If you’ve been playing season-long fantasy football for a while, you’ve probably wondered if there are any more methods to improve your game and your overall experience. Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests are a lot of fun, and they give fantasy managers the opportunity to pick a new team each week and engage in exciting games against friends, family, and dedicated fans. What’s the best part? Some of these contests have cash prizes! Whether you’re entirely new to DFS or just getting your feet wet, this article will walk you through the fundamentals of participating in these daily tournaments.
Select your slate
The first step is to decide which slate will be used to create lineups. In the upper right corner of the Optimizer page, there are three drop-down menus. From the menu options, select the week, the DFS site, and the game slate. The menu selections will only show slates that have already been priced. Different DFS hosting sites such as NBA Draftkings Optimizer publish pricing for their various slates at different times, but as the week goes, each site should have more game slates available.
Make a profile
The following step is to give our profile a name. The configurations we choose in the next steps will be kept so we don’t have to re-enter them each time we return to the Optimizer over the week. When we click the blue “Load” button in the upper-left corner of the Optimizer page, the profile we’re about to create will be available for the rest of the week. Each profile will be unique to a given slate, so if you make one for a FanDuel slate, you won’t be able to use it for a DraftKings slate.
Players page
This takes us to a screen where we can see the salary, projected ownership, projected points, and estimated upside for each player in the selected slate. By clicking on the figures and altering the numbers, you can change a player’s expected points or upside. If you change a player’s expected points, his upside will change immediately. If you change a player’s upside, his projected points don’t change.
Make a lineup
We’re ready to click the orange “Build Lineups” button after making our desired modifications on the Players tab. Based on all of the information we’ve provided, the Optimizer will generate the desired number of lineups. We can download a CSV file with all of the lineups to your browser’s default download location. Click the orange “Export” button to do so. To avoid having to manually enter all of your lineups, you can send the CSV file directly to the host DFS site — in this example, you can check NFL Fanduel Optimizer.
