Okay, so I wanted to make some serious cash on FanDuel, and I heard about these “lineup optimizers.” I figured, why not give it a shot? It sounded complicated, but I was determined to figure it out.
First, I started poking around online, looking for a decent optimizer. There are a bunch out there, some free, some paid. I opted for one of the free ones to start because, well, I didn’t want to spend money before I even knew if this thing worked.
Finding and Understanding the Optimizer
The website I found looked…intimidating. Lots of numbers, player names, and abbreviations I didn’t recognize. I felt like I was staring at the control panel of a spaceship. I spent a good hour just clicking around, trying to make sense of everything.
Eventually, I started to grasp the basics. You basically import the player list from FanDuel (which I figured out how to download – that was a victory in itself!). Then, the optimizer lets you set all these rules, like:
- Salary Cap: Of course, you gotta stay under the FanDuel salary cap.
- Min/Max Players from a Team: You can tell it to use, say, at least two players from the Chiefs, or no more than three.
- Min/Max Player salary: you can input minimum or maximum salary of players.
- Min/Max Exposure to a Player: This was a cool one. You can limit how many lineups a certain player appears in. So, if you’re not super confident about a player, you can tell it to only include him in, like, 20% of your lineups.
Experimenting and Tweaking
I spent hours just playing around with these settings. I’d create some rules, run the optimizer, and see what kind of lineups it spat out. Some of them looked promising, others… not so much. It was a lot of trial and error. I felt like a mad scientist, tweaking variables and hoping for a breakthrough.
I learned pretty quickly that just hitting “optimize” wasn’t enough. You gotta put some thought into it. For example, I noticed that the optimizer loved to pick cheap, no-name players to fill out the roster. Which, I guess, makes sense mathematically, but it felt risky. So I started setting minimum salary thresholds for certain positions.
The Results?
Honestly, it’s been a mixed bag. I haven’t won any huge jackpots yet, but I’ve definitely had some decent wins. I think the optimizer helps me create more diverse lineups, which increases my chances of hitting on something. Before, I’d just pick players I liked, which probably wasn’t the smartest strategy.
It’s definitely not a magic bullet, but more of a tool. And I can improve it.
It’s a learning process, and I’m still figuring it out.
