Master Min Uniques: The Secret to DFS Diversification

If you're tired of totally bricking DFS slates, seeing all of your lineups right next to each other at the bottom of the standings at the end of the night, You might be undervaluing diversification in the lineups that you're entering. In this video, I'll walk through min uniques on SaberSim, how this unassuming but important feature can help improve the quality of the lineup portfolios you're playing, and avoid totally breaking slates.

But make sure to stick around until the end of this video where I'll jump into the app and give you a simple step by step system you can use with our minuniques feature, regardless of the sport or slate that you're playing. Let's start by just quickly defining what minuniques literally mean.

Minuniques is the minimum number of unique players when comparing any two lineups. For example, at three minuniques, if you pick out any two lineups out of your lineup set, they will be at least three players different from each other. But the more important question here is why does this even matter?

Minuniques are intended to reduce the similarity between the lineups that you play. And the first benefit that this gives us is it helps reduce the variance of our results by diversifying the entry fees we paid to play that slate. GBP contests are very top heavy. Most of a lineup's expected value comes from how often it is able to win first place in the contest that you're playing.

But only one of your lineups can actually win the first place prize. And shipping spots 1 through 10 sounds cool in practice, but if you're playing sets of lineups similar enough to each other where that would actually happen, You're way more likely to just brick slate after slate after slate. Now, our goal with our lineup portfolios should be to play high quality lineups that are different from each other.

So we have a shot at winning that first place prize across a wide variety of the different game scripts of what could happen on that slate. Playing lineups that are very similar to each other via core plays or highly restricted player pools, or just. Relatively undiversified lineups as a strategy is a relic of an earlier era of DFS where it was harder to identify good lineups.

It made sense at that time to say lineups that contain these players are likely to be good, so let's lock those players in and build as many lineups around them as possible. Now that's no longer the case in DFS in 2024. With SaberSim you can build 5, 000 competitive lineups in under a minute for any slate.

across the full range of possible game scripts, so the lineups you take with you into your contests should be well diversified. However, even if you didn't care about variants at all, it would still be to your advantage to play diversified lineups because it reduces the fragility of your lineups. The projections, ownership projections, and simulations you use to build your lineups have assumptions naturally baked into them.

Things like this player is expected to get 30 snaps. This player is expected to have 20 percent usage. Your opponents are expected to play a particular player 25 percent of the time. And what makes a good lineup in your lineup builds rests on these assumptions. If that player ends up getting 30 snaps, if that player ends up getting 20 percent usage, and if your opponents use a player 25 percent of the time, Well, then this lineup is a good one to play.

And while we put a ton of work into our models that determine those assumptions, no model is going to be completely perfect on any given slate. We're going to get a ton of things right. But a handful of things wrong and making your lineups different from each other lets you benefit from as many things as we get right as possible and mitigate as much of the damage from the things we get wrong as possible.

The more concentrated your lineup portfolio is, the more fragile it becomes to any of the key assumptions that that portfolio relies on being wrong. Now, if you've used optimizers to build lineups before, this probably isn't the first time you've heard of minuniques. However, 90 percent of DFS players using minuniques with traditional optimizers are using it wrong and making their lineups worse.

And it's not their fault. It is the fault of the way the optimizer is built. Most optimizers require you to set minuniques as a build setting before you actually build your lineups. The optimizer will build the best possible lineup and then throw out every subsequent lineup until it reaches the next possible best lineup that has the level of uniqueness you requested.

This becomes highly restrictive very quickly. Sacrificing the overall upside and projected score of the lineups that you're building. Just imagine how heavily restricted your 150th lineup you build is, when it must be 3 players different from all 149 lineups that preceded it. On SaberSim, rather than a pre build optimizing setting, minuniques are a lineup specific selection setting that happens after the build.

Setting minuniques on sabersim affects which lineups are selected from your overall pool, but each lineup in that pool is still the best possible GPP lineup for a given sim of the way that the slate may go. This way you don't sacrifice the way that your lineups are constructed for diversification. You merely change the way that those lineups are selected when you enter your actual lineups into your contests.

And while this is a much less restrictive and punishing approach to get that diversification, it does not mean that using minuniques on sabersim comes without any cost at all. And you should consider the cost when you are implementing them into your process. After building your lineups on sabersim, and if you're on the ultimate plan running your contest sims, you should be aware of the aggregate metrics you see on the build screen.

These are going to give you a sense of where your lineups are at. The high, low, and average ROI Or, if you're on the starter plan, the projected score or saver score of your lineups. You can consider these the baseline metrics for your current set of lineups, and they're the easiest way to measure the cost of increasing minuniques.

Now by default, you should see these aggregate metrics show up after you've built lineups or after you've run your contest sim, but if you wanted to add them or change them, You can do so with the gear icon here that says aggregate metrics. If for example, we also wanted to see the same information for saber score, we can go ahead here and say max saber score for a large slate, large field contests.

We could also add in the median saber score and also the min saber score. And this will give us a little bit more information to look at here. Now, as you start increasing your min uniques, these metrics are going to go down. down and that is to be expected and it's totally okay. Remember, as you are increasing your min uniques here, you are making each lineup that you're playing less correlated to every other lineup you're playing and less fragile to any of your assumptions being wrong, but there is a balance here in between the costs in the form of what you are sacrificing with your ROI or saber scores shown here versus the diversification you're getting with the min uniques as a general guideline.

I recommend incrementing your min uniques up one at a time, one by one, and notice how it affects your aggregate metrics. In general, typically your first few increments you make are going to have a very small impact, but this impact will get bigger and bigger as you increase the min uniques more and more.

What I look for is a big drop off point in my aggregate metrics, whether that's the ROI if you're on ultimate, or saber score if you're on the starter plan. And once I find that point, I will back my min uniques back one or two increments before that drop off took place. And this lets me maximize the amount of diversification I'm able to get while minimizing the cost to the quality of my lineups here.

Now, I'll show this in a second, but one quick note, if you are on the ultimate plan and running contest sims and sorting by ROI, there is some natural diversification already baked into the way that ROI is calculated. So if you literally see no changes to your aggregate metrics in the first few increments, don't panic.

Your lineups are probably just as diversified by ROI alone up to that minunix number. You can keep going until you actually find the point. where mini niques becomes limiting. So let's walk through this here first using the contest sims and talking through this here. I would just start incrementing.

Assuming I'm playing 150 lineups into a flagship type tournament. I would start incrementing my mini niques up. Noticing what is happening here with my median and minimum. So you'll notice at two, nothing changed at all. I was already meeting two minimum uniques already. At three, we drop off a little bit on the minimum here, but only by a little bit.

I'll keep going through to four and continue to study what happens here with my min uniques. Again, this is still probably not a very big drop off. I'm looking for a significant fall off in the min uniques, and there it is. So you can kind of really see the difference. between four and five. What happens there?

So at three, just to show you this one more time, three min uniques, I'm at 111. 6 and about 91 on the min. When I go to four, I go to, as my median ROI, I go to 100. 2 and 80. 3. What happens at five? I get a significant drop off. All of a sudden I'm seeing that I've basically slashed my minimum ROI in half.

I've seen a big drop off in the median as well. I would probably go back to somewhere around three or four, depending on your comfort there with the difference between those two options. I personally would probably lean a little bit more to going to form and uniques. Now, just so you can see an example, let's say we weren't using the contest Sims and we were instead using saber score.

I'll change this to large slate 50 K. So we're starting by the same thing and we can see what we are getting here now going back again. So. Uh, with the large slate, what we are going to see is our top saber score is ranked 90 here. Median is 89 min is 88. I would increment this the same way again, looking for a big drop off in the way that my saber score here is calculated.

So if we keep going up to three. Up to four, up to five, up to six. Okay, now you can see again, it's a big drop off there. Now you should be thinking about this from a relative standpoint, right? You're going to see numbers differently here, and you're going to get different results if you were doing this with ContestSim.

Or with SARE score, but you're looking for that point here where Saber simm has to make a big jump down to get the same level to get, to get to that next level of diversification. So you saw, we were seeing very flat changes in our min SARE score numbers here up until we went from five to six. That's that point where that drop off is two extreme there, where that, where the curve of how your SABRE scores has been changing.

at each increment changes dramatically. So in this case, I would back off probably either to four or five here. If I was playing with just SaberSquad on this slate, I might end up more at the five point mark here. And that is where we're seeing that big drop off. Now we get a ton of questions about how our advice regarding MinUnique should be used in specific situations.

How many MinUnique should I use for my late swap build? How many men unique should I use for NBA? How many for MLB? How many for NHL? What about showdown? And the point of this video here was really to outline a system that you can apply across the board. Diversification and reducing your portfolio fragility is generally always going to be a good thing, but you should measure the benefits that you get from it against the cost to either your ROI or your Sabre score in general, your lineup quality.

If you follow what I have outlined here, you should really be able to take as much advantage as possible from the benefits of Minunix. while minimizing those costs. So to sum up, MinUniques mitigates variance and reduces the fragility of the lineups we play into our contests by making our lineups different from each other.

Most other optimizers get this wrong because this kind of diversification should be done as a part of the way that your lineups are selected, not the way that they are actually constructed. But increasing MinUniques does not come without costs completely. So in general, you should use them up until the point where the benefits are still outweighing those costs.

In general, increment your minuniques up one at a time and look for that point where you see a big drop off on the minimum measurement of your lineup quality here, whether that's ROI or whether that's saver score. But of course, minuniques are only a very small part of the DFS puzzle and certainly not the skeleton key to DFS success.

So. For a complete guide on how to beat NFL DFS, you should check out this video next. And in the meantime, thanks for watching. Good luck. And I'll see you in the next one.

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