups from my portfolio that I think are just less likely to be duplicated. But once I've done that and I'm satisfied with the lineups that I'm playing, I'm overall ready to rock and roll for the slate.

So the last step here would be to click save to my contests, get my entries file uploaded from DraftKings and get these entries into the slate. Now, last note here, if you've never actually sat down and watched some professional League of Legends, I'd highly recommend it alongside sweating your DFS lineups.

It is a really fun and exciting watch and the commentators do a great job of helping newer watchers understand what's going on. So I highly recommend sweating your DFS lineups along with watching the actual games when you're playing. It's just a lot of fun. So to sum up, League of Legends is a great DFS sport to play and exploit the edges you get using simulations because of the high correlation.

Binary player ranges of outcomes and duplication strategy that is just very hard to navigate with a traditional optimizer or building by hand. That of course makes it a great sport to exploit with Sims. If you're already a seasoned league DFS pro, one of the more valuable things you can be doing to continue to improve is studying your results and the plays of the other top players in the lobby.

And if you're new to league DFS, it'll only take a handful of slates before you're going to be ready to start adding more to your process. The best way to do both of those things is to learn from the top players with Saber Sims Contest Flashback. So next up, check out my guide on how to review and improve your DFS play with our tools.

I'll see you in the next video.

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