Creating Cash Lineups

Creating Lineups for Cash Games

As promised, it’s finally time to start discussing how to use your lineup optimizer to create rosters for your DFS contests. We’ll first discuss creating rosters for cash games.

Your DFS cash games roster should be built around a core group of players. These should be players you’ve identified, while doing your research, as top tier picks. The difficult part about creating cash games rosters, once you’ve identified your top picks, is fitting in the best mix of players within the salary cap and required roster positions. An optimizer can make this a lot easier.

Here’s some steps for creating cash game rosters using an optimizer:

1. Lock in any players you’ve deemed “must plays”. These are players you want to make sure they’re in 100% of your lineups.
2. “Favorite” or “Like” any players you want to be included in your rosters, but you don’t deem 100% must plays (otherwise lock these players).
3. Set any “rules” you want your lineup creation to abide by, through filters in the generator. This is a pretty broad step, that includes strategy discussed throughout this page and depends partially on the optimizer you’re using. Filters you may want to include for your players could include the following:
   • Filter rosters to only include players in a specific salary range.
   • Filter rosters to only include players with a certain level of projections or projected value.
   • Filter players with a minimum number of projected minutes.
   • Filter players of particular volatility levels.
   • Set a minimum salary used for your rosters.
   • Filter players by batting order, stacking options, or other sport specific factors discussed below.
4. At this time, you can generate lineups. The rosters you generate at this point will not necessarily be the rosters you end up using. This step is used to how the generated rosters look, compared to how you want your final roster to look. From here you can make additional needed tweaks and changes like these:
5. Exclude any players being put in your lineup that you do not which to roster.
6. Adjust players’ exposure percentages if you only want them to be included in a maximum number of your rosters.
7. Make sure your locked and favorited (liked) players are in the percentage of lineups you wish them to be in. Adjust as necessary.
8. Continue making tweaks and adjusting filters until you create optimized lineup(s), based off your research.

*TIP: While in the “adjustment phase” of creating rosters, generate more rosters than you actually plan to play. Sometimes you’ll find rosters more to your liking in these additional rosters. You can then save these lineups in your optimizer.

You’ve probably noticed the reliance on filters when generating rosters. This is why you’ll typically find lineup optimizers with many features rated more highly in our reviews.

When creating rosters, it’s important to remember that generator tools have limitations imposed by daily fantasy site’s roster requirements. Attempting to lock 9 players all priced above $8,000 on DraftKings will of course not allow your tool to create any rosters, due to the $50,000 DraftKings salary cap. Similarly, locking in 6 wide receivers would also not work, as the max receivers allowed is 4 (3 WR positions and flex position). These are extreme and obvious example, but it’s important to recognize roster limitations.