How To Remove Players From Stokastic Sims (Fade, Don't Delete)

The question I get more than almost any other about the Stokastic Sims came in almost word-for-word from a subscriber in our community: "What's the best way to remove a group of players from the player pool, before running sims or after?" That is really the whole question of how to remove players from Stokastic Sims, and it has a slightly counterintuitive answer. The best way to remove a player from a simulation is usually not to remove them at all. Deleting a player tears a hole in the exact thing that makes the sim worth running. Fade them the right way and your exposures move while the machine keeps doing its job. This piece is about that difference, and about the two controls I reach for first, the ones the sharpest golf and MLB DFS players I know use to steer their pool instead of gutting it: the ROI boost and the Low/High Stakes slider. Change-the-projection and hard exposure caps are in here too, as the situational levers behind them. There is also one twenty-minute experiment I keep coming back to that teaches the whole machine faster than any setting menu, and I will get to it at the end.

The Quick Answer

The best way to remove players from Stokastic Sims is usually not to remove them at all: give each player you want off a negative ROI boost, re-favorite your lineups, and your exposure falls while the simulated field stays realistic. Deleting a player also deletes him from the field of opponent lineups the sim grades you against, which quietly corrupts every ROI number that follows. The full case for why, a worked example of fading a chalk favorite, the Low/High Stakes slider that reshapes the whole pool, and the one experiment that teaches you the machine are all below.

Watch The Video

We walked through the exposure-steering version of this in a short PGA Sims clip, using a chalk favorite as the example. It is the same logic below, in about two minutes. Watch on YouTube.

Why Deleting Players Quietly Breaks The Sim

Start with what the Sims are actually doing, because the whole answer flows from it. The Contest Generator builds a realistic field, thousands of opponent lineups shaped like the contest you are entering, and the simulator grades your lineups against that field rather than against a vacuum. That simulated field is the product: the tool surfaces the builds that beat that specific room most often, ranked by simulated ROI, instead of just re-sorting a projection column. It is why a sim ROI means something and a raw projection ranking does not.

Now delete a player. Pull a popular golfer or a chalk pitcher out of the pool entirely and you have not just removed him from your own lineups. You have removed him from the field the sim uses to model your opponents. The other thousands of simulated entries suddenly behave as if a player half the room is rostering does not exist. Your lineups get graded against a room that is not real, and the ROI numbers you are trusting quietly stop describing the contest you are about to enter. That is the trap hiding in the innocent-sounding "just take him out."

Fade And Force With ROI Boosts Instead

So we fade rather than delete. The Stokastic Sims ROI boost nudges a player's simulated ROI up or down. Every lineup containing that player leans with the boost, so the set you favorite for entry tilts toward or away from him. As we covered in office hours, this is the preferred quick lever precisely because it moves your exposure without forcing a full re-run. You make these tweaks at the end, once you are close to final, so you are not redoing them after every projection update.

A Worked Example: Fading A Chalk Favorite In PGA

Here is the golf version, and it is the move from the video above. Say the tournament's biggest chalk favorite is a $9,800 stud projected for 35% ownership, and the sim has you at 50% exposure to him, well above even his chalky field share. Give him a negative ROI boost, a fade, and every lineup that includes him now projects a touch worse; the delete key never comes into it. Re-favorite your lineups and his exposure falls, maybe from that 50% down into the twenties, while he stays fully alive in the simulated field around you. Flip the sign to force a player up. The lever I keep coming back to is this one, because it is honest about what you are doing: you are expressing an opinion about a player's range, not pretending he vanished.

It works the same in any sport. In MLB, when you want off a $10,700 chalk ace sitting at 45% projected ownership, you do not delete him and leave the sim modeling a field that ignores him. You check his numbers against the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub, fade him with a negative boost, and re-favorite. The same logic trims an over-owned stack you want less of, and the identical workflow runs in the NFL DFS Sims when a chalk quarterback stack needs the same treatment. Golf, baseball or football, the move is identical: steer the exposure, keep the field honest.

That last point is why the ROI boost is not the only lever, just the most-used one. Three controls do three different jobs:

The row worth lingering on is the last one. A cap feels like the natural tool for "remove these guys," but staff flag it as the one to use sparingly. Capping several players at once at a multi-slot position, think two pitchers in MLB or several mid-tier golfers, can silently kill good lineup combinations the sim would otherwise have found. You end up pruning builds you never meant to touch. A cap is a scalpel for one player, not a way to clear a group.

Removing A Whole Group? Fade Them, Don't Delete Them

Which brings us back to the exact phrasing of that member's question, a group of players. Trimming your Stokastic Sims player pool at that level is the same move, applied to five names at once: put a small negative ROI boost on each player in the set, re-favorite, and your exposure to the whole cluster drops in a single pass while every one of those players keeps his real share of the simulated field. The group case carries one wrinkle worth knowing, and it works in your favor. Because each boost applies to every lineup that player appears in, a build leaning on two or three of the faded names takes the hit two or three times over, so the lineups most concentrated in the cluster fall furthest down your rankings, exactly the ones you wanted off. (How many players belong in your pool in the first place is its own question, and we answer it in our player pool size guide.)

The "before or after" half of the question has a clean answer too: after. Your own tweaks (ROI boosts and exposure caps) do not require a re-run, so make them near the end once projections and ownership have settled. The Low/High Stakes setting is a different kind of control, one that changes the field the sim builds rather than your exposures against it, and it gets the next section to itself.

Want to steer your own pool instead of pruning it? The full ROI-boost and stakes-slider controls live in the Stokastic Sims (Data + Sims or Sims MAX). New members get 10% off their first Stokastic payment with code ROIBOOST10.

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The Low↔High Stakes Slider Reshapes The Whole Pool

Everything above moves individual players. The Low/High Stakes control moves the entire field at once, and understanding it is what separates people who tune the Sims from people who fight them. In the tool it lives in the Contest Archetype control, which offers Low Stakes, High Stakes, and a Marquee option for the day's flagship contests; this piece focuses on the two stakes ends. (It is one of several field-shaping dials; the full tour lives in our Stokastic Sims settings guide.) The setting tells the field generator what kind of contest you are in:

The High Stakes row is where behavior actually changes. When the field concentrates on the best plays, the sim starts wanting contrarian pivots off that chalk, because getting different is suddenly where the edge lives. A sharper simulated field, counterintuitively, does not push you toward the safe, popular plays; it pushes you off them.

Notice that this points the same direction as the manual fade we did earlier. When you gave that chalk favorite a negative ROI boost, you were hand-steering toward a contrarian build. Push the slider to High Stakes and, by reshaping the field rather than touching any one player, the sim produces that same contrarian tilt on its own, so the two moves reinforce each other. Learn the slider and you get, at the field level, the same tilt you were producing one player at a time by hand.

The One Experiment That Teaches You The Machine

Here is the payoff I promised up top. Keep your contest size fixed, run the same slate twice, once at each slider extreme, and watch what your top-play exposures do: which names fall, which lower-owned pivots climb, and by how much. Twenty minutes, and it is the single best way to learn the tool.

Straight from office hours: "I would encourage you to take a look at that by keeping your contest size consistent... run both extremes." The whole experiment fits in that one sentence.

You do not need me to hand you the numbers, because the whole point is to read your own. But the shape is reliable. Say your most obvious chalk play sits right at the top of your exposures on Low Stakes. Slide to High Stakes and, more often than not, it slides down the board while a couple of lower-owned pivots climb, all without deleting anyone. The field changed, the incentives changed, and your pool followed. Holding contest size constant and studying that delta is the fastest way to build intuition for how the sim thinks; if you have never touched the tool, try the Sims free first to get a feel for the levers. One sitting of it taught me more than an afternoon of reading setting descriptions.

When To Actually Change A Projection Instead

There is one case where you should reach past the boost. When you do not just want less of a player, but you are convinced our median on him is wrong, edit the projection itself and re-run. Editing the number itself is the most powerful lever of the three, because it changes the math every downstream number is built on. (The full head-to-head between these two levers gets its own piece: ROI boost vs. changing the projection.)

One honest caution the staff repeat: the sim takes your word for it. Change a projection and every lineup gets graded on your assumption, so a fat-fingered edit (a 50 typed as a 500) will make every build with that player look elite. When your read is right, that inflation is exactly where your edge over the field comes from. Just re-check big edits before you trust the run. For the day-to-day work of shaping who shows up and how often, though, the boost and the slider are the tools. The projection edit is for when you are overruling the model, not steering it.

FAQ

Should I remove players before or after running the sims? After. Your own tweaks, ROI boosts and exposure caps alike, do not require a re-run, so make them near the end once projections and ownership have settled. Staff call out two changes that do need a re-run: a projection edit and a different contest pool size. The Low/High Stakes setting shapes the field the sim builds, so treat moving it as modeling a new contest rather than a late tweak.

How do I lower my exposure to a specific player without deleting him? Give him a negative ROI boost and re-favorite your lineups. His exposure drops while he stays present in the simulated field, so your lineups are still graded against a realistic room.

Can I fade a whole group of players at once? Yes. Put a negative ROI boost on each of the players you want less of rather than deleting names individually. That trims your exposure to the whole set while keeping them in the field, so your lineups stay graded against a realistic room.

What does the Low/High Stakes slider actually change? It changes the kind of field the sim generates. Low Stakes models softer, chalkier rooms; High Stakes models sharper, more concentrated fields, and a concentrated field makes the sim value contrarian pivots more.

Is deleting a player ever the right call? Rarely, and usually only for someone truly out, like a late scratch you can confirm. For everyone else, a fade keeps the field honest and gives you the same exposure result without distorting the grades.

Steer The Pool, Don't Prune It

The reason "how do I remove these players" is the wrong first question is that the player pool was never a list to trim. It is a field to steer. The sharpest golf and MLB DFS players do not reach for the delete key. They fade with a boost, group their fades, and let the stakes slider reshape the room around them, then read what their exposures do. Learn those three moves and you are no longer overriding the sim's output; you are steering the field it builds and reading the exposures it hands back. (For the boost-cap-and-groups workflow from the tool's PGA side, the companion piece is how to control your player pool in the Stokastic Sims.)

The controls are all one place. To run the both-extremes experiment on tonight's slate yourself, new members get 10% off their first Stokastic payment with code ROIBOOST10.

Grab the Sims

Never run the tool end to end? Start with how to use the PGA Sims or the MLB DFS Sims walkthrough first, then come back and dial in your pool.