Daily Fantasy Football Strategy

Player Lab

Player Lab has one simple goal: To help you find the players who are poised to have huge games.

As DFS players, we do this by looking for indicators or 'criteria' that tell us a player has a statistical advantage over the rest. This is daily fantasy football strategy 101. This could be the simple fact that a player is facing a bad corner back, or maybe he has seen a big jump in touches because the starter was injured. Maybe his opponent historically gives up a ton of snaps to their opponents. There are a multitude of indicators to look for, and that is precisely the problem.

Don't get me wrong, the information is out there! In the form of endless daily fantasy football advice articles. Endless pages of data, week by week rankings. Everything you need to create a killer fanduel or draftkings nfl lineup is published. But A) you have to know what to look for and B) you have to burn hours and hours pulling this data together and figuring out which of your players meet not one criteria, but multiple criteria. Simply put, it so time consuming that it is prohibitive. Professional daily fantasy football players have built homegrown solutions to automate this process. So if you don't have hours a day to spend on DFS, it is going to be very hard to stay competitive.

This is what inspired us to create Player Lab! Lets take a look at the layout: daily fantasy football strategy - main screen

Here is an example of Player Lab in use. I am researching Running Backs. There are several indicators (or 'filters') in the top section. You can see that several are toggled on, and the in the chart below, several players are highlighted green. One glance and hopefully the system starts to make sense.

We are using these filters to find players that meet our criteria, the exact indicators described above. Things like:

  • Is he facing a poor defense? (Defense vs Rush)
  • What is the Vegas O/U?
  • How much does his team depend on him? (Load%)
  • Has he had a recent spike in touches? (Touch Trends)
  • ... and many more

The idea is simple but insanely powerful: The more filters a player meets, the better statistical chance he has at being great today. You can experiment with different filters and with just a little work, you can find VERY interesting players. You can use the system to speed up your typical research, or you can try to employ new strategies that you have wanted to try, but maybe didn't know where to find the data. (or didn't have enough time to round it up every day!)

Daily Fantasy Football Strategies you Never Knew

And here is the other great thing about player lab. There is a good chance that some of these filters are very new and foreign to you. Now you can easily uncover and understand advanced strategies for fanduel and draftkings. And then you have the data right at your finger tips!

If you want to understand each filter, hover your mouse over the filter name and you will see a tooltip. dfs strategy - ss2

Each filter is fully configurable. Click on the little 'gear' icon to open it up. dfs strategy - ss3

Here you can set up your filter, in this case, I am going to set my Vegas Total to 48. Now players will only be highlighted if they are in games with a Vegas Total of 48 points or higher. If you want to learn more about the filter, click on the 'more info' link and you can read the theory behind it.

Ok, so you can select multiple filters and find very very interesting players. Great. But before we go on, lets take a look at the actual table of data itself: dfs strategy - ss4

Many of these columns are self explanatory, but if something doesn't make sense you can hover over it to see what the tooltip says. dfs algorthim - ss5

Finally, after we have selected some filters and we have a group of interesting players, we can then either send that data to the optimizer, or download it in an excel file: integrate-with nfl lineup optimizer - ss6

So there you have it. Let us know what you think, and please send in your filter & data suggestions here. We have several more on the way, but we will definitely re-prioritize based on feedback.

Go check out Player Lab here. And don't forget to register with us to hear about new Player Lab filters when they are released.

Player Lab - Tutorial Video