Stokastic MLB DFS Subscription: The 20-Minute Loop

Here is a thing that comes up on the MLB DFS Strategy show and almost never in the marketing copy: people pay for the tools and then use a fraction of them. As one of our hosts put it on air, there are a lot of things people don't take advantage of with their subscriptions that they should, like the late swap tool, like the post-contest sims.

That is the thesis of this playbook. A Stokastic MLB DFS subscription is not a data feed you glance at. It is a daily decision loop, and the loop takes about 20 minutes once you know the order of operations. Almost all of the value you are not currently getting sits in two places: the settings that decide what field the Sims simulate, and the 60 seconds after the slate ends. We will get to that 60-second habit last, because it is the one that quietly fixes more of your builds than any amount of morning research.

In Summary

• Your MLB subscription is a loop, not a lookup: morning read, build, pre-lock adjust, post-slate review.
• The settings that matter most are contest archetype and pool size, which decide what field you simulate, and percent to first, which decides how your lineups get graded.
• The most-wasted paid features are Late Swap and post-contest sims. As the host put it on air, all of that is included with your subscription already.
• The 20 minutes are only worth it if you close the loop at the end of the night. That part takes 60 seconds and almost nobody does it.

Watch The Video: MLB DFS Strategy

The daily MLB DFS Strategy show is the morning slate read from step one, done out loud on a live board. It is also where the point that opens this article got made.

Watch on YouTube · Stokastic DFS on YouTube

What Your Stokastic MLB DFS Subscription Actually Includes

Before the clock starts, know what you are holding. Most subscribers can name two of these. The tools live in the MLB DataHub.

The row worth staring at is Late Swap, the only tool on that list that is still making decisions for you while the slate is running, and the one subscribers most often forget they have. Late swap will not save a bad build, but you are worse off ignoring it, because a scratched player or a batting-order change rewrites everything downstream of him. We wrote the mechanics up separately in the MLB late swap guide.

The Daily Workflow By The Clock

Morning: Read The Slate, Don't Build It

Open projections and the Top Stacks Tool and do nothing but read. You are looking for the shape of the day: is stack probability concentrated on two teams, or is it flat across eight? A flat board means the field will scatter, and your leverage comes from pitching. A top-heavy board means the chalk stack is obvious and the game becomes about who is willing to be off it.

The MLB DFS Strategy show airs at 11 a.m. ET on weekdays, hosted by Dave Loughran, and it exists to do exactly this read out loud. It streams free on the Stokastic DFS YouTube channel, which is also where every show mentioned in this article lives. If you have 20 minutes total, spend the first five here and let the show accelerate the rest.

One warning about the morning read, and it is the mistake we correct most often: do not build your slate opinion off last night's box scores. A two-game sample carries almost no context, and treating it as signal is how you talk yourself onto an overpriced bat. Recent form is a tiebreaker in baseball, never the case itself.

Build: The Two Dials That Decide Everything

This is where the subscription earns out, and where most people click "run" without touching the settings that determine what they are even simulating.

Open Contest Sims and set the contest archetype and pool size first. Together they decide what field gets generated: low stakes simulates a softer, chalkier field, high stakes simulates a sharper and more concentrated one. Then set percent to first, which is first-place prize divided by total prize pool. Archetype changes who you are playing against. Percent to first changes how your lineups get graded, pushing you contrarian and ceiling-hunting at a high number, and consistent at a low one. We broke down the interaction between the two in the contest archetype and percent to first guide.

Order matters here for a boring, practical reason. Anything that changes the inputs to the whole simulation forces a full re-run: changing the contest pool size, or editing a projection. Your own finishing tweaks, ROI boosts and exposure caps and filtering down to the stacks you want, do not. So set the field first, then shape your exposures inside it, and make those tweaks last, once you are close to final. The full sequence lives in how to use the MLB DFS Sims.

Then shape the pool. Boost a player down to fade him; boost him up to force him. Resist deleting players outright, because a deleted player also disappears from your simulated opponents, and now you are optimizing against a field that does not exist. That reasoning is worked through in full in how to control your player pool.

The thing to understand about boosts is how little you need to move them. On the MLB DFS Strategy stream that opens this article, the host pulled up his first Sims run, found he was on only 12% Brandon Woodruff and 9% Jacob Lopez, and gave each arm a 15% ROI boost. After the re-run, Woodruff sat at 33% and Lopez at 27%. His own read on it is the part worth copying:

"This was not a dramatic sh[ift] ... we didn't do anything crazy, right? No 50% boost. We['re] getting more of Woodruff and Lopez, but we're still getting a lot of Baz, still getting a lot of the guys that the Sims were already giving it to us, but now we're just smoothing that exposure out and getting a little bit more of the guys that I like."

A 15% nudge roughly tripled both exposures without evicting anybody from the field, and left the arms the Sims already liked still in the pool. That is the whole argument for boosting instead of deleting, demonstrated on a live board rather than asserted.

A Worked Example: One MLB Slate, Start To Lock

Say it is a Tuesday, nine-game main slate, and you are firing 20 lineups into a $10 tournament with roughly 8% of the prize pool going to first. The numbers below are illustrative rather than a real slate; the sequence is the part to copy.

You open the Top Stacks Tool and the board is flat: the top team sits around 11% stack probability, the next around 10%, the third around 8%. Nothing is running away with it. That flatness is your read for the entire day.

In Contest Sims you set three things before you touch anything else:

• Archetype: match a $10 field, not a marquee one.
• Pool Size: near the real field size, since this forces a re-run if you change it later.
• Percent To First: 8%, straight from the contest's prize structure.

You run it. The output ranks lineups by Sim ROI, a single number for how the lineup performed across every simulated contest rather than in one projected outcome.

Now you steer. Ownership projections say the field is piling 30% onto one starting pitcher whose projection is barely separated from the arm behind him. That gap between projection and ownership is leverage, and it is the whole game. You set a hard exposure cap so you land near 15% on the chalk arm, and you apply a positive ROI boost to the pitcher nobody wants. You keep uniques low rather than cranking them up, because on a flat board more uniques just smooth you back toward the field you were trying to beat.

Then you export favorites and stop. Total elapsed time: about 10 minutes. The board being flat is why you ended up overweight the unowned arm, which is the same fact you noticed in the morning, arriving now as a build decision rather than an observation.

Not a subscriber yet? Stokastic's MLB Sims simulate the contest thousands of times against a modeled field, so you are steering exposures instead of guessing at one projected score. Take 10% off your first payment with code MLBPLAYBOOK10.

start your MLB subscription

Pre-Lock: Confirmed Lineups Change The Math

Ownership projections are worth re-pulling once confirmed lineups post, because a scratched leadoff hitter moves both the projection and the field's reaction to it. This is precisely why MLB DFS Live Before Lock airs when it does: it starts an hour before the main slate locks, which means the clock moves with first pitch rather than sitting at a fixed time. Check the channel rather than setting a standing alarm.

That hour is the most useful one of the day to watch somebody else work. The morning show reads a board nobody has tested; Live Before Lock is where the tools get driven under real time pressure, with late scratches landing and ownership moving underneath the build. It runs seven days a week, with Eric Lindquist hosting on weekdays and Eric MacPherson taking the weekends.

Why this show, specifically. Every other show explains the tools. Live Before Lock is the only one that airs during crunch time, so you see the tools worked in the last hour before lock, when a scratch has just landed and the ownership number you built against is already stale. Watching someone re-cut exposures against a closing clock teaches the pre-lock block faster than reading about it.

Post-Slate: The 60 Seconds Nobody Spends

Here is the habit promised at the top, and it has two halves.

First, reopen the exposures tab on the pool you exported and read what your exposures actually were, not what you meant them to be. The number that matters is the same one that mattered at build time: your exposure minus projected ownership.

The 60-second audit. Three questions, every night: Did the exposure caps bind where you expected? Did a group you forgot about quietly own 40% of your portfolio? Did the uniques setting smooth you back toward the field anyway? These are process facts, true regardless of whether the slate paid.

Second, open post-contest sims and look at the finished contest rather than just your payout. The point of doing this is to separate two things a payout screen fuses together: a lineup can win money and still have been a bad bet before the first pitch, and a lineup can be well constructed and lose. That is why judging a build by one slate's outcome is how strong players talk themselves into bad adjustments.

Do both for a week and you will usually turn up a setting that has been quietly working against you.

The 3 Mistakes New MLB DFS Subscribers Make

1. Treating projections as the answer instead of the input. A projection is one number. The Contest Sims exist because the same projection produces wildly different outcomes depending on the field around it. The top-ranked Sim ROI lineup going into a contest can finish deep in the field, and a lower-ranked one can win it. That spread is the range you are actually playing inside. If you are picking the top projected lineup and clicking submit, you have bought a simulator and used it as a calculator. The distinction is spelled out in Sims vs optimizers.

2. Buying the "steamed" player. Chasing a hot streak means paying into a worse price point, whether the currency is salary or ownership. Two good games is not a sample. Baseball's variance is wide enough that a bat can look transformed for a week on nothing but sequencing, and by the time the streak is visible to you it is visible to the pricing and to the field.

3. Assuming the tools are for high-stakes players. This one is exactly backwards, and it quietly leaves the most on the table. Low-stakes contests are the soft ones. Ask yourself how many people in a $10 field are running comprehensive contest simulations, and then reconsider who benefits most from owning them. If you play low stakes, you have more edge to gain from the Sims, not less. Contest choice deserves its own thinking, which we covered in the DFS contest selection guide.

Power Features Most Subscribers Never Touch

Everything below ships with the Sims tools you are already paying for. None of it is an add-on, and none of it costs extra. What each tier includes is spelled out on the pricing page

• ROI Boosts, Positive And Negative. Nudge a player's ROI up to force exposure or down to fade, without removing him from the simulated field.
• Exposure Caps On Players And On Stacks. Cap a whole team stack, not just a bat. If you only want 15% total exposure to one offense, say so once rather than fighting it lineup by lineup.
• Groups. Pair two correlated hitters and nudge that combination up or down together, rather than fighting each bat separately. It is a lean, not a ban: a negative boost on a pair makes the Sims build that combination less often without pretending those two players do not exist. The cleanest way to steer correlation rather than accept it.
• Custom Projections Upload. Upload your own projections and ownership via CSV and the Sims run on your numbers. You can also hand-edit a single player's projected points, ownership, or batting position right in the table, and rewind any change you make.
• Single Lineup Sim. Paste a lineup you already like, click to complete it, and the tool fills the open spots optimally and returns Sim ROI, cash rate, and chance to win.
• Uniques. Uniques set how many players must differ between your own lineups. Raising them forces your builds apart from each other, which spreads you across more players and pulls each individual exposure back toward the field's. That buys portfolio stability and costs ROI, and on short slates the trade is usually bad.
• The Stakes Slider. The low-stakes-to-high-stakes control that reshapes the whole simulated field in one move rather than player by player. It is the fastest way to make sure you are simulating the contest you actually entered.

The one to open tonight is groups, because it answers the leverage problem from the worked example directly. Caps tell the Sims how much of a player you will tolerate. Groups tell them which combinations you refuse to duplicate, which is often what separates a lineup that cashes from one that shows up on 400 other screens.

The MLB Show Calendar And Who To Follow

Everything below streams free on the Stokastic DFS YouTube channel.

Live Before Lock is the one to add if you only watch one more, and it is the one subscribers most consistently skip. Strategy and Perfect Lineup both work a board that nobody has played yet. Live Before Lock is the only one that airs inside the window where the day's real information arrives, which makes it the one place you watch these tools used the way you will actually have to use them: fast, with incomplete information, against a clock. That is the same pre-lock block from the workflow above, done on camera against a live board. There is also a Stokastic Discord, which the hosts point people toward when they have questions.

If you would rather see the daily output than the process, our MLB DFS picks page carries the slate read every day.

Prefer to tail a proven card instead of building your own? The value-first habit above still applies; you just outsource the legwork. DFSnDonuts Picks on Tails is a DFS-native expert (#8 on the MLB Hot Streak leaderboard as of July 16) whose plays come with the receipt every Tails expert carries: a full graded track record you can check before you tail. Start with the free expert picks feed, where free picks post every day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a Stokastic MLB DFS subscription worth it? It depends entirely on whether you run the loop. If you use it as a projections lookup, you are paying for a spreadsheet and the honest answer is no. If you use the Contest Sims to simulate the field you are actually playing against, set your archetype and percent to first deliberately, and audit your exposures afterward, the tools do work you cannot reproduce by hand. Baseball, with its daily slates and enormous variance, rewards that process more than most sports. No tool removes that variance, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something worse than a subscription.

Which Stokastic MLB DFS package should I buy? MLB Premium gets you projections and core content. Data + Sims adds the full data tables and Sims access, which is what the build step in this article runs on. Sims MAX adds maximum Sims runs and the largest pool sizes. If you play more than one sport, the All-Access bundles cover every sport at the matching depth. Current pricing and the exact contents of each tier live on the pricing page

Do I need Sims MAX, or is Data + Sims enough? Data + Sims is enough for most MLB players. The jump to Sims MAX is about volume: larger simulated pools and more runs, which matter most when you are entering marquee contests with big fields. If you are firing 20 lineups into a $10 tournament, spend the difference on entries.

Can I use the Stokastic MLB DFS tools for low-stakes contests? Yes, and that is arguably where they pay off hardest. The percentage of a low-stakes field running full contest simulations is small, which is exactly the argument for owning them. Set your contest archetype to match the field you are entering rather than the one you wish you were entering.

How long does the daily MLB DFS workflow actually take? About 20 minutes on a normal main slate: five reading the board, ten building and shaping exposures in the Sims, four reacting to confirmed lineups before lock, and the one-minute audit after the slate. The audit is the minute people skip, and it is the one the other 19 depend on. Budget less on a short slate, more on any day you are playing multiple slates.

Closing The Loop

The subscription is not the projections, and it was never the projections. What you bought is a loop: it starts with a read of the board's shape, passes through the settings that decide what field you are simulating, survives contact with confirmed lineups, and ends with one honest minute looking at what you actually rostered.

Most subscribers run the first half of that loop and stop. Notice that the flat board from the worked example never stopped being useful. It was a morning observation, then a reason to cap the chalk arm, then a groups decision hours later, and it would have been worth auditing that night whether or not the lineups cashed. Carrying one read all the way through a day, rather than collecting five disconnected ones, is the whole difference between owning these tools and using them.

Ready to run the loop? Stokastic's MLB Data + Sims gives you the Contest Sims, ownership projections, Late Swap, and post-contest sims in one subscription. Code MLBPLAYBOOK10 takes 10% off your first payment.

get MLB Data + Sims Want to try the engine first? The free Sims will show you what a simulated field looks like before you pay for one.