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 — the PGA Sims walkthrough covers the golf-specific setup), but the same basic idea applies across the other Sims formats, from the NFL DFS Sims on down, 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.

The Quick Answer

The best way to control your Stokastic Sims player pool is to boost players instead of deleting them: a negative ROI boost trims your exposure while your simulated opponents keep rostering that player at a realistic rate, and the Low Stakes to High Stakes slider reshapes the whole pool at once. Make those tweaks AFTER you run the Sims — only projection edits, pool-size changes, and archetype (slider) moves force a re-run, because those change the field itself. Below: why deleting quietly breaks the field, the walkthrough's real Jon Rahm fade (50% exposure down to 32% with one boost), the three-lever comparison table, and the two-run experiment that teaches the slider faster than any settings page.

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.

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 actually runs it. In the video, Jon Rahm is the golfer with the most exposure, sitting in 50% of the favorited lineups. Give Rahm a negative 10% ROI boost, and every lineup that has him in it now projects 10% worse. Adjust favorites, and Rahm drops to 32% exposure — not because he was banned, but because you made his lineups compete at a disadvantage instead of deleting them. Not enough movement? Push the boost more negative and adjust again — you are dialing a knob, not flipping a switch. The field still holds a realistic amount of Rahm. You just hold less. It works the same in reverse: the walkthrough gives Ben Griffin, sitting in just 11% of lineups, a positive 10% boost, and he climbs to 16.67% on the next adjust. And if you change your mind, Clear Boost plus one more adjust resets everything to our baseline numbers.

That negative boost is the direct answer to the member's question, and the right way to fade players in the Sims generally. 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.

One warning from the same walkthrough, because it is the most common mix-up we see: do not try to do this with the up and down arrows in the Contest Generator. Those arrows change a golfer's projected ownership — how often the simulated FIELD rosters him — not how much of him you get. Your exposure levers live on the Players tab after the sim runs; the ownership arrows reshape your opponents.

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.

If you want the deeper head-to-head on when a boost beats a projection edit (and when it doesn't), we break that down lever by lever in ROI Boost vs Projection vs Cap. The row that trips people up is the exposure cap. It feels like the cleanest tool, one number, one ceiling, done. Used on one player, it is: in the walkthrough, Bryson DeChambeau sits at 41% exposure, a 35% cap goes on, and one adjust later he lands at 35% on the nose. 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 axis maps to the two numbers that define a contest — 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 powers winning DFS tournaments. 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. (Two notes on the dials here: 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. And the slider's partner dial, Percent To First, is what tells the sim how much to REWARD those contrarian, ceiling-chasing builds once the field is set: the slider sharpens the field, Percent To First grades against it. The full breakdown of both is in Contest Archetype & Percent to First.)

Notice what just happened with the Rahm fade from earlier. A negative boost thins him out one player at a time. But if Rahm 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 (how pool size works, if you have never set it), 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, changing the contest pool size, or moving the stakes slider to a different archetype (in each case the field itself is different, so everything built on it has to rebuild; that is why the two-run experiment above really is two runs). 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.

More on this:

• How To Remove Players From Stokastic Sims
• Stokastic Sims Pool Size: Why Swaps Show 2,000 (Not 5,000)
• Stokastic vs SaberSim vs RotoGrinders: NFL DFS Optimizers
• Stokastic Sims Promo Code: 10% Off Every DFS Package
• How A Stokastic Sims Subscriber Won $200K At DraftKings PGA DFS

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, contest pool size changes, and archetype (slider) moves 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.