The 3 Reasons You Need LineupHQ to Win at MLB DFS
CheeseIsGood, a two-time winner of a $1,000,000 first place prize in DFS, is here to tell you how he uses the RotoGrinders MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ.
We’ve launched our SimLabs Lineup Generation Tool for NFL, PGA, and NBA, so we’re happy to announce that our SimLabs MLB lineup generator is also in development.
The MLB DFS season is upon us!
Transitioning to a new sport can be challenging, especially a sport with so much data like we have for MLB. RotoGrinders is loaded with all of the tools and information you need, such as our amazing (and free) PlateIQ tool. And when it comes time to build those lineups, our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ, has you covered. Whether you’re building one lineup or 150 lineups, for one site or multiple sites, you can customize LineupHQ so it spits out exactly what you’re looking for.
There is a ton of data on the main screen of LineupHQ, and you can use as much (or as little) of it as you need for your purposes. From the most basic perspective, the best thing about LineupHQ is having all the players, salaries, matchups, positions, games, odds, etc. in one tidy package. You don’t have to toggle back and forth among different screens to find out who the starting pitchers are or what game has the highest total. And with an MLB Premium subscription, not only will you get access to this nifty optimizer we call LineupHQ, it will come loaded with player projections and projected ownership.
But when all lineups have been released and the slate is nearing lock, there are three features I use in LineupHQ that I feel give me an edge over the rest of the field:
1. Player Pool Customization
First off, the projections themselves can be edited if you just want to give more or less weight to a certain player. Now I don’t recommend changing projections if you are a DFS novice, but it is an option. Ultimately though, my two favorite ways of getting what I want in my lineups are using Mn% / Mx% and OIS.
Personally, I put most of my effort into the Mn% / Mx%. This is where you are able to tell the optimizer to give you at least this much of Player A (Mn%) and no more than this much of Player B (Mx%). As an example, some days there will be a player who projects extremely well in the P/$ column, and he shows up in every lineup you make. One thing you can do is manually lower his projection, as noted in the paragraph above. But if you don’t want to mess with that, simply put 30% in the Mx% box, and voila, he will only be in 30% of your lineups.
OIS stands for ‘Only In Stacks’. If you are a mass-multi entry (MME) player, building multiple lineups with stacks, I cannot recommend this enough. Quite simply, if you check this box on a player in LineupHQ, that player will only show up in lineups with his teammates and will not be used outside of those stacks. Even with little to no baseball knowledge, this can immensely help your lineups, just by not allowing players with low projections into your non-stacked lineups.
One other thing you can do is simply X out (exclude) players that you don’t want at all in any lineups. And most days, I will completely remove quite a few players from my player pool.
2. Build Rules
I am not going to discuss all of the tabs that you see at the top of LineupHQ. But I do want to talk briefly about the Build Rules and Stacks pages, as these are the other spots I cannot live without when making my MLB DFS lineups.
If you’ve used LineupHQ for any other sports, you’ll be familiar with the Build Rules page. One thing that I use much more for MLB than any other sport is the Range of Outcomes slider. As I have mentioned numerous times over the years in my content, and will talk about a lot throughout this upcoming season, the range of outcomes for baseball projections is wider than in any other sport. So I am much more open to using a larger range of outcomes, which is where this specific tool comes in handy. I don’t have a set number to recommend, and because I use the Mn% / Mx% and OIS, some of that work is already done for me. But I can tell you that I never have the Range of Outcomes slider set at zero for MLB.
I also like to use the Number of Unique Players slider to help make sure I’m not getting similarly grouped lineups, and I will typically set that to 3 or more.
3. Stacks
MLB is one of the most stacking-heavy DFS sports, meaning you typically want to correlate your lineups with multiple players from the same team. The Stacks page allows you to do this quickly and easily (and works in tandem with the OIS checkbox that we already discussed). You’ll see two main sections on the stacking page, Quick Stacks and Exposure Summary.
Quick Stacks is where you tell the optimizer what types of stacks you want. You can choose as basic as 100% of one type of lineup, or split it up any way you choose by just checking the boxes and entering the percentage you want of that type of stack.
And then with Exposure Summary, you get to tell the optimizer what teams you want included. You can set it exactly to 100% of what you want or set a number higher than 100% to allow the optimizer some flexibility to give you more of the highest projected options. In the following example, you’ll see that I asked for 25% of four teams as my primary stack, so those four teams are the only teams that I will have 5-player stacks for. And then for the secondary stack, I allowed for up to 20% of every team. So I’m going to get more combinations but won’t have too many of any one team since I am limiting them each to 20%.
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