by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2023-03-21 16:21:13
CheeseIsGood, a two-time winner of a $1,000,000 first place prize in DFS, is here to talk to you about how he uses the RotoGrinders MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ.
The MLB DFS season is upon us!
Transitioning to a new sport can be challenging, especially a sport with so much data, like we have for MLB. RotoGrinders is loaded with all of the tools and information you need, such as our amazing PlateIQ tool. And when it comes time to build those lineups, our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ, has you covered. Whether you’re building one lineup or 150 lineups, for one site or multiple sites, you can customize LineupHQ so it spits out exactly what you’re looking for.
How To Use LineupHQ For MLB DFS – The Basics
I want to talk about a couple of my favorite features of LineupHQ that I use the most for MLB. But first, we should probably cover the basic necessities.
There is a ton of data on the main screen of LineupHQ, and you can use as much (or as little) of it as you need for your purposes. From the most basic perspective, the best thing about LineupHQ is having all the players, salaries, matchups, and positions in one tidy package. You don’t have to toggle back and forth between different screens to find out who the starting pitchers are or what game has the highest total.
With an MLB Premium subscription, LineupHQ will come loaded with player projections and projected ownership. Every column on LineupHQ is sortable just by clicking on the header, and the most basic way to start is simply to sort by projection or salary. This is where having everything on one page is an advantage. You will quickly be able to see what positions have large gaps in projection or salary and where everyone is closely bunched together. You also have a Points Per Dollar (P/$) tab next to the projections which you can use to find the best values.
And if you’re new to MLB DFS and unsure where to begin the lineup-building process? Well, we’ve got you covered! Premium subscribers will have access to expert recommendations from some of the best MLB DFS players in the game, right there in LineupHQ. If you click the CheeseIsGood icon, you will get my favorite plays on that specific slate.
Three Reasons Why You Need LineupHQ, An MLB DFS Optimizer
Now, I know what some of you are already thinking at this point. If you’re already familiar with my content, you’ll find that I don’t personally like to rely on projections as much for MLB as other sports due to the wider range of outcomes. That is where the next few tools I want to highlight come into play, specifically:
- Player Pool Customization
- Build Rules
- Stacks
1. Player Pool Customization
First off, the projections themselves can be edited if you just want to give more or less weight to a certain player. Now I don’t recommend changing projections if you are a DFS novice, but it is an option.
Personally, my two favorite ways of getting what I want in my lineups are further over to the right side of the LineupHQ screen. You’ll find a box for Mn% and Mx%, as well as a checkbox labeled OIS.
OIS stands for ‘Only In Stacks’. If you are a mass-multi entry (MME) player, building multiple lineups with stacks, I cannot recommend this enough. Quite simply, if you check this box, that player will only show up in lineups with his teammates and will not be used outside of those stacks. Even with little to no baseball knowledge, this can immensely help your lineups, just by not allowing players with low projections into your non-stacked lineups.
Personally, I put most of my effort into the Mn% / Mx%. This is where you are able to tell the lineup builder to give you at least this much of Player A (Mn%) and no more than this much of Player B (Mx%). As an example, some days there will be a player who projects extremely well in the P/$ column, and he shows up in every lineup you make. One thing you can do is manually lower his projection, as noted earlier. But if you don’t want to mess with that, simply put 30% in the Mx% box, and voila, he will only be in 30% of your lineups.
One other thing you can do is simply X out (exclude) players that you don’t want at all in any lineups. And most days, I will completely remove quite a few players from my player pool.
2. Build Rules
I am not going to discuss all of the other tabs that you see at the top of LineupHQ. But I do want to talk briefly about the Build Rules and Stacks pages, as these are the other spots I cannot live without when making my MLB DFS lineups.
If you’ve used LineupHQ for any other sports, you’ll be familiar with the Build Rules page. One thing that I use much more for MLB is the Range of Outcomes slider. As I mentioned, and will talk about a lot throughout the season, the range of outcomes for baseball projections is wider than in any other sport, so I am much more open to using a larger range of outcomes. I don’t have a set number to recommend, and because I use the Mn%/Mx% and OIS, some of that work is already done for me. But I can tell you that I never have the range of outcomes set at zero for MLB.
I also like to use the Number of Unique Players slider to help make sure I’m not getting similarly grouped lineups, and I will typically set that to 3 or more.
3. Stacks
MLB is one of the most stacking-heavy DFS sports, meaning you typically want to correlate your lineups with multiple players from the same team. The Hitter Stacks page allows you to do this quickly and easily (and works in tandem with the OIS box that we discussed). You’ll see two main sections on the stacking page, ‘Quick Stacks’ and ‘Exposure Summary’.
‘Quick Stacks’ is where you tell the Lineup Builder what types of stacks you want. You can choose as basic as 100% of one type of lineup, or split it up any way you choose by just checking the boxes and entering the percentage you want of that type of stack.
And then with ‘Exposure Summary’, you get to tell the optimizer what teams you want included. You can set it exactly to 100% of what you want or set a number higher than 100% to allow the optimizer some flexibility to give you more of the highest projected options. In the following example, you’ll see that I asked for 25% of four teams as my primary stack, so those four teams are the only teams that I will have 5-player stacks for. And then for the secondary stack, I allowed for up to 20% of every team. So I’m going to get more combinations but won’t have too many of any one team since I am limiting them each to 20%.
If you are new to LineupHQ, this may have seemed like a lot of information. But I assure you that after just a few days of building lineups with this amazing tool, it becomes very intuitive. There are a lot of ways to use LineupHQ, and so many more things you can do, but these are the features that I use the most.
If you’re new to MLB DFS, or just want a very basic quick start to start building MLB lineups, this is what I would recommend:
1) Use either the Expert Filters or the projections and put a Mn% on the players you want to be sure to get in your lineups.
2) Exclude the lowest projected, lowest P/$ players at each position from your pool.
3) If you are playing tournaments, go to the Stacks page and check at least 2-3 of the Quick Stacks and put a Mx% on every team you are willing to stack.
4) Hit that glorious blue BUILD button and watch as the little wizards in the machine do their thing.
I hope you join me and the rest of the RotoGrinders team along for the ride this upcoming MLB season. Not only will your MLB Premium subscription get you access to this world-class LineupHQ tool we’ve been discussing, but you will also get my Million Dollar Musings article Monday through Friday.
