How To Control Your Player Pool In Stokastic Sims

A member asked me the exact question I used to wrestle with myself: what's the best way to remove a group of players from the pool before you run the Sims, or after? The honest answer surprised most people the first time we walked through it in office hours. The best way to shape your player pool in Stokastic Sims is usually not to remove anyone at all. Once you understand why, you stop fighting the Contest Sims and start steering them, and your exposures land where you actually want them.

That instinct to delete is the whole thread of this piece. I use PGA as the running example because golf is where the exposure question comes up most (six roster spots, a 150-golfer board, and one or two chalk golfers 30% of the field piles onto), but the same basic idea applies across the other Sims formats, even if sport-specific roster rules change how aggressively you use each lever. Our staff also swears by one quick experiment that teaches you more about the tool than any settings page ever will, and I will hand it to you at the end.

TL;DR

• Don't delete players — deleting removes them from your simulated opponents too, which breaks the realistic field the sim grades against.
• Boost instead: a negative ROI boost trims your exposure to a player (or a whole group) while the field keeps rostering him at a realistic rate; a positive boost forces more.
• The Low Stakes to High Stakes slider reshapes the whole pool at once — left models huge, chalky $0.25 fields; right models sharp $55+ fields where the tool surfaces the contrarian pivots.
• Order matters: run the Sims first, then apply boosts, caps, and filters at the end. Only projection edits and pool-size changes force a re-run.

Watch: Adjusting Golfer Exposure In The Sims

Before we get into the why, here is the actual tool doing the work: adjusting a golfer's exposure with ROI boosts and watching the numbers move.

Watch on YouTube

Why Deleting Players Quietly Breaks The Sim

Start with what the Contest Sims are for. They build a realistic FIELD, thousands of opponent lineups shaped like the contest you are entering, then grade your lineups against that competition instead of against a vacuum. The realism of that field is the entire edge — it is the difference between the Sims and a plain optimizer (the full comparison is in MLB DFS Sims vs Optimizers), and it is what turns a projection into a decision.

Delete a player outright and you tear a hole in that field. The field would roster him, but now your simulated opponents cannot, so you are grading yourself against a version of the contest that will never exist. You get exposures you like and a read you should not trust. That distortion is the trap the "just remove him" instinct walks you into.

So the goal shifts. You are not trying to erase a player from the tool. You want to end up with less of him (or more) while the field stays honest. Here is the difference in one look.

	Delete the player	Boost him down
Your exposure	Drops to zero (a blunt on/off)	Drops as much as you dial in
The simulated field	Can no longer roster him, so it is unrealistic	Still rosters him at a realistic rate
Your read	Graded against a contest that won't exist	Graded against your real contest

The middle row is the whole reason to prefer the boost: the field keeps rostering the guy you are fading, so your lineups are still measured against opponents who behave like your actual contest. The Sims give you two levers built for exactly that.

Fade Or Force With ROI Boosts

The first lever is the ROI boost, and it is the one I reach for most. A boost nudges every lineup that contains a player up or down in the sim's eyes without touching the field. Want less of someone? Push his boost negative. Want more? Boost him up.

A Worked Example: Trimming The Chalk

Take the mechanic the way the walkthrough above runs it. Say a chalk golfer like Scottie Scheffler is your most-owned play on the main slate — you are at 60% exposure and want to be closer to 35%. Drop Scheffler to a negative ROI boost, and every lineup that has him in it now projects a little worse. When you pull your favorited lineups from the sim's rankings, fewer of them contain Scheffler, because you have made his lineups compete at a disadvantage instead of banning them. Not enough movement? Push the boost more negative and pull again — you are dialing a knob, not flipping a switch. The field still holds a realistic amount of Scheffler. You just hold less. Flip the sign to force a player you love higher.

That negative boost is the direct answer to the member's question. To thin out a group of golfers, boost the whole group down rather than deleting them. You keep a field that behaves like your real contest and still move your exposures.

Remember the one-line version: you are not removing players, you are handicapping their lineups. A boosted-down golfer still exists for the field, so your read stays trustworthy while your own exposure drops.

ROI boosts are not the only knob, though, and knowing which one fits the job keeps you out of trouble. Our staff ranks the three exposure levers like this.

Lever	What it does	When to use it
Change the projection	Rewrites the player's median, then re-runs everything downstream	Only when you truly disagree with our number on a player. Most powerful, and it costs you a re-run.
ROI boost	Leans a player's lineups up or down without a re-run	The preferred quick lever, and the right one when you think a player's RANGE is wider than we do (volatile plays, rookies).
Exposure cap	Sets a hard ceiling on how often a player appears	Only when you just need a firm lid on one guy, and you are short on time.

The row that trips people up is the exposure cap. It feels like the cleanest tool, one number, one ceiling, done. But cap several players at once, especially at a multi-slot position like the two pitcher spots in MLB, and you can silently kill good lineup combinations the sim would otherwise have found. The cap is a scalpel for one player, not a way to reshape a whole pool. When you want to move a group, that is the boost's job.

Tune your exposures instead of guessing at them. Stokastic Sims build a realistic contest field and let you boost, cap, and shape your own player pool against it, the exact workflow above. New members can start with the free Sims, and code SIMSPOOL10 takes 10% off your first month if you upgrade: Get 10% off Stokastic Sims.

The Low Stakes To High Stakes Slider

The second lever does not touch any single player. Instead, it reshapes the whole pool at once.

The Low Stakes to High Stakes slider controls the contest archetype, which tells the field generator what KIND of contest you are in. The two levers underneath it are buy-in and field size — the same two numbers that should drive which contests you enter in the first place. Pushed left toward Low Stakes, you are modeling the huge, cheap contests, the quarter mini-maxes and their softer, chalkier opponents, so weaker plays show up more often and the field looks the way a $0.25 field really looks. Pushed right toward High Stakes, you are modeling the smaller, higher buy-in fields where the lineups are sharp, and the pool concentrates on the top plays.

That concentration is where it gets interesting, and it flips the incentive most people expect. When the simulated field tightens onto the best plays, the sim starts to WANT contrarian pivots, because the way to beat a sharp, concentrated field is to get off the plays everyone is on — the same logic that separates GPP builds from cash builds. Slide toward High Stakes and the tool surfaces the leverage plays a concentrated field creates. The small, high buy-in fields ($55 and up) are sharper DFS rooms, and the slider lets you simulate that room on purpose. (One note: the archetype selector also has a Marquee setting for the day's flagship contest, so the slider is the Low-to-High axis, not the whole archetype menu.)

Notice what just happened with Scheffler. A negative boost thins him out one player at a time. But if Scheffler is the chalk the whole field is stacking, sliding toward High Stakes can accomplish something similar from the other direction, by making the sim hunt for the pivot off him without you touching his number at all. Two different tools, same goal: less of the play the field is drowning in.

The One Experiment That Teaches You The Machine

Now for the payoff I promised. The single best way to learn how these levers behave is not to read about them, it is to run a controlled test, and this is the exact thing our staff pushes new users toward:

1. Lock your contest size. Pick the pool size that matches a contest you actually play, and do not touch it again for the rest of the test.
2. Run the slate with the slider pinned to Low Stakes. Note your exposure to the two or three chalkiest plays on the board.
3. Run the same slate again pinned to High Stakes, changing nothing else, and check those same exposures.

Watch how your top-play exposures move between the two runs. Your chalk shrinks and your leverage plays climb as you push right, and you feel exactly how much the field's concentration drives the build. Do that once and the slider stops being a mystery setting and becomes a dial you actually understand.

I still run this any time a slate feels weird: two runs, both extremes, contest size held steady. It is the fastest practical way I know to build intuition for a tool that is doing a lot of math you cannot see.

When To Make These Adjustments: Before Or After You Run

Back to the second half of the member's question: do you make these moves before running the Sims or after? The rule is clean once you know which changes ripple downstream.

Anything that changes the inputs to the whole simulation forces a re-run: editing a projection, or changing the contest pool size (the field itself is different, so everything built on it has to rebuild). But your own finishing tweaks, ROI boosts, exposure caps, and filtering down to the stacks you want, do NOT require a re-run. Make those at the END, once you are close to final. That way you are not redoing the same boosts after every projection or ownership update that lands on the DataHub during the day. Run the sim, let the updates settle, then shape your pool last.

So to remove a group of golfers the right way: run the Sims, wait until you are near final, then boost that group down. No re-run, an honest field, and the exposures you were after.

The Bottom Line

Controlling your player pool in the Sims is not about forcing your will on the tool. The real skill is nudging a realistic field until it reflects the reads you actually have. Boost players down to fade and up to force, keep the exposure cap for the rare hard ceiling, and use the stakes slider when you want to reshape the whole pool and let the sim find its own leverage. Then save the tuning for last, once the field is set. Steer the machine instead of deleting your way around it, and it starts handing you the builds you were reaching for.

Ready to try it on your next slate? The free Sims let you feel the levers, and code SIMSPOOL10 takes 10% off your first month of full Stokastic Sims when you are ready to build for real.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I delete players I don't want from the Sims? Usually no. Deleting a player removes him from your simulated opponents too, which breaks the realistic field the sim grades against. Apply a negative ROI boost instead: you end up with less of him while the field still behaves like your real contest.

How do I force a player I love into more lineups? Apply a positive ROI boost. Every lineup containing him projects a little better, so more of your favorited lineups include him, without you hard-locking him and distorting the rest of the build.

What does the Low Stakes to High Stakes slider actually change? It sets the contest archetype, which reshapes the simulated field. Low Stakes models big, cheap, chalkier fields; High Stakes models small, sharp, concentrated fields, and a concentrated field makes the sim favor contrarian pivots off the chalk.

Do ROI boosts and exposure caps require me to re-run the sim? No. Boosts, caps, and filtering are finishing tweaks you apply at the end without a re-run. Only projection edits and contest pool size changes force a full re-run, because they change the simulation's inputs.

When should I make my exposure adjustments? Once you are close to final. Run the Sims first, let the day's projection and ownership updates settle, then apply your boosts and caps last so you are not redoing them after every update.