How to Use the Lineup Optimizer

Before you touch a single player, look at the game board. It's the horizontal strip of game cards above the player pool — one card per game on the slate.

Each card shows the Vegas total, implied team totals, and weather conditions for that game. Color coding tells you at a glance which environments are elevated: green means 17+ implied points, yellow is 14–17, muted means under 14.

The game board is your first filter. Click a game card once to include it — the player pool immediately narrows to only players from that game. Click again to exclude a game — those players disappear from all generated lineups. Click again to reset to neutral.

Use includes when you want to concentrate on specific games. Use excludes when you want to avoid a low-total or weather-affected game entirely. The optimizer treats every game board selection as a hard constraint.

The gear icon on each card opens per-game settings — you can set a maximum number of players from that game, or from each individual team. Useful when you want exposure to a game but don't want to over-stack it.

The player pool pulls directly from Field Vision's projections for the current week. Switch between DraftKings and FanDuel using the site toggle — the pool reloads with the correct salaries and projections for each platform.

Lock players you want in every lineup by clicking the pin icon. Locked players get a green glow and appear in the locked players bar above the generate button. You can also lock an entire team by clicking the team abbreviation — useful when you want full exposure to a specific offense.

Exclude players you want to avoid entirely by clicking the X icon. Excluded players gray out and strike through — they won't appear in any generated lineup.

Edit projections to override Field Vision's numbers with your own read. Click any projection value, type your number, and hit Enter. Edited values display in green so you always know which projections you've changed. The optimizer uses your number — not ours — for every lineup it builds. Reset any override by clicking the × next to the edited value, or clear all overrides at once from the summary bar.

Sort the pool by any column. The default is projection descending — highest projected players first. Sorting by Value (projection per $1,000 of salary) is useful for finding salary efficiency. Sorting by Own% helps identify high-ownership chalk and low-ownership leverage spots.

Use the GPP / Cash toggle to tell the optimizer what it's building for.

GPP mode optimizes for ceiling. It adds a small amount of random variance to each player's projection per lineup — which is how it generates diverse lineups rather than the same roster over and over. Stacking rules are on by default.

Cash mode optimizes for floor. No variance is added, stacking is off by default, and the number of lineups defaults to one. Cash is about finding the highest-confidence roster, not the highest ceiling.

Open Advanced Settings to configure how the optimizer stacks players.

QB Stack — on by default. Forces the optimizer to pair your quarterback with skill position players from his team. Set the size to 1+, 2+, or 3+ players. A double stack (QB + 2 pass catchers) is the standard tournament structure.

Bring-Back — on by default. Forces at least one skill position player from the opposing team into your lineup. The logic: if your quarterback is in a shootout, the other offense benefits too. Set the size and the optimizer handles the pairing.

Game Stack — off by default. Forces at least four skill position players from the same game across both teams. Use this when you're concentrating heavily on one game environment.

Secondary Stack — off by default. Forces players from a second game into your lineup alongside your primary QB stack. Use "Auto" to let the optimizer pick the highest-total remaining game, or select a specific game manually.

When generating multiple lineups, exposure and uniqueness settings control how diverse your lineup pool is.

Max player exposure (default 60%) — no player appears in more than this percentage of your total lineups. Lower this for more variance across your pool.

Min lineup uniques (default 2) — any two lineups must differ by at least this many players. Higher values force more differentiation.

Max players from same team — caps how many players from one team can appear in a single lineup.

Max total roster ownership — caps the combined projected ownership of all nine players in a lineup. Lower values produce more contrarian lineups. Leave blank for no limit.

Hit Generate Lineups. The optimizer runs all your constraints simultaneously and produces the number of lineups you specified.

Each lineup card shows the total projected points, total salary used, and a stack badge identifying the core correlation structure. Any player whose projection you manually edited shows a green indicator — so you always know which overrides influenced the result.

After generating, the Exposure % column in the player pool updates automatically — showing what percentage of your lineups each player appears in. Use this to check concentration before you enter.

Export individual lineups with the Copy button (formatted for DK or FD import), or download all lineups at once with Export All Lineups — formatted for bulk upload directly to either platform.

If the optimizer can't find a valid lineup with your current settings, it will tell you which constraints are too restrictive. Relax your stacking rules or game filters and try again.

See the game differently.