How to Late Swap in NFL DFS: A Real-Time Tutorial

Staying on top of the news in the form of late swapping, your NFL DFS lineups is a crucial part of NFL DFS strategy. My name is Jordan Chand. I'm the head coach here at Sabre Sim. It is the mid afternoon here of the week one NFL Sunday main slate. And in this video, I'm going to walk through my late swap process here live in real time.

So you can figure out how to take advantage of this edge in your NFL lineups. Plate swap is an important part of NFL DFS strategy for a few reasons. The first is we need to get players that aren't playing in the afternoon games out of our lineups. When the inactives reports come out 90 minutes before the afternoon game starts, sometimes there will be surprise scratches or potentially players that were questionable heading into the slate that get ruled out, opening up big value opportunities for other players on the team.

But at the very least, we want to make sure we get players that are otherwise going to be zeros out of our lineups. There are also some, sometimes some final tuning simulations that run in our final simulations as well, as our models team is working throughout the day to update snaps, target shares, things like that.

So we want to capture any of those final updates we have in those last simulations for the afternoon games. But perhaps one of the bigger edges in NFL late swap here is updating for the live information we have at this point in the day that we didn't at lock. At this point here, we know how most of the early games have gone.

Most of these games are in the fourth quarter at the time I'm recording this video here. We also know what your opponents are playing in your DFS contests. When you late swap with SaberSim and run a late swap contest, you account for the live information of how the players in your lineup's games are going, for those that are already in progress, and the real lineups that your opponents are playing, and our contest sims are going to account for that information automatically here.

In terms of timing your late swap, the main thing that you want to look for is that our final simulations have run. Our final sims run 60 minutes before kickoff for each of the afternoon games. Today, there are two at 2. 05 my time, and two at 2. 25, And by checking the NFL lineup alerts channel here in Discord, you can see that those final simulations kicked off on time and have since completed, so we're ready to start our late swap.

When you actually start your late swap, the very first thing you want to do when you pull up the app here is check this quick swap icon, this lightning bolt in the upper left corner. If at any point this turns red, it means you have players that are out in your entries file that you need to remove as soon as possible.

If this ever turns red, you should always come up here, click this, and quick swap any out players out and swap them to the best available player, re download that entries file, and re upload it to the site that you're playing on. The worst thing that can happen here is taking a zero. We'll do a late swap to fully rebuild these lineups here in a second, but the first step should always be quick swapping to get any out players out of your lineups.

After that, we're ready to late swap, which we can start by clicking the big green late swap button here, and it's going to ask you what contest you want to late swap. I typically recommend grouping everything together here, I think it makes it just a lot easier to initiate the late swap when you're managing all of your contests together.

You will have another option down here with the swap method to either take your existing build settings from the build that you had before lock, or to use the defaults. My preference is to use the defaults and I think defaulting to this is a good idea because it will generally prevent you from running into any issues with the settings that you set before lock.

Exposures, stack requirements, all of that kind of stuff that you might set pre lock here can be very restrictive to late swapping effectively, especially when there has been significant news that has changed. If you've put in a ton of effort to set all of your exposures before lock, you may want to instead clone current build settings to pull that over.

But my preferred method here is to use the defaults here to make my late swap as flexible as possible. Another way of thinking about this is we have a lot of extra information that we didn't have at lock. I don't want to be tied to decisions that I made a few hours ago before any of the early games played here.

I instead want the sims to tell me what is the best way to maximize my profit in this late swap. Once you're in the late swap build here, the one thing that I typically like to do is double check that my swaps per lineup here is as high as it can go. You typically want to make it however high it can go here before your number of lineups does not exceed what is allowed on your plan.

So I will try this here at say 18 or 19. We'll do 19 swaps per lineup here. And then we're good to build our swaps. So I'll go ahead here and click build swaps. And what SaberSim is now doing is taking each of our original lineups that we played into these contests here, and it's giving me 19 different swap options of what those lineups could become after this late swap here.

Once these lineups are complete, we'll run a contest sim on those late swapped lineups here and see what the highest ROI swaps I can make are for the remainder of the slate. Once your late swaps are complete, if you're on the standard starter or pro plans, you'll be sorting by saberscore here, which is still going to be a great method to sort your lineups here.

and you're still taking advantage of any updated news in your lineups. But, for those on the SaberSim Ultimate plan, we'll want to next run a contest sim, which is going to take into account, again, how players are actually performing in your contests, as well as what your opponents are doing in their lineups to identify the most profitable swaps we can swap to.

Once the contest sim is complete, I just want to change my sorting method here to the ROI here for each of my lineups, so I'm finding the most profitable swaps. I'm seeing a message here that only 256 lineups. I think this is showing up on accident, to be quite honest. So I'm gonna go ahead and just click OK.

I'm getting as many swaps as I can here. And now that I'm sorting by ROI, you can see that for some of these lineups, I'm doing actually pretty well. These ROIs have gone up by quite a bit. Some of these lineups have a little bit of a sweat, so they are helping me to swap into the most profitable swaps here for the remainder of the slate.

At this point, all I need to do here is click the save icon, which is going to put the best possible swap into each of my entries here. Again, that's showing up as an accident. We'll click. Okay. And then I'll click download entry file for draft Kings. And I can go ahead. and get these uploaded. Now I do recommend in general doing it exactly as I've just done here, where as soon as your late swap build is complete, whether you're sorting by saberscore or you're running a contest sim, as soon as that process is done, to get that entries file uploaded so at least you make the lock of the afternoon games.

Now I do have a little bit more time before the 205 games start here. So this would be an opportunity where I could go through and review any of my exposures, maybe make a couple of additional adjustments. If I wanted to get higher or lower on anyone, review my stack types here. For example, I don't really want to play any lineups that don't have a quarterback stack, even as a part of my late swap here.

So I'm going to go ahead and remove those from my portfolio. I also don't really want to play any QB plus threes. So I'm going to remove those from my portfolio as well and click apply. And now SaberSim is going to eliminate those stack types from my late swaps. I can re save here and get those uploaded again.

But had I run out of time, I would have at least known if I wasn't able to make those exposure changes here that I would have gotten the swaps in place and taken advantage of the updated live data. Now that is the fundamental process for running late swaps on SaberSim. I do want to mention a couple troubleshooting things you can do if you're having any issues with your late swaps.

Now, if you are having an issue when you're running a late swap, where perhaps you're getting errors, when you upload to DraftKings, the best thing that you can do is go back to the contest tab here. and upload a new entries file, download a new template file from the site you're playing, and upload that file back into SaberSim.

Most of the time, late swap issues come from players having a discrepancy in what's on the site and what SaberSim thinks you're playing, and uploading a new entries file will fix that quickly. The other thing that you can do is when you actually initiate the late swap, if you cloned your settings from an existing build, instead, try a late swap where you are using the defaults rules and exposures and other requirements that you may have set in your builds before lock can actually become surprisingly restrictive for late swap builds without you realizing it.

If you're running into a problem where your late swap builds are not completing or they're just not doing what you expect them to do. let those restrictions that you set before lock go, and run a late swap build on the default settings. But overall, that's it. Late swap should be a generally a pretty simple process that should only take a couple minutes, which is a good thing because you're often going to be under at least a little bit of a time crunch when you're trying to get it done on your lineups.

I hope this was a helpful walkthrough to show you how I go through the process of late swapping my NFL DFS lineups. If you have any questions, you can reach out at support at sabersim. com. And in the meantime, thanks for watching and good luck.

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