NFL DFS: How To Leverage Super Bowl Sims To Make DraftKings Lineups
Simulations took NFL DFS by storm this season, and so too will they for Sunday’s Super Bowl contests on DraftKings and FanDuel.
Find out how our experts are using our DFS sims tool, SimLabs, to create DraftKings lineups for the Super Bowl.
You can get more tips for using DFS Sims in our SimLabs FAQ.
NFL DFS: How We’re Using Super Bowl Sims
Chris Gimino: I don’t want friends. It’s a terrible notion that has grown living in the Philadelphia area for nearly 20 years, and it will dominate my SimLabs strategy for the Super Bowl. I will be looking to make lineups with as few friends joining me as possible in order to keep my lineups unique. I intend to increase my chances of this by leaving more than $1,500 in salary on as many lineups as it makes sense to.
I will build 150 lineups using settings that heavily favor the “Simulation Weight” and then sort by salary. I will proceed to take all of the lineups that are in that build under $48,600 and save them. I will then repeat this as necessary until I have way more lineups built than I intend to enter.
Once I have my pool of cheap lineups, I will sort by Simulation Weight to get rid of the lowest performers. I will sort by top 100 ratings and eliminate more until I have about double the number of teams I will enter. From there, I will attempt to normalize my exposure to the players I like as best as I can without overthinking it.
Players I like that aren’t named Christian McCaffrey: Noah Gray, Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Deebo Samuel, San Francisco D/ST, Kickers.
DFS Sims for Large Field Tournaments
Dan Gaspar: I plan on using SimLabs for the Super Bowl the same way I have for all NFL Showdown slates since it’s launch: Retrieve and trim. As I’ll largely be focusing on large-field tournaments, that will be my default setting, and I will select a high results range to get a wide variety of lineups. In the more advanced settings, I plan on weighing Simulation Weight the highest and Correlation Weight the lowest. From there, I will click “Get Lineups” and save the lineups I like the most from that batch. I will repeat this process as many times as needed to get the number of desired saved lineups that I want.
Once I have my desired number of saved lineups, I will trim those lineups down to the number of lineups I want to play. I will do this a couple of different ways: I’ll be trimming straight in SimLabs based on Top 100 rating, and I’ll be syncing to LineupHQ and trimming from there. Syncing to LineupHQ allows me to view the lineups using aggregated projections and also allows me to view my SimLabs lineups next to those that I will create in LineupHQ.
Weighting the Simulations
Justin Carlucci: I’m going to run SimLabs a few times with the Simulation Weight set to High and the Projection Weight to Very Low. And then I’ll do the opposite to see if there are any glaring differences or discrepancies. In a Showdown type of format, you can all but throw correlation out the window if you’re trying to finish well within the top 1%, so I will set that weight to Very Low.
I’ll typically figure out ahead of time how many different Captains I plan on using, and then I’ll lock in each Captain one by one to create a ton of lineups for each specific Captain. I’ll save each lineup that I like, sifting through hundreds of them for each Captain.
Finding An Edge With DFS Sims
Kyle Murray: The Super Bowl brings the biggest Showdown slate of the season, and I will be more prepared than ever with SimLabs. First, I will evaluate our player simulations to determine if anyone sticks out as a place where I can gain an edge. I will do this by comparing a player’s Opto% to their projected ownership. By finding which players appear in the optimal lineup in our sims more or less often than their projected ownership, you can find spots to take stances on in your lineups. At the time I am writing this, our Sims show edges on guys like Deebo Samuel and Rashee Rice as CPT/MVP options, so I will be increasing my exposure on those guys right in the SimLabs tool.
Simulating Captain Ownership on DraftKings
Keith Eyster: One of the best uses of SimLabs that I have experienced so far has been for NFL Showdown. Sifting through simulated lineups as opposed to building a large amount of groups in LineupHQ to get anything close to the lineups I want to play has been an incredible time saver. The massive prize pools for the Super Bowl will no doubt make SimLabs a huge part of my lineup building process this week.
My process starts by considering Captain pOWN%. Immediately, Christian McCaffrey jumps out as the highest owned in this regard. I certainly don’t disagree that CMC should be the highest-owned player for the game, but there is some game theory involved. There are plenty of other high-upside players I will look to be overweight on, like Deebo Samuel, Travis Kelce, George Kittle, and Rashee Rice.
Let’s use Deebo to demonstrate how I intend to accomplish building out my lineups. Early-week builds are only giving me 2-5% Deebo in the Captain spot (depending on variance) in a 150-lineup build. If I want to be at 10% Deebo in my 150 lineups, I can easily just increase my exposure by using the ‘+’ button on the exposures tab, but there is another method I prefer to accomplish this. If I select Deebo Samuel as CPT in the “Lock Players” section, I can build as many as 150 lineups with Deebo at Captain. Then I can select and save my 15 preferred lineups (to get to 10% exposure for my 150 lineups) from that build. I will repeat this process for each player I want exposure to.
More NFL DFS Tips
See below for a SimLabs video tutorial.
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