How to Beat NFL DFS Showdown Contests

NFL season is back and I couldn't be more excited for another year of NFL DFS action. My name is Jordan Chand. I'm the head coach here at SaberSim. And in this video, I'll be breaking down exactly how you can beat NFL showdown contests in the 2024 season, starting with a full walkthrough of my process for how I'd approach the opening night showdown slate between the Chiefs and Ravens and stick around until the end of this video Where I'll show you my number one favorite NFL showdown feature in Sabersim and exactly how you can use it to dominate this season.

I'm going to be walking through my process using the Saber system, a proven framework for playing DFS successfully. If you want to review the Saber system in full, there's a video in the description of this one. But the five main principles here are. Understand the odds of DFS. Second, optimize your portfolio.

Third, keep your lineup building process simple. Fourth, pay attention to the news. And finally, fifth, study the sharks. Those five principles are going to guide my approach throughout my NFL showdown process here. So let's go ahead and dive in. Now, when it comes to understanding the odds in NFL showdown, we need to remember that our profit in these DFS games come from outlier top 0.

1 percent outcomes, even if we're playing in a way where we can expect to profit in the long term, the profit mostly comes from these inherently rare events. It's important, especially in NFL DFS, where some of these showdown contests are absolutely massive to remember that losing in a small sample size does not necessarily mean you are playing poorly.

And in fact, towards the end of this video, I'll show you exactly how you can see if you're playing well, regardless of the short term results, but we need to be aware of the variance and the odds and how likely it is for us to have a winning night. On any night we're playing NFL showdown. The best way we can navigate this variance of NFL showdown is to optimize our portfolio.

The second principle to increase our ROI and minimize our variance. We can increase our ROI by playing against the softest competition in our contest, focusing most of our action on the under 3 entry fees and under 5 entry fees with less than a 25, 000 total prize pool. And we can minimize our variance.

By increasing our sample sizes of play and increasing our sample sizes really goes beyond just playing more lineups per slate, though. We want to do that as well. And playing those lower dollar entries will help us do that, but we should also be looking at playing more slates in general. At a minimum, I'd recommend entering and playing the three big primetime NFL showdown slates each week on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night, and for opening week we actually get an extra Friday game in there as well, but don't sleep on the showdown contests that are tucked into the Sunday main slate.

I know that navigating building lineups for showdown contests on Sunday while also navigating your main slates and potentially your early and afternoon slates all at the same time can be stressful. So, So don't bite off more than you can chew here, but there are NFL showdown contests for literally every NFL game played on Sunday.

If you are playing in a profitable way, the more slates that you can enter in, the more lineups you can play, the lower your variance of your results will be, and the more likely it will be that you put profit in your pocket by the end of the season. Now, you need to be mindful of your bankroll here so you don't just literally go broke after week two, but as a part of your NFL showdown play this year, I would try to work in some extra games that take place on Sundays.

And there's typically two marquee games on the Sunday main slate, one in the morning for week one. I think it's the Texans and Colts. And in the afternoon, I would have to check, but there'll be one of these games that has a little bit. Bigger prize pools than normal, a little bit bigger contests than normal, so they can be a little bit more attractive.

And maybe a good way to slowly ramp up into playing more showdowns on Sunday is to just add those two in addition to the primetime contests, but really they're all good to play. There have been Sundays in the past where I play every single one of these. And if you can keep your lineup building process simple, which I'll walk through how to do that in a second.

Playing these will help you get many more shots on goal over the course of the year. Now, I tried to keep your total NFL Sunday action to under around 10 percent of your bankroll. That includes all of the showdowns you might be playing, the main slate, potentially the early and the afternoon only slates.

That should put you in a good spot overall, where you're getting some decent action down. But a lot of your action is decorrelated from other spots that you're playing and you're just getting a lot of shots on goal. But back to what people typically associate with NFL showdown, which is those primetime slates playing all three of them each week is a great start.

So without much further ado, let's take a closer look at this draft Kings lobby and enter our contests for the slate. For these primetime games, I'm generally going to be sticking to somewhere between two and a half to 5 percent of my bankroll, which for me, this season is 5, 000. So I'm looking to get around 125 to 250 in play for this particular slate.

I'm going to be entering contests as you've seen before from lowest to highest entry fee. So I get as many lineups in play against the weakest opponents. Remember that the best players in the lobby. Can't enter those contests under 3. They can't enter the contest under 5. If there's less than a 25, 000 total prize pool, this is also going to let me get more lineups in play because my money's going further on each dollar.

I'm spending. And also for NFL specifically, I'm going to end up skipping any contest. That isn't paying out at least what I'm playing in total for that slate to first place. So in this case, I want at least 250 to first. And that's just a good rule of thumb that will eliminate a bunch of these tiny contests that they open up.

There will literally be like sometimes dozens of different dime times that end up getting opened up on a slate. I'm just going to skip them if the first place prize is not at least 250. Which is my top end that I want to play on this particular contest. So let's actually do this here. What I typically end up doing is I'm going to set the maximum to 5 here, just to keep that filtered.

So I know about where I'm at. I'm going to look at tournaments. I'm going to look at guaranteed only, and I'm looking at the. Baltimore and Kansas City showdown slate and I'm going to sort by highest to lowest entry fee So the first contest that pops up is this dime package very easy one to get into it pays out 500 to first I definitely want to play this 20 lineups for 2.

Sounds like a good place to start So let's go ahead and get entered into here might as well remove Hollywood Brown We're gonna replace these lineups anyway here shortly, but no reason to play a guy that's not playing tonight even in our dummy lineup. So let's enter that. And then now that we've entered that particular contest, it gets a little bit easier with the draft Kings.

bulk entry tool to enter the rest of ours here. So we will look at tournaments again. And once again, look at highest to lowest and a bulk enter here and get another 19 entries into the dime package. And let's keep going. You see a bunch of satellites here. I really wish that the tournament filter would actually filter out the satellites as you would expect.

It would given that there is a satellites category itself, but that's okay. We're skipping all of these here. These are winner take alls that pay out a hundred of first. These are small, tiny little contests that pay 5 to first. So we're skipping all of those gets us to the mini max, which we are definitely going to play here.

I like that one. So we'll drop 150 in there. We will drop 20 into the first down. You know what? I think I missed going a little too quickly. Is the quarter jukebox. Yeah, that's right. Okay. I knew something was up, so we definitely want to play the quarter jukebox. It's a great contest here. And we'll keep going here.

Daily dollar. I want to play these. These are some really high ROI contests with some really bad opponents can be pretty solid to play. I'm at 106 so far. So let's go ahead and keep going. I want to get at least 225 up to 250. I'll typically just find a nice contest break point between those two values here.

And that's where I'll typically stop. So let's keep going. For some reason, 50 fifties are also included in the tournament category here. That's a little annoying. We get to the safety here. I'll dump 20 lineups into that. One thing I do like doing here as well, when it comes to NFL showdown is getting a good mix of these contests that have smaller, smaller sizes and larger sizes.

So I've got a fun sweat in like the first down and the mini max, which are massive contests. Big payday when you take down first and then a little bit of a smaller contest where it's only a thousand to first place, but I only have to beat 8, 900 players here. So I like getting that kind of nice little mix of different contest sizes here.

So let's keep going. So I am at 146 now here. I can certainly stop. I'm going to at least just take a look and see what the next lineups, the next contest look like here. See if there's anything I want to dump in. Particularly, are there any other contests that are, uh, under 25, 000 prize pool since we're at the 3 price point now, we're not under 3 anymore.

If there's any of these, if there's any contests under 5 that have a sub 25, 000 prize pool, I might dump them in there as well to keep getting some extra action down. So, uh, Pylon just misses it. Play action misses it here. We'll cover four, just misses it here. And then we're at the 5 range. So I'm actually just going to go ahead and stick with this.

If the cover four was maybe a 20, 000 prize pool, it sounds inconsequential, but there's actually a big difference between those two because this contest would suddenly no longer be available to those sharks that have a lot of lifetime entry fees and DraftKings. So I probably would have played it in that case for this example.

I'm totally happy. I've got 233 unique lineups for 146. Let's enter that and we're good to go. Okay. Now that we have an optimized contest portfolio designed to help us maximize our ROI by playing against the easiest competition while minimizing risk and letting us get 200 plus unique lineups in play for just a little over a hundred dollars, we're ready to actually build some lineups for the slate.

And remember principle number three here was keep your lineup building process simple. We've put extensive work into our game simulations and our contest simulations this offseason, so you'll find that my process for actually building and entering lineups is going to be quite simple. I'm going to let the sims handle about 80 to 90 percent of the work, and I'll do a quick review towards the end of the build for any individual player takes that I have about the games.

And this is even more true on the NFL Sundays when I'm playing those NFL showdowns that are in mixed into the main slate. Because I'm frequently going to be entering many of these slates. So I need to enter lineups for a bunch of different contests all at once, right before lock. So I want to prompt process where I can really quickly get high quality lineups in play without having to worry too much about the details of my individual lineups.

The reason most NFL DFS players have to spend hours researching and building and tinkering with their NFL showdown lineups. is because traditional optimizers that optimize based purely on average projection have no idea what makes a good NFL showdown lineup on their own. They can't build based on game scripts, they can't identify the optimal lineups, they can't calculate dupes without a huge amount of legwork from the user.

But on SaberSim, they can. Each lineup that you build is the optimal lineup for a single game simulation of the way that the game might play out. And our contest sims will help you identify the unique and low duped ones to actually play. So, you can still spend your time with individual player takes that you have about the game.

But you don't have to spend as much time programming lineup rules, which is the big bulk of time. Most people have to commit to building good lineups. Now, before we actually build anything here, the first thing I'm going to do is get that entries file uploaded that we just entered here. So we'll go ahead and download the template file from DK.

Get that uploaded here. And we're going to see right away all of the different contests we just entered, as well as automatically created contest sims here for each of our contests that we're playing. You'll see here one other extra thing that got added in is this one lottery ticket into the Millie Maker.

Fingers crossed here. I got that as a part of a promotion for playing basketball this year, so that's why you didn't see me just enter that here. But hopefully that's the best lineup. Hopefully that's the winner there. The one entry into the Millie maker on that note, it is also worth mentioning that it's totally fine to have a little bit of a fun sweat every so often throw a couple extra entries into the Millie maker, maybe play a high stakes tournament, whatever you particularly want to do with that money.

At the end of the day, we're all looking to have some fun and have a little bit of sweat with this, so it's okay every once in a while. To do that, but make sure you just keep that under control. And really think about that as an entertainment expense, separate from the rest of your DFS play. You should only play money in that way that you're totally prepared to lose and try to focus your actual profitable DFS play, your portfolio, playing the best contests, sticking to strong bankroll management principles and contest selection.

And as we jump over to the build screen here, I'll quickly also remind you of course. Principle number four of the Sabre system, which is stay on top of the news. Obviously we don't have late swap in NFL showdown. So as it relates to this type of contest, the main thing you need to watch for is just making sure that you're building after the final inactives report is out and our final simulations have run for NFL.

This will always happen 60 minutes before kickoff because we get very conveniently. Placed 90 minute pork per before kickoff inactives reports. So just check discord around that time. And you'll see if the SIM has finished in the discord, NFL lineup alerts, discord. You can also check just by hovering over the.

Refresh projections button the last time they were updated. And so at my time, this game is going to start at six 20. So the last SIM is going to quit kickoff at five 20. So I should see that projections update here around five 30 and ownership shortly thereafter here. The, the SIMs will take about eight to 10 minutes to run.

And then I know that I'm good to go and everything's ready. Okay. So let's actually run a build here as if lock was approaching right now. I mentioned before, I'm going to let the SIMs do. An immense amount of the heavy lifting here for me. I'm not going to be very opinionated with lineup rules or adjustments to projections or exposures ahead of time here.

I want to build a big pool of single simulation optimals and make a couple adjustments that I see fit from there. So the only things I'm going to do here is make two changes to player projections just to abide by the DraftKings regulations here. So I'll just make two very small changes and I am going to bump number of lineups up to 5, 000.

The number of lineups is set to 2000 by default for NFL showdown because these builds can take a little bit longer to run. We don't want someone to be in a situation where they need to get their build done quickly and it's taking longer. A ton of time to build 5, 000 lineups when you just need to get some lineups in.

But if you have time, if you're building, say an hour or 50 minutes before the slate actually locks, you can bump this up to 5, 000, get a nice big pool of lineups from which to work with here. So I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to let this go. Actually the one other thing I'm going to stop this build quickly here.

I did forget. I personally as well. Do like to allow really low salary lineups into my pool for showdown for a game like the chiefs and ravens where there are a lot of very talented players on the field that necessarily you're probably not going to get a ton of lineups that are super low salary anyway.

But we will have showdowns over the course of the season that are two bad teams playing with a very low total. And there are a lot of types of lineups that have very low salary that can be successful in those contests. Sometimes those are some of the lowest duped lineups that you can play. You should be aware we set that min salary at 45, 000 for a reason to prevent you from getting potentially very bad lineups.

You are exposing yourself to a little bit more risk lowering that min salary. You'll get lineups that look quite a bit worse. But I do like to take on that little bit of risk in my play. Okay. to have a chance to get some lower duped lineups in there. So I recommend a min salary of zero here for NFL showdown.

Just being aware that you are taking on a little bit of extra risk if you do that and follow me with that min salary zero. But in the meantime, we'll go ahead and click build. Now, just to remind you what happens when I click build here, we are not just optimizing lineups based on average projections. We are literally taking 5, 000 play by play game scripts of our database of thousands of simulations of the game and building the best possible draft Kings lineup for each of those simulations.

So we know that these lineups have the upside it takes to win because they literally binked the SIM that they are built from. They're going to often have correlations and have the right combinations of players in your lineups. But not literally every single time, for example, first line up here, right out of the gate, we've got Xavier worthy here who is at the captain spot and we see Patrick Mahomes show up in the lineup here.

Now, that is a good thing, right? We generally are going to want to have the quarterback paired with our wide receiver captain, but we don't literally always want that to happen. Our lineups here are going to have the right combinations of players together, naturally correlated. Based on the game simulations, but not forced into your lineups with outdated rules of thumb and lineup rules and things like that.

But after our lineups are built, the most important thing we want to do next is to run our contest SIM. Now, if you're on the saber SIM starter or standard or pro plans, you won't have access to the contest SIM. That's totally fine. You can just use the single game saber score sorting method here. Which has been back tested on contest Sims here.

And it's just a more general way of identifying the top lineups from your pool contest. Sims though are extremely valuable for NFL showdown. And if you're serious about NFL showdown this season, I would highly recommend considering signing up for ultimate the main reason why contest Sims are so valuable for this contest type is we need to know how likely a lineup is to be duplicated in our contest here, duplication is going to affect Evie of your lineups dramatically.

Because each time a lineup is duplicated, that means somebody else in the contest played it. Anytime your lineup wins, you have to share the winnings with that player. Now, a lot of these lineups here don't have a very high probability of winning anyway. You see some of these wins coming back from the contest sim.

Now we're talking about win percentages of 0. 1%, 0. 09%, things like that. When we hit those outcomes and we are right and we have a 0. 01 percent outcome actually take place, We want to win the full first place. We don't want to share that with a bunch of other people. So we want to make sure our lineups are not duped.

Our contest Sims are taking each lineup in your pool and simulating it in what we expect your opponents to do in your contest tonight and seeing how they would perform if the slate played out a hundred thousand times. So we're actually accounting for how likely we think lineups are to be duped in your contests and coming up with the best possible ones to play here.

You see that this top lineup here sorted by saber score is not a terrible lineup. It's actually showing up as. Slightly profitable in some contests, slightly unprofitable in others here, but it is not a contest that the contest Sims would actually generally recommend you play here. The next lineup on the list is actually grading out as a little bit better, but you can see the disparity between what the contest Sims think.

And if you are playing at high volume or playing a lot of these showdowns this year, I'd recommend using Contest Sims and Saber Sim Ultimate. But now that the Contest Sims are complete, I'm going to go ahead and change my sorting method here to the Contest Sims Target Contest ROI. And from here, this is where you can start to make some adjustments based on your particular takes on the slate here.

So any opinions that you have on individual players. the game, I would make most of those adjustments with min and max exposures. The way that I typically tend to prefer to do this is mostly focusing on the leverage column here, looking at your high and low leverage players, which are going to give you a sense of how you are handling certain spots relative to the field.

I spend more time looking at my captain exposures than my flex exposures. Uh, I think that's a little bit more of an interesting way to consider the slate. There are occasionally some low owned players on the flex side that I will want to look at, but the main thing that you should be doing here is looking at your high and low leverage players and make sure that you agree with the direction of the slate.

If we are looking at the high leverage captains here right now, we are heavy over the field on Derek Henry and Isaiah Pacheco, and you can start to build an image of what that means about. the way Sabersim thinks you should play this slate. Our big fades are Zay Flowers, Mark Andrews, and Travis Kelsey at the captain.

So, clearly, Sabersim is taking us in a direction of saying, it's opening night, we think the teams are going to run the ball a little bit more. Isaiah Pacheco, Derek Henry, maybe going to get in the end zone, maybe catch some extra passes there. The passing game itself might be a little bit overvalued with some of these guys like flowers, Andrews and Kelsey.

And that's the direction here. You can ask yourself, do you agree with that? If you do, if you don't, you can bring down, for example, some of your exposure to captain Derek Henry, Isaiah Pacheco by setting a men or max exposure. You could bring up your exposure to some of the other passengers. Pass catchers by setting their min or max exposure.

Now it's also totally fine to go in here and take a look at the flex players. The one thing you just want to be aware of is that you can't play a player in the flex and the captain spot. So sometimes you'll see a little bit of a discrepancy here. Mark Andrews is a good example of this here. Our top high leverage player in the flex spot.

So we just looked at the captain spot and you might think based on those leverages, Oh, we're fading Mark Andrews. Well, not exactly. We're over the field on Mark Andrews in the flex spot. So we're kind of, it's almost a bit of a middle in that situation. You should also be aware that sometimes if you lower the exposure to a player in your captain spot, that will result in SaberSim finding more lineups that raise your exposure to that player in the flex spot.

So just take a look at the high low leverage players at both the captain and the flex, and And make sure that it's overall in view of how you think that the game is going to play out and what you think is going to happen on the slate. For me personally, this isn't a slate that I have very strong opinions on.

The main thing that I wanted to do is take a quick look at a couple of players that are projected more to the bottom range here. and see if I'm getting any exposure there. And also just take a quick look and see what types of players are showing up at the very bottom range here. Because I think early on in the season, I just want to be cautious of players.

We don't really know what the very end of benches looks like here. So I will be cautious playing any players that, you know, I'm not entirely sure if they're even going to get on the field. Chris Collier is a good example here of a guy that I think is potentially. Unlikely to get on the field period. I don't even know if I want to spend any lineups on him here.

So I'm going to just go ahead and click apply there to remove him from my pool. And in fact, I think what I'm going to do is set a quick filter here and just filter out everybody below me, Colt Hardman. I just don't want to accidentally end up in a situation where any of those players start showing up in my lineups.

I don't know why there are 155 filters there, but I will set a quick player filter is what this one is. To say that only show where players projection is greater than two. Now, this isn't something I want to be clear. This isn't something I'm going to do on every single showdown slate all year long, but just early in the season, it seems like there's a little bit of a break there of a lot of these guys.

I don't even know if they're going to get on the field. I think it's unlikely that they're going to get on the field. So I'm going to remove them from my pool. There might be a couple players in here that I would at least be willing to play. Yeah, now that I'm thinking about this, I'm actually going to handle this different because there are a couple players that I think have a chance to play, and I am, I want them to be in my pool.

So I'm going to remove the guys that I don't think are likely to play at all here. But I do think I want to at least allow the potential for Deontay Hardy, who is a speed guy who has some upside if he were to just get a ball in a lucky situation and break one off. Devontaz Walker is a rookie here that I kind of like, uh, and think is a little bit interesting.

And Jared Wiley is a training camp guy. Who I do think Travis Kelsey is getting a little bit older here. I think I could see opening night is probably not the best example of this, but I could see them limiting his snaps a little bit more this season. And he's a young guy that I think is a little bit interesting here.

So those three players I would be okay. Seeing sneak into my lineups here. But I'm going to go ahead and remove some of the others. The one other player I did want to take a look at is Samajay Pirine here, who just got signed recently here. I actually think he could be potentially a little bit popular.

Juju Smith Schuster as well. I think both of these guys could be popular. Pirine is a little more expensive at 3, 000. But I want to make sure that I at least have some exposure to these guys. I am getting some exposure there already, which is good. I'm curious what my leverage looks like on these players.

I'm a little bit interested in a guy like Pirine here. I don't think casuals are going to even be aware that he's on the roster and potentially in a position to get some particular playing time. So I'm going to set a min exposure to 15%. I just want to make sure I'm getting some extra Py lineups in my portfolio here.

I also like, he is a little bit priced up at that 3000 salary range compared to 1000 for Juju. So I just want to make sure that he's a leverage play for me. So a good example of here of how I would make those adjustments here, how much exposure is the right amount of exposure to get to P ride? Well, I want him to be one of my bigger stands on the slate.

So if I look at my top leverage plays by bumping him up to 15 percent min exposure, he becomes my second highest leverage flex. That's a good amount. That means that I'm getting the right amount of exposure relative to the rest of my portfolio here. I'm not lock buttoning him in and suddenly having 84 percent leverage.

I'm not doing anything crazy like that. I want it to be balanced along with the rest of my portfolio. But I want him to be one of my top plays. And that's pretty much it for what I would be doing for one of these primetime slates. Anytime I would make an adjustment, I might go back through and see how my leverage has changed to other players in other positions here.

Maybe at the high or low end, just to see. Sometimes there is a bit of a butterfly effect when you start to make changes of how that affects other changes. But I'm not going to be very opinionated about every single player on the slate. And again, I'm going to mostly make sure. That a couple of the takes I have are incorporated here and otherwise trust the Sims to put me in a position where I'm playing at strong lineups overall.

For an NFL Sunday slate, if these were showdowns that were happening on Sunday, I might have no takes about any of the games whatsoever, but for these primetime games, I'll just pick up on anything that I've been reading or listening to throughout the week or just things that I've picked up on from watching the games over the course of the season or news, things like that, practice reports.

If there's a couple of players that I want a little bit more or a little bit less exposure to. Another really strong advantage of using the contest Sims alongside this is that I know So, I'm getting the best possible, the highest ROI lineups with Samajai Pirine, who's the one player that I made an adjustment to here.

I don't have to guess what the best, most profitable way is to play Pirine on this slate. We've built these lineups using the play by play game simulations and graded them out with the contest sims. So I know that my Pirine lineups here are are going to be the best possible PRine lineups that I can play, at least according to the contest sims at this particular point in time.

So the last step here to get these lineups into our contest here is to fill them. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead here and change this to the multifill fill method. And then I recommend sorting by the prize pool or the entry fee here to make sure that your best lineups are going into each of your contests.

And I've explained this in other videos, but what specifically ends up happening when we go through and do this here is we will first. Take the first lineup in the list, sort your lineups by the ROI for that particular contest. Sim fill in this case, the best possible one lineup for that contest here while listening to exposures or anything else like that, and then move on to the next contest in the list, filling this time by the first down ROI.

putting the best 20 lineups into that contest. Then by the minimax, it's basically just making sure that for each contest you play, the best possible lineup went into each of them. So I'll go ahead and click save here. It's going to take a second to process all of that because it does have eight different contests to fill and then let us know that 235 lineups have been saved and we can go grab this contest file here from the upper left and get this uploaded to DraftKings.

And we're ready for the slate. But our work does not stop after lock because we still have my number one favorite Saber Sim feature for NFL Showdown to discuss, and that is contest flashback. So after each NFL Showdown slate, we'll take each contest that was played on DraftKings and re simulate the game 100, 000 times using the real lineups played in the actual DFS contests.

From there, regardless of what actually happened on the field that night, We can come up with the expected ROIs for each lineup and each player that played the contest. So remember what I said before about how hard it is to know if you're playing well in a short term sample, where maybe you've lost some money.

The first thing I'll do in contest flashback every day after I play NFL showdown is to check to see how my SIM ROI looked. So what I do is in the contest tab, you can click on a contest you played. Look at the users tab here. And what I will do is sort by SIM ROI and then filter to look at players that played the, as many lineups as I did.

And I'm looking at first to see if I had a profitable number here, basically an above zero number in SIM ROI that indicates if the slate played out a hundred thousand times on average, I would have made money. So in this particular slate, I have a 28 percent SIM ROI. I'm not as good as some of the heavy hitters here that had 200 percent ROIs, but I know that if this slate played out over and over again, this is the super bowl from last year.

I would have made money in this particular contest. You're not going to have a profitable SIM ROI literally every time you play NFL showdown, but if you're using our simulations and you're following the steps that I outlined just before, you should have a profitable SIM ROI more often than not. And in more contests than not.

And it will help to know that you're on the right track and just give you an idea of about where you're at. Now, the other thing you can do here is remember principle number five of the saber system, which is study the sharks. This is particularly useful in NFL showdown because we can look to see how the most profitable players avoided dupes on the slate.

Over here indicated in the average dupes column, because again, in NFL showdown, the more duplicated a lineup is, the more people that share the prizes when it wins. Most of the top SIM ROI 150 maxers in the flagship tournament will generally have lower than average dupe counts. Now, this is a balancing act because good lineups, lineups that are projected well are good to play, but they're likely to be bad.

More likely to be duped, and we have to give up some average expectation in the form of projection to lower our dupes, so it's a balance. Not every lineup is perfect just because it's unique and not every lineup that's duplicated is bad or not. Every lineup that's duplicated frequently is bad, but it can be very useful here to come in here and see How the top 150 matches by sim ROI played.

And in particular, take a look at how frequently they were duplicated on the slate. I like to look at top players with high sim ROIs and check out the following information. So for example, if we take shady advice, who is a player that I often like to look at here to see how they played and filter upon his lineups here.

Now, the main things that I like to look for is first, how did they allocate salary? Salary is something you'll see quite a bit that players will use. They'll set maximum salary caps here to limit their overall dupes and intentionally see If there's a couple of things that I particularly like to look at here, I like to see how they allocated salary, especially if it looks like any particular players set a intentional salary ceiling to avoid duplication.

You do see here, giant squid actually had an average salary in his portfolio of just 47, 000 and his lineups were on average only duped four times in this ginormous Superbowl contest here. So it might be interesting here that as a data point to take away to maybe experiment with some in depth analysis.

More heavy salary ceilings here. The other thing I like to do is when you're actually filtering on a player to take a look at their overall exposures and see what their approach was to a particular slate, where their stands were. If they took some of the same stands as you did and just how they overall put together their lineups.

You can also look at the actual individual lineups that players played and see how they combined certain players together. Were there one thing that I like to look for here is did they do a creative things with the combinations of players that most players assume you don't want to do? So for example, did they combine running backs from the same team together in the same lineup?

Did they use skill position players, particularly wide receivers and tight ends at the captain spot without incorporating the quarterback? Did they use quarterbacks at captains here without including the Any or more than one pass catcher on the opposing side. I just like to go in here and see how the top players are actually putting together their lineups in a way that makes them high probability of winning, while also low probability of being played by somebody else.

Now I'm recording this before the first game of the 2024 season, and frankly, I don't remember the ins and outs of the DFS strategy for the Super Bowl for last year. So I'll probably end up following this up with another video as the season goes along, going more into detail about what I like to look for here.

But those are the, generally the kinds of things that I'm looking for and the reasons why I like to go back and look at contest flashback. Remember while we can't go back in time and replay the Super Bowl with whatever we would have learned here. Just from looking at this now, if you make this a habit and look at both your results and also how the top players are playing, you will be surprised at how many patterns you start to pick up and that you can apply to future slates.

As you're tweaking your lineups, you might find something on the week seven NFL Sunday night football game where you think, Hey, I actually remember seeing this, a similar situation back in week four for Monday night football, where a weight that a lot of players ended up getting unique was Playing these two running backs from the same team together in a lot of their lineups and you could potentially incorporate that in or maybe it's I'm going to lower my salary for this particular slate because it's a very low total and I've seen that other sharp players are often playing with very low salary caps on low total games that is actually one that I've picked up over my NFL showdown play that I found is a consistent pattern.

So look for these patterns, take notes. Spend time reviewing your lineups each time and reviewing lineups from the pros each time you play NFL showdown, it will pay off when you are building for your next slate. But that's it. That is a full breakdown of my NFL showdown lineup building process for the 2024 season from bankroll management and contest selection to building lineups to reviewing the next day.

If you are ready to get started with the best optimizer in NFL DFS, we do have a free five day trial on our site at sabersim. com. And if you've used sabersim before, and the version that I've had up on the screen over the course of this video looked a little bit different, it's because we've made a huge UI improvement.

For the start of the NFL season this year, you can learn more up. You can learn more about those updates here, and I'll see you in the next video.

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