How to Use Stokastic PGA Sims Tools | Daily Fantasy Sports 101

Daily Fantasy Sports 101: Learn how to use the Stokastic PGA DFS Sims Tools to gain an INSANE EDGE. This video gives you a step by step guide on how to elevate your PGA DFS game by harnessing the power of PGA DFS Sims!

Stokastic PGA Sims Tool: https://www.stokastic.com/register/pga-sims-max-monthly/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=PGASimsTool

#PGADFS #GolfDFS #DailyFantasyGolf #DFSPGA #DFSGolf #DraftKingsGolf #DraftKingsPGA #FantasyGolf #Sims #Simulations #DraftKings #FanDuel

What is happening guys it is the start of 2024 which means new tools for PGA here over at sto.com and I’m here with Brian barryman we’re going to break down everything that you guys need to know to make money at PGA DFS this year using the new tools we have here at stochastic

For the PGA Seasons we’re going to walk through the contest generator the simulation tool and how to use all this and the best ways for you to make sure that you’re profiting and making the best possible lineups that you can for PGA in 2024 and where this starts Brian

Is with the contest generator which is what’s on screen here it’s just like the most simple overview possible what is the contest generator and what is its function yeah Greg so the contest generator what we’re doing with that is trying to uh come up with a set of

Lineups that is going to be the most reflective of the contest pool that you may encounter when playing on your selected site so uh for this example why don’t we use DraftKings and what we’ll do once we start to uh set up the settings here is there’ll be different

Pool sizes that you can choose from anywhere from 250 lineups all the way up to 10,000 lineups what you want to do as a user is make sure that you’re selecting the pool siid that’s most accurately going to represent the contest that you’re playing in so if

You’re going to be playing in a small single entry tournament that only has 300 entries in it you’d probably want to select the 250 pool size but if you’re playing more of the large field high entry pool gpps you’d want to maybe go with a 10,000 uh pool size selection there so

Let’s say that we’re playing the the $320 Max on DraftKings this week it’s going to have uh you know 20,000 entries in it uh so we want to go with the 10,000 pool size and then the other option that we have here uh after we select the pool size is the contest

Archetype slider uh what this is going to do is really change how the pools are being created based on the level of competition that you’re going to be playing for that pool uh on the left side you have low stakes on the right side you have high stakes in the middle

We have the Marquee setting the Marquees setting is going to be reflective of the the big high dollar tournament for that week so this week there’s a there’s a $20 tournament that uh I think the price pool is 200k to First that would be reflective of that ownership set but if

You were playing like like we said maybe the the $320 Max this week you’d proba maybe bump it down the level of competition in that event is not going to be potentially as high as it would be in a $100 or $200 single entry tournament so uh once you have

These customized settings built out we want to hit the generate lineups button and that will create the pool that we’ll want to use to to start matching up some of these different lineups against and see um what we could do in terms of the best Roi lineups yeah and that’s what

We’re doing right now I just pressed generate lineup so it is now building US 10 10,000 lineups using the Marquee settings and then also Bron I want to ask you because we’ve got two different package options there’s the base option as well as the max option what is the

Difference in pool size that the base users can create compared to what the max users are allowed yeah so it’s a great question with our data plus Sims package you’ll be able to create a pool size uh of 250 or 500 lineups uh this is a really good package potentially for

People who are playing some of the smaller uh pool sizes on a consistent basis throughout the week maybe even some single entry contests as well uh a limitation with the data plus Sims packages you’re only able to export 20 lineups from the simulation which is um different from our our Sims Max package

Which allows you up to 10,000 lineups created and also simulated and uh there is no cap on the amount of lineups that you can export yeah and as you guys can see how quickly it runs it took us here like I don’t know what 45 seconds or something

Like that to build out 10,000 lineups here in the contest generator and now I’ve got some data on screen here Brian from the lineups we’ve created there’s the ownership the pool exposure the difference so for starters here what is this ownership column what is this showing us yeah so the ownership column

Is going to be what our projected ownership is for every golfer in the field and what we’re trying to do when creating the pool based on this the settings that you selected is create a pool that’s going to be most reflective of the settings not necessarily the ownership so our projected ownership is

Typically based around the Marquee setting anyway so for this example as you can see the pool exposure and the ownership are going to be very close if you were to adjust the archetype slider at the top the differences would reflect based on your selection there but because we kept it in the Marquee

Setting we’re going to get very close to uh our projected ownership numbers yeah and then you guys will see that here right now so we’ve got the ownership like Brian said that is the projected ownership from the stochastic ownership algorithm then the pool exposure that’s the amount of exposure

We got to these golfers in our lineups then the difference that’s just simple addition and subtraction the difference between the pool exposures and the ownerships now what I think a lot of people think when they look at this Brian is why why did we build lineups that are similar to the projected

Ownership like why is it that we want these to match up in the contest generator yeah so the whole point of the simulation is to try and put the lineups into your simulation that are going to be as close to reflective as the actual lineups that you’re going to see when

The cards are flipped over after lock and so by by getting the player exposures as close to what we think the actual ownership of these players will be the natural combinations of these players will match up with a lot of the lineups that you’ll actually see when

When uh the the golfers are uh revealed after after lock right and so trying to get those as close to possible to the ownership projections is very very important to the quality of your simulation and then you also have the ability to boost ownership here so if

You guys see that you could do three up arrows you could also do three down arrows but what are they actually doing here Brian so if somebody decides that they want to boost the ownership of somebody what is what is the Fallout like what is that actually doing if

They’re increasing the ownership of somebody yeah so this isn’t I don’t want people to be looking at this as like I want more of this player so I’m going to boost their ownership that’s actually going to have an inverse effect on that player um so what you want to look at

This is in terms of the ownership is if you disagree with our ownership projection or you think hey like for this example I really think Brian harman’s going to be closer to 30 or 35% in this contest that I’m playing you’d want to boost his projection to get him

Close to what you think his own ownership is going to be again the whole goal of this tool is to create a pool that is reflective of what you think the contest is going to look like not necessarily what we think the contest is going to look like what you think the

Contest is going to look like so this provides you with that granular level of customization that’s really important to this tool yeah and then one other thing to note as well is just because you press the up boost ownership it doesn’t actually change your lineups right here

What you have to do after is actually click regenerate lineups and then it would create a new pool of lineups based on any boost you make here to the ownerships of individual players and uh then after you’re done with that you’ve created this set of lineups that you feel comfortable simulating then we

Would go over and actually simulate those lineups so let’s do that now Brian we’re going to simulate the lineups that are built out here by pressing the simulate lineups button and you’ll see that already everything that we built on the other screen it automatically comes

With us onto the other page when we go to the Sims page so before we actually do run the simulation though let’s walk people through some of the other options that they could have here on screen before they click the Run contest simulation starting with the percentage

To first payout what is the setting that people should select here and why yeah so this is very important when it comes to the ROI of your lineups you want to make sure that this percenta First Column is reflective of the payout structure of the contest that you plan

On entering so if I’m playing a a 100K guaranteed prize pool in the first case first place prize is $10,000 I would want to select the 10% to first payout structure there because it’s really going to impact the rois of these lineups if if it’s a topheavy payout

Structure versus a flat payout structure it’s going to completely change the rois of these lineups so we want to make sure that we’re paying attention to that drop down and not just constantly clicking 25% because that is going to have an impact there uh same with like the pool

Size in the contest generator some of these you may not have an exact right you might be playing a 100K prize pool that gets 15K to First you’ll have to decide if you want to go with the 10% or the or the 20% option there maybe run

Both and see which one you like better um but try and get as close as you possibly can to the contest you’re playing in yeah so it typically defaults here to 25% and different contests are different here’s the easy way to find out what the percentage to first payout

Is in the contest you’re playing whether it’s DraftKings or fandle click on the contest look at what it pays out to first place and look at the total prize pool so if something is a $100,000 prize Po and 10,000 a first it’s 10% if something is you know a a 300 or

$400,000 prize pool and 100,000 first that’s 25% to first and that’s how we’re choosing what percentage to first to select here but now Brian people could also customize some of the projections here and this is something that there’s a pretty big update for all of our

Sports with in terms of the ways you could upload custom projections the default is always going to be the stochastic projections but if you guys want to upload your own you could do that as well but how do they do that within the Sims tool Brian yeah so

There’s a couple different ways that you can manipulate the projections let’s start with the uploading of the custom projections so you want to click on that um link there on the right and this will pop open our modal here that allows you to download the projections template uh

By clicking that button there you’ll be able to download the template that allows you to manually input all of your player projections right into there very seamlessly um if you know how to use Excel as simple V lookup function will be able to be a match uh the player name

To your custom projections and easily translate that uh that projection number over once you do that you want to make sure that you’re saving that CSV and then just re-uploading it back right here into this modal either by dragging and dropping or by clicking the upload CSV and selecting the appropriate file

Very simple process and it’s very quick once you get the hang of it yep and if you’re going to be uploading a file of your own you just want to make sure it has these three three columns player name that’s the one with the players names the projection that’s with the

Projection and the ownership that’s with the projected ownership and then you could upload it here and it’s going to immediately take in all of your own projections that’ll show up right here on screen but also if people just want to use our projections to make some simple manual adjustments they could do

It using the green and the red buttons right here Brian and what what do these do and we’re actually changing some of the projections within this page yeah I mean it’s exactly what you would think right so hitting the plus button is going to increase the player’s

Projection by a point the minus button will decrease the player’s projection by a point you can also U manually type in a a specific number so say you want lvic aberg to be9 points uh it’s a simple 109 and then that projection will save and these projections will then save from

Run to run now so if you are running multiple different simulations you don’t have to constantly be re-uploading your custom projections these are now being saved to your session here so that it’s very seamless and quick to run multiple simulations if you choose to do so yeah

And then you could always very simply let’s say that for abber here you put in 109 and then you go no I want to use the stochastic projection easy just click the rewind Arrow here and it goes back to our base projection and then you’ve

Got what you need on the screen here as far as projection for adberg so let’s go ahead after we have all this data inputed we actually simulate the lineups which is as simple run contest simulation so now all of the lineups that built in the contest generator page

Are being simulated here but what does it actually mean when it’s being simulated Brian yeah this is this is the part that’s really awesome about this tool right right now what we’re doing is well there’s there’s a lot of different things that we’re doing uh on the player

Level we are simulating on a whole by whole basis every single player in the field making a cut if they don’t make the cut ranking the golfers at the end of the tournament based on where they finish for their finishing placement points and we’re doing that process

Thousands and thousands of times on the individual player level and after each individual player level simulation we get individual player level actual fantasy points that we are then able to apply to the lineups you built in Step One in contest generator so this very very closely mimics what an actual DFS

Slate would look like from a golf standpoint and so these lineups are then competing against each other in a very lifelike DFS simulation so after every simulation run each lineup will get ranked against the other lineups in your pool assign the appropriate payout based on the structure that you selected in

The percent to first drop down and then assigned what we call a simulated Roi percentage the simulated Roi percentage is essentially going to rank the lineups based from like from best to worst based on the pool that you generate ated in Step One um so this is a very very

Advanced product this is something that has been long leveraged by professional DFS players and something now that you can use right at the tip of your fingertips and put together custom simulations in a matter of minutes yeah and as you guys could see right there Brian had I don’t know like 90 seconds

He was talking for there and over the course of that time we had 40,000 times all the lineups we built so we built 10,000 lineups and then simulated them 40,000 times and in the time it took us to generate the line ups that was like a minute and then it was another like

Minute and a half to simulate those lineups 40,000 times and have them playing against each other and you had mentioned there Brian that it’s going to default to have all these lineups sorted by simulated Roi but why simulated Roi why are we sorting all these lineups by

The simulated r y as opposed to something like just the Fantasy Point projection yeah that’s the all-encompassing metric that’s really going to tell you how that lineup performed in relation to the other lineups within that contest gen generated pool uh so this is really going to be like I mentioned earlier

Ranking the lineups from most profitable to least profitable over the course of the 40,000 simulations we also have other metrics here as well like win percentage top 10 percentage cash percentage if you choose to s or to sort by those columns as well but we highly recommend that you use the simulated Roi

Column in order to evaluate your lineups yeah and there’s all other metrics in here which it’s going to contribute to that projected simulated Ry so stuff like the win percentage of the lineups how often they actually win the contest top 10 percentage how often did these

Lineups end up coming in the top 10% cash percentage how often do they just make it in the money like even if it’s a Minash these are all things that contribute to that lineups projected simulator Roi as well as dupes so dupes aren’t going to come into play all that

Frequently Brian for PGA main slates where you know we’ve got 90 or so golfers in the field however sometimes for Showdown they come into play and that is something that we also have within the Sim tool and the contest Jes you could also build out lineups for PGA

Showdown contests but for some of the also small field events that don’t have Cuts we’ll see there’ll only be like 25 30 golfers there is a lot of overlap and how does the amount of times the lineup is duped how how is that factored into the Sims yeah it’s absolutely critical

Um like you mentioned in large field events normal uh full PG golf events you’re not going to run into dupes all that often but when you have a a field of 30 golfers only you’re going to have duplicated lineups that appear quite frequently and every time a lineup is

Duplicated it’s really eating into the expected value of that lineup and the reason being is if everything goes right for that particular lineup and it happens to be the best lineup on that slate if it is duplicated even once you’re are winning way less money than

You would be if you had a um a solo lineup That was not duplicated and that expected value of that lineup with every duplication it gets eaten into more and more and more and that’s going to be reflected in the simulated Roi we do account for duplicated lineups if the

Lineup is duplicated we assign the payout of that lineup just like DraftKings or FanDuel would with a duplication so it’s very important that you’re monitoring the dupes of your lineups because those can be uh those can be things that really eat into the overall quality of the lineup yeah for

Sure and now here’s where it also gets really easy to select your lineup so let’s say you guys are playing 20 lineups you could favor with the top 20 if you’re playing 150 you favor with the top 150 or a custom amount like let’s say you’re playing you know 25 lineups

For a slate you just click in 25 here type it in and then your top 25 are going to be selected with hearts here and then you could also check other metrics which we going to go over in a second for the purpose of this I’m going

To favor 150 lineups and then we’ll look at some of the other data that’s within the Sims that can help us really optimize the lineup decisions that we end up making here so Brian we’ve got our top 150 lineups now selected so now here we have the player Roi tab what is

This showing us we’ve got here average simulated Roi projected fantasy points and you fantasy points is pretty straightforward that’s just our Fantasy Point projection but what is the average simulated Roy for each golfer in this column yeah so what this is doing is taking the ROI of all the lineups that a

Particular player appears in and is providing you with the average Roi of that lineup it really gives you a sense of what players are contributing to high Roi lineups and which players are contributing to low Roi lineups now this wouldn’t say I wouldn’t say this is the

Be all endall metric that you should be looking at to select a player pool or anything like that but it does give you a good sense of who are The Sharper plays on the Slate who are the ones that are providing the most value the most benefit to their individual lineups so

It’s it’s a really interesting metric to look at definitely and then if we look at the next tab this is favorites this is simply the top 150 lineups that we favored in before and now we have the exposures column which is my favorite thing to look at Brian because this is

Lets me know who it is I’m rooting for On Any Given slate who who is it that I’m overweight to who is it that I’m underweight to and that’s what the exposure column is going to be showing us which is this is the amount of exposure that we have to these golfers

In the top 150 lineups that we have selected the Fantasy Point projection the pool ownership which gets back to what we were talking about in the contest generator as well as the leverage column which is the difference between the pool exposure and the exposure that we ultimately have but now

We’ve got this data here on screen so people are looking at this and they know like okay Matt Fitzpatrick he’s in 36.7% of my top 150 lineups if somebody wanted to have their own input on this and they wanted to change some of the exposures

Of players what is the best way for them to do that within the Sims tool yeah yeah so I think you you laid it out really well let’s say I’m looking at the Matt Fitzpatrick exposure and let’s say I really like him this week and right

Now I don’t even really have um I have just over 2x leverage maybe I want to get to three or fourx leverage what you want to do is click on the ROI boost tab right there that’s going to bring up a model that allows you to manually boost

A particular player and any lineup that that player appears in that lineup will get a boost in their Roi to help it rank higher on your list of lineups so I would recommend let’s boost it by 20% or 25% and see how that may impact some of

Our exposure to mat Fitz Patrick when we redo our quick favorites yeah and really easily for each time you click the red button here it’s going to go down five% because if you want less exposure to somebody you do the inverse too and you can make it go into the negatives and

Then for every time you PR you press the green button here it’s going to go plus five so if we go to 25% on Matt’s fitchpatrick and then go boost r y it’s not going to make an immediate change because first you have to do is go back

To the lineups tab then you unfavorite the top lineups you had before so now nothing is selected and you already see here on the left Brian the lineups that have Matt Fitzpatrick they have the 25% Ry boost so like you said all the lineups that have Matt Fitzpatrick

Getting sorted a little bit more towards the top and then we select the top 150 lineups we could go back to the exposures and you’ll see that Fitzpatrick who before was 36.7% owned in our lineups has now gone all the way up to 76% so that’s what we’re doing

Right there with the Boost tab where we’re making it so that if there’s a golfer that you guys want more of that the Sims aren’t giving you and it could be for whatever reason maybe you think that you just think that golfer is going to be really good or you think that he

Should have more exposure in your lineups whatever it may be that’s the easiest way to manually adjust your lineups and then once again same thing if there’s a golfer you don’t like you go into the negative and change them as well and then something else you could

Do also is like you could go and ch change the player’s Fantasy Point projection which will kind of have a similar sort of impact where if somebody’s project for 106 fantasy points and you’re on the custom projections page you put them in for 102 that’s also going to manually change

Their exposure but now if somebody made a bunch of change they don’t want to save them Brian if they just want to go back to the default what’s what’s the easiest way for them to do it yeah so you can just click open the ROI boost again and there’s a clear boost button

Right there that’ll take you back to your original uh projections in terms of your Roi I do want to touch on one thing there with the uh Roi boost so it does take into account if you’re boosting multiple players say you boost Fitzpatrick and then aberer and then you

Negatively and positively boost a bunch of other players the lineups where those players appearing together it’s gonna add the Boost together so you could be multiple boosting if aberer and uh Fitzpatrick were in the same lineup or negatively boosting if you have negative players as well so something to keep in

Mind when you’re boosting players it is going to have a pretty big impact so just make sure that you’re being cognizant of how much you’re boosting every player sure and then after you’re done with all that this is where it’s really easy you just click the export favorites button and then that’s going

To export those lineups and then you could upload them directly to DraftKings to FanDuel whatever it is that you’re playing and then also if you’ve already got lineups reserved you could simply open that CSV within DraftKings or FanDuel and you copy and paste the lineups you just built in here over

Those ones you save the file you upload it back to DraftKings and FanDuel and then your lineups are good to go it is really as simple as that but then also Brian there are ways for people after the Slate is over that they could evaluate their lineups within our Sims

Tool what’s the best way for them to do that yeah this is probably the most overlooked feature and one of the most valuable features that we do have and it’s the postc contest simulator um something I want to stress that has been a big impact in my game and I know

Others across the site as well who have really used this data to take their game to the next level uh so what the postc contest simulator is doing is very much the same process that we did on the front end in terms of taking the lineups and simulating them and getting a

Simulated Roi but instead of theoretical lineups that we think the field is going to look like these are the actual lineups that we’ve exported from DraftKings and so what we’re able to do is take the lineups and take your lineups and simulate them 40,000 times against all the lineups that you

Actually played against in the contest and really get an understanding for how well you played from a strategic standpoint for that slate it’s very very easy as a DFS player to get caught up in the single re life runout the single sample size that you’re getting and and

Make conclusions based off of that but in reality if you were to play that exact same golf tournament over and over again with the exact same players at the exact same course you’re going to get different results it’s just the nature and the variance of what we’re doing as

DFS players so this tool allows you to take a very zoomed out view of your strategy and see if what you’re doing is actually profitable over a large sample size and it’s extremely valuable information and Greg I don’t know if you want to run through some of the data

Points we have here uh but it is fantastic tool yeah and we’ve got this on screen here I just pulled up a random contest from last week this was uh the 600k Season tea off for PGA here on draft KS last week and ran the pre-contest Sim so pulled up all the

Data here and what you’re going to see in here is the simulated lineup Roi you’re going to see the actual lineup Roi which is going to be what the lineup actually produced so the one with the highest simulated Roi that’s the the one that ultimately ended up winning here uh

And then the simulated Roi this is what we were projecting the lineups to have an Roi of and you guys could look at all the individual lineups as well as the individual golfers rois is there anything else you like to look at when you’re within the post contest Sim BR

Yeah I’m always checking in terms of how the best players played so and how you can easily identify that for the most part across your contest is to filter the total lineups by the maximum amount of entries for that contest and really you can compare okay these are the best

Players that are in the DFS space they’re they’re contributing the most money they have a process that they believe in how did they perform what did they do differently than what I did and how can I start to reverse engineer how they came up with this High Roi how did

They come up with their strategy and evaluate maybe I was too chalky on some of my lineups maybe my factual or my simulated average fantasy points number was too low maybe I need to have more projection in my lineups there’s a nice balance and a lot of data that you can

Really gain from looking at this and I would highly recommend every single slate that you play you’re analyzing your play against the best players in the world and trying to improve in that way and this tool is fantastic for doing that and that’s the process from start

To finish from building the lineups to simulating them to evaluating them after the fact everything that you need to win a PGA DFS this year it’s all included here at stochastic tocom if you guys want to sign up there’s a link for that below stop guessing start winning join

Stochastic let’s have a great 2024 together