Optimize Your DFS Portfolio: Contest Selection With The SaberSystem

Welcome back to the Saber system, a complete guide to beating DFS. My name is Jordan Chan. I'm the head coach here at SaberSim. And in the first video in this series, I laid out the five principles you need to follow to be successful playing DFS. They are in order first, understand the odds and the variance of DFS.

Second, optimize your portfolio. Third, keep your lineup building process simple. Fourth, follow the news. And fifth, study the sharks. Now in the first video, we laid out the theory behind these five principles, why these things matter and how they help you become a better DFS player. In the rest of the videos in this series, I'll be walking through and putting these principles into practice with my actual DFS play.

From entering contests, to building lineups, to late swapping, and finally to reviewing in contest flashback. So, without much further ado here, we've got the baseball slate pulled up and the lobby for today. I'm going to start by just entering the contests exactly how I would for today's baseball games here in terms of what principles are going to come up the most here when it comes to entering contests and contest selection and bankroll management.

It's mostly about the optimizing your portfolio side of things here. I'm going to be selecting contests that allow me to raise my expected ROI by targeting the contests that have the softest competition, and also by minimizing the variance by entering a lot of different contests across a variety of different slates and just getting a lot of lineups in play.

The first step here to actually do this is to make sure that you have defined a bankroll. Now, this is going to mean a different thing for different people. For some people, it's going to be the money that you have in your DraftKings or FanDuel account. For others, it's the amount that you are comfortable committing to DFS.

If you lost that amount of money, for example, you would just be done. For me, I'm working with a bankroll of about 5, 000 for the baseball slate on, er, for the baseball season on DraftKings this year here. So that's what I'm going to use as my baseline, but just have a sense of what your actual bankroll is before you're thinking about entering contests here.

What I want to do with my bankroll from there is first to play about two and a half to 5 percent of that on the main slate tonight. So that's a seven game slate that kicks off at five Oh seven here. If I have enough action into that slate and I'll show you exactly what that looks like in a minute here.

And I want to spread out into some other slates. I don't want to exceed more than 10 percent of that bankroll for today. So I'm going to be shooting to get about. 125 to 250 down in the main slate. And then no more than 500 across all of the slates here for today's games, which would be 10 percent of my bankroll to get that actually started here.

I'm going to first select the main slate on draft Kings. I'm going to select the classic game type, and I'm going to target tournaments and guaranteed tournaments here. And this is going to give us kind of our baseline, the contest that we want to be entering here. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to set the entry fee to 5 maximum And I just want to start entering the contest from lowest to highest first.

I want to make sure that I'm getting my action down in the easiest contests, and my money is going the furthest it can in terms of entering me into as many lineups as possible. The more shots on goal I have tonight, the more shots I'm going to have at a top finish. So rather than playing, if I was just playing 5 for example, rather than just playing that in the one 5 contest, I'd rather play that into the quarter jukebox and get 20 lineups in play.

For example, we'll cap the entry fee at 5 here. And then I'm going to sort the entry fees from lowest to highest and then begin entering contests. I typically, uh, skip the satellites completely here and skip these dime time contests. I don't think there's any problem with paying, playing these for 2 to get 20 extra lineups in play.

But I do have the general soft rule that I want the prize to first in any contest I'm going to play to be at least about what I'm playing on this, this slate overall. So 125 is my bottom range here of that 2. 5 percent of my bankroll. So, I'll probably start by playing the quarter jukebox and try to avoid anything that isn't playing paying at least a hundred bucks or so out to first.

So, to get entered into that first contest, I'm gonna go ahead and just enter this. And for the very first contest I enter, we can just fill this in. As a true dummy lineup. We'll be filling this in with real lineups here shortly in the next video in this series, but we'll go ahead and just get that entered.

Now we can use the bulk entry tool here to make this a little bit easier on DraftKings. So we'll go ahead and reapply some of these things here. Reset the entry fee maximum to 5 tournaments, and then flip the entry fee back upside down here. And we'll keep going down. So. I'm going to go ahead and finish maxing the quarter jukebox to get another 19 entries in there.

Continue to skip a lot of these smaller contests that are only paying out, say, 5 to first. Continue to skip a lot of the extra satellites, the winner take alls, things like that. The next contest we get to are the minimax, the solo shot, the daily dollar, and the strike three. I think these all make a lot of sense.

They all make sense to be mixed in here. If you couldn't afford to max out the minimax based on your bankroll, I think it would make sense to play the solo shot first. But I am good to just play all of these contests here. So I'm going to fill all of these here. And now I'm already up to 193 unique lineups that I'm going to be able to get into play here for a little, uh, around 104 here.

And I will continue to keep going here. So as we continue to scroll down the list, we see a lot of random 1 contests here. I don't even know why the 50 50s show up here if we're selecting tournaments, but we can keep going. The next contest that we're going to see that we actually want to enter start at this 3 range here.

Now at the 3 range on Giraffe Kings, you do want to be a little bit careful here. There is a difference between, uh, the types of 3 contests that you can play. So the Giraffe Kings rules as they are written is contests under 5. Contests under 3 period cannot be played by the top players in the lobby. So anything under 3, you're generally just good to enter and know that you're going to be playing against softer competition for contests under 5, but 3 or greater, so three to 4 and 99, 4 and 99 cents players with a If the contest has a prize pool of 25, 000 or less, it is a contest that the top players won't be able to enter.

So this Mega Minimax is a deceptively difficult contest to beat. In our post contest flashback, this is actually one of the tougher contests in the lobby here. The best players are able to enter this because it is a 3 entry fee and the prize pool is over 25, 000. So I'm actually going to skip this contest for now here and keep moving down the list.

So I'm going to play the Hot Corner next. Get three entries into that contest here. And then I'm going to move to the pickoff and get another entry in there, filling out some of these contests. These are 3 as well, but there won't be as tough of competition in these contests here because the sharks can't enter this here.

So as we continue to move down the list, we get to this 4 contest, which is actually quite a bit better than this 3 contest. The main reason why is that this is only a 15, 000 prize pool. So despite the fact that this is a 4 contest and this is a 3 contest, I'm actually going to generally prefer to play this contest when the prize pool is under 25, 000 here, because it is a contest that the best players won't be able to enter.

Whereas this one, There will be, there's a lot of pro players that play this contest and there'll be a lot of familiar names in here, this is a little bit of an easier contest to beat. So at this point, I'm getting to the 5 range here. Every contest that I can play in addition to this, that is on the main slate would be a contest that the top players have access to.

So I'm at the point here where I've entered, uh, of $196 into this slate that's right in between that goal that I had originally set of 125 to $250. So I'm gonna be totally happy with entering this on the main slate here. I would have been willing to play up to $250 on this slate. So I'm gonna branch out and look and see if I can get a little bit of additional action down in other slates.

On this day of D of baseball DFS, instead of just jamming this extra 55 or so into other tougher contests on the main slate. So I think that's a big point to, to grasp here is that any other extra action I put down on the main slate is going to do two things. One, it's going to go into tougher contests and two, it's going to be correlated.

My results in that, in that those contests are going to be correlated to the rest of the money I've already put in. I'm just getting additional action down on this exact same slate. But if I submit this here and use that extra, say 50 or so on showdowns or turbos or night slates one, I'm getting it down into softer contests where the, my opponents are not as strong because I'm back under that 3 range.

And second, it's slightly decorrelated to my results on this main slate here. If I play a showdown or a turbo slate, while those share games or a game with the games on the main slate, they don't share all of the games on the main slate, so the results in those contests are decorrelated from the rest of the action I'm playing here.

This is the way I would basically think about setting up your main slate. Contest selection is first, figure out about how much you want to play, two and a half to five percent of your bankroll, fill lowest to highest GPPs, and really target those contests that the pros can't play here. So, we'll go ahead and click submit there.

That looks like a good portfolio for the main slate. And now let's go back to the lobby, and I'm gonna look at some of the other contests here on the DraftKings lobby that we could potentially look at playing here. Okay, so if we come back to the lobby here, we've got a few different options. There are a few other slates that we can play today.

There's a turbo at 440 and a turbo at 610. We've also got a handful of different showdowns that we can play. 1235, 205, 507. So if we take a look at these, your options for these contests are not going to be as numerous as they would have been on the main slate, but there's still some pretty good contests to play here.

And again, it lets us just get a little bit of extra action in for this day of games here. And have it be a little less correlated to our results on the main slate. So let's look at some of these other classic slates here. We'll take a look at this 4. 40 here. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to look at contests under the 5 range and just see what's out there sorting lowest to highest entry fee here.

For these, the top prizes for these can sometimes get a little small. I'm probably still going to skip the dime time. The quarter jukebox I think is a fine, Contest to play. If you're just playing a little bit of action on each of these slates, but just be mindful of those prizes to first year and just make sure that their contests generally worth playing, but a 20, a 1, 20 max, that pays out 200 to first that the top players can't enter at all, looks like a pretty strong contest to me.

So I'm going to enter the quarter jukebox and the solo shot here and get another 25 down into this four 43 game showdown. So let's go ahead and get entered into those. We'll drop another dummy lineup in here just to fill this out and enter. And resort this here so we can easily see where we were. And similarly here.

So I'm playing 25 on this slate now, or roughly thereabouts. So I'm going to finish up the solo shot. And I'm also going to play the quarter jukebox because it is pays out 60 to first. I'm playing 25. I'm happy with getting some lineups in there. And that's probably going to be all I'm going to play here.

You could definitely consider playing this 4 seamer here. This is a pretty small contest, it's an 8 max. I'm going to prefer to instead get another, what would that be, 32 down into this 4 seamer to instead branch out into even more slates, some of the other turbos and showdowns that I can see here. So for now, I'm going to go ahead and just click submit there.

And then we'll keep going. So next up, let's take a look at that other showdown that we had for today, the two game. So this one's even a little bit smaller here. It looks like we have a very small quarter jukebox, the dime time, another four seamer here. I think this is still something that's worth playing.

One trick that I do like to use as I'm getting into the smaller contest here is I generally prefer to avoid playing more than 1 percent of the total entries in the contest here. So you can see this contest, if you maxed it out, Uh, would pay 5x to first if you want it. So it's 20 to max and it's 100 to first, which is pretty good.

I don't like to take up too many spots in contests in general here. Win. We are I don't like to take up too many spots in contests thinking about your lineups as a portfolio here again Remember that you can only win each contest once so we're talking about some micro stuff here But in general rather than playing the extra eight lineups into this solo shot.

I would rather just save that 8 and use it somewhere else because I can't win the solo, this solo shot twice, but I could use that as entries into some other contest or something like that. So I generally cap my entries. I'll play in a contest at 1 percent of the total entries that are in the contest.

So anyway, let's go ahead and keep doing this. So this will be 12 entries here and then another 15 entries into this quarter jukebox. Let's go ahead and get entered into those now. So we'll again, fill this out with a quick dummy And we'll go here and play the solo shot and play the quarter jukebox and we'll get entered there.

So let's keep going here. And I haven't been tracking exactly how much money I've been spending here. I think it was about 25 for the first showdown and another 15 for the second turbo. Sorry, not showdown turbo. So that's another 40 bucks. Remember, I just don't want to exceed over. 500 for my total days investment at this point, because this action is not correlated to my results in the mainsley in the same way.

So I'm willing to go a little bit over the original 250 threshold I had set here to play these contests, but I don't want to exceed more than 500 for the entire day. So we'll keep going here and now take a look at some of these showdown contests. This contest is coming up pretty quick here on us. So it looks like a lot of the main contests have already filled and now we have a lot of just these smaller, Versions of the contest.

So I'm actually just going to skip that one. If I had gotten to it earlier in the day, it might've been one I entered, but let's take a look at this angels and Yankees showdown and we see again, pretty decent contest here, at least a decent looking solo shot. That's one that I want to play. I'm going to play 18 entries into this contest here.

So we'll go ahead and fill out a dummy lineup and we'll at least, Oh, he is actually in the lineup. And get entered here as well. And we'll do another 17 into the solo shot. The quarter jukebox, it's fine to just play 20 in there. 1900 is good enough for me. So again, we're playing 22 into this contest here.

We'll go ahead and click submit. And now we'll go back and look at a handful of the other showdowns here. There should be two more. We have Baltimore and Toronto and we have the Phillies and the Dodgers. So a couple more to enter into here. It looks like a similar structure here. For these, we'll go ahead and drop into the solo shot and drop another 17 into that and fill out the quarter jukebox here.

This tool tip always drives me crazy. And get entered in there. And then the last slate that I will be playing for today here is the night game showdown. Which the night game showdown and the night game main slate or the night slate generally have pretty strong prize pools. If you don't want to play all of these different contests on a given day, I would at least check out the showdown for the night slate and the night slate.

Classic style. They generally just do have very strong prize pools. And a lot of times it's a good place to dump some of your extra action into here. So we'll go ahead and get entered into the solo shot and the quarter jukebox here. Okay. and put another 19 there and another 20 into the quarter jukebox.

So once we enter these, let's go look at the overall contest portfolio that we've put together here and talk a little bit more about it. But that is how I would go about entering my contests for a given slate. What we have done here is we have in total, actually, let's get this uploaded. So let's summarize what we've done here and why this works so well as a portfolio.

So we've taken a bankroll of about 5, 000, identified two and a half to 5 percent of that for the main slate, which is 125 to 250. And about 500 total, 10 percent of our bankroll that we'd be willing to play on the day. We took that action and we branched that out into 400 different entries that we'll get to play over baseball today.

400, 408 different shots at first place in 24 different contests here. And we've played this across six or seven different slates. All of our lineups are also entered into the contest that the top players can't play, where our ROI is expected to be the highest. And now I haven't played a massive amount of action on today's slate overall.

We probably have about maybe 250 total in play, maybe somewhere closer to about 300. But we've played that action into a way where we've gotten a ton of different shots on goal against the easiest opponents here. And that's a key point here. You could have taken that same amount of money and maybe just dumped it into a handful of entries into the flagship, maybe 10 or 15 different entries into the flagship, and you'd be competing for a bigger prize, but you'd be competing against much tougher competition in a much more higher variance way.

You can play it in this way. a lot more safer while also making profit more reliably in DFS because we're playing contests that have a higher ROI and we're spreading out our action into more shots so our variance is going down. Now 408 entries across six or seven different slates may seem intimidating to you, Don't worry, in the next video I'll show you exactly how I'm going to go about building lineups here.

And remember, principle number three that I outlined in the first video is to keep your lineup building process simple. SaberSim allows you to keep your lineup building process simple by leveraging our simulations to do 80 percent of the busy work here anyway. So it doesn't take a lot of time to get good lineups filled into these contests.

And entered and have a shot at first place here. Now the last note I wanted to make here is if you want to take some occasional shots at a big payday by playing the flagship or high stakes, single entry, or just gamble a little bit, it's totally fine, but you should be treating that as an entertainment expense and separate it from the rest of your DFS play.

If you are serious about making money playing DFS, this is the right way to optimize your contest portfolio overall. It's totally fine to have a fun sweat at a 50k or 100k or a million dollar payday playing some of these other contests or dropping a couple entries into the flagship here or there. I do it all the time.

I think it's a lot of fun, but just treat that separate from your main overall DFS portfolio and make sure you're gambling is smart in a way. That it doesn't totally offset the profit that you're working on building following the Sabre system. That's all I've got for this episode here. That's generally what my contest selection process looks like on a day of baseball DFS.

In the next episode, I'll show you how I'm going to be building my lineups for these different contests.

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