How To Use MMA DFS Sims To Win On DraftKings & FanDuel

If you play MMA DFS, the hard part was never spotting the live underdog or the priced-up favorite. It's deciding how much of each fighter to play across a whole pool of lineups, and then knowing which of those builds actually gives you the best shot at first place on a small, high-variance UFC slate. That's the exact problem the MMA DFS Sims are built to solve, and it's how I attack large-field tournaments on DraftKings and FanDuel. This walkthrough follows the tool step by step, the same simulation approach behind Stokastic's (formerly Awesemo.com) other Sims products, with the features built specifically for MMA. If you're still learning the fundamentals the Sims automate, our DFS beginner's guide covers ownership, leverage, and GPP play; this piece is the tool that puts them on autopilot. Pull up the next card in the MMA DataHub and follow along.

Watch The Video

The full tool walkthrough is below, a screen-by-screen tour of building, simulating, and customizing MMA lineups. Read on for the written version. Watch on YouTube.

Step 1: Build Your Pool In The Contest Sims (Match The Field, Don't Fight It)

Everything starts in the Contest Sims (the contest generator), where you build the pool of lineups that eventually gets simulated. Before you press Generate, a few settings matter:

Setting	What to pick	Why it matters
Site + Contest Type	DraftKings or FanDuel; classic or captain mode	Both sites are supported (DraftKings is the more popular MMA site), and single-fight captain slates need their own selection
Slate	The exact card and slate you're entering	A card can have multiple contest options; make sure the right one is loaded
Pool Size	Closest to your contest's field (up to 10,000 lineups on Sims Max, up to 500 on the base package)	The pool has to model the field you're actually beating
Fight Stacks	Off by default	You almost never roster both fighters in one fight; leave stacking off unless you have a specific reason (see below)

The mindset that trips up most players is right here: this stage is about emulating the field, not building the lineups you personally want. The Contest Sims build a pool that matches the field's projected exposure on purpose, so the simulation has a realistic opponent pool to beat. Force 90% of your pool onto one fighter the field is only rostering 50% of the time, and the sim would simply assume that fighter is 90% owned, handing you a distorted result. You shape your exposures later, once the sim tells you which builds actually win.

Once you generate, each fighter shows a projected ownership next to your pool exposure. When you believe a fighter will run hotter or colder than the model says, that is exactly when to reach for the up and down arrows: nudge their projected ownership and regenerate so the simulated field reflects it. One thing worth knowing, the Contest Sims have tested out as more accurate at predicting ownership than the older standalone ownership model, so when a fighter sits a few points off, I lean on the tool.

New to the Sims? The MMA Sims build a full lineup pool, simulate it against a realistic tournament field thousands of times, and hand you the lineups with the best simulated ROI, plus the leverage, ROI-boost, and dupe controls below. Code MMADFS10 takes 10% off your first Stokastic+ MMA payment: get the MMA package.

Step 2: Run The Contest Simulation (Let Sim ROI Rank Your Lineups)

Once you have a pool you like, click Simulate Lineups and it drops into the simulation page. Check the setting across the top before you run anything: percentage to first, which is the first-place prize divided by the total prize pool. If a $500,000 card pays $100,000 to the winner, that's 20% to first. A $300,000 pool paying $100,000 to the winner works out to about 33%, so you'd select the nearest 30% option. When a payout doesn't line up with a menu choice, just round to the closest one. This setting matters more than people expect, because a top-heavy payout rewards a very different, more contrarian lineup than a flatter, more spread-out one.

Projections are flexible here too. Run the sim on Stokastic's own projections and ownership (what most players do), upload your own via CSV (a file with a fighter-name column, an ownership column, and a projection column), or hand-edit a single fighter right in the table. Type a new projected number over the current one, or use the plus and minus buttons to move it a point at a time, and the rewind arrow snaps any change back to the baseline. When the data looks right, press Run Contest Simulation.

Here is what actually happens next: every lineup in your pool is simulated against the rest, and the whole card is run 40,000 times, so every fighter "fights" his opponent 40,000 times inside your exact payout structure. Then the lineups are sorted by simulated ROI, which is the entire point of the exercise. Sim ROI reflects how often a lineup min-cashes, how often it reaches the top of the contest, and how often it wins outright, all at once. Separately, the tool calculates how often each lineup is expected to be duplicated, a read that matters enormously on small MMA slates (more on that below). In the walkthrough, the top lineup showed a 35.4% simulated ROI.

The key shift: you are not chasing the single highest-projected lineup. You are ranking hundreds or thousands of builds by how they finish against a simulated field, with dupes and payout shape already baked in. That ranking is the edge a lone projection can't give you.

Step 3: Shape Your Exposures (A Worked ROI-Boost Example)

This is where I turn "the best lineups by ROI" into "the best lineups I actually want exposure to." I favorite the top lineups by Sim ROI (say the top 150; you can also enter any custom number, like the exact 57 you plan to play), then open the exposures tab. It lists your exposure to each fighter, their projected fantasy points, their expected ownership, and a leverage column, which is simply your exposure minus their projected ownership.

The ROI-boost feature is how you reshape that pool without hand-editing a single lineup:

• Fade A Fighter. Say they show up in roughly 72% of your favorited builds and you want far less. Apply a negative boost (for example minus 50%) and every lineup containing them grades down and sorts lower, dropping that exposure to around a third of your pool. Go more aggressive (say minus 80%) to push them down further, then re-check the exposures tab: because the two fighters in a bout are negatively correlated, fading one side hard can nudge the opponent's exposure the other way.
• Force A Fighter. Boost them up the same way and the tool pulls more of the fighter you love into your top builds.
• Reset Anytime. Clear Boosts snaps everything back to the original exposures.

One correlation note worth remembering: because two fighters in the same bout move in opposite directions, cutting one side naturally pulls their opponent into more of your lineups, so a fade on a fight ripples both ways. The payoff of all this is that you get the exposures you want while the tool keeps handing you the best-projected, least-duplicated versions of those builds.

The MMA-Only Setting: Stacking A Fight

Stacking two fighters from the same bout is the one control unique to MMA, and by default it's turned off, because most of the time you do not want to roster two fighters who are actively trying to knock each other out. The exception is a specific spot: a competitive main event where both fighters are cheap enough that if the bout goes the full distance, both could post a score high enough to land in the optimal lineup. In that case you can tell the Contest Sims to put, say, 20% of your lineups on that fight stack, press apply, and build. It's a rare, deliberate move, not a default, but the tool gives you the dial when the spot calls for it.

Why Dupes Are The Biggest Edge In MMA DFS

If there's one reason to run MMA through the Sims, it's the dupe read. MMA slates are small: a handful of fights, a short roster (six fighters on DraftKings, five on FanDuel), and a limited pool of viable fighters. That means a lot of the field independently arrives at the same "obvious" lineup, the one loaded with the highest-projected fighters and the best line-value plays off the betting odds. Winning a big tournament with a lineup that 18 or 20 other people also submitted means splitting first place; winning it with a unique lineup means keeping it. The tool calculates how often each build is expected to be duplicated and steers your top lineups toward the ones that are both high-ROI and uncommon, which is exactly the edge that's hard to eyeball on your own on a small card.

The dupe edge in one line: on a small MMA card, a unique winning lineup keeps first place while a duplicated one splits it, and simulated ROI already prices that in for you.

After the contest is over, the post-contest simulator lets you go back and review the lineups you actually played, checking whether they were expected to be profitable, so the read keeps sharpening slate over slate. For a worked example of this process on a real card, see our UFC DFS picks breakdown.

Tournaments Vs. Cash Games (A Scope Note)

Everything above (a large pool, simulating it against a tournament field, setting percentage to first, leveraging ownership and dupes) is the GPP, or tournament, process. The Contest Sims are built around tournament dynamics: a top-heavy payout, a big field, and getting leverage off the chalk.

Cash games are a different game. In a double-up or 50/50 you only need to beat about half the field, so the target is the highest-floor lineup built straight off projections, not a leveraged, contrarian, simulated pool. Don't run your GPP pool into cash. Build cash lineups around the projections and floor in the MMA DataHub instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are MMA DFS Sims? They're a DFS contest simulator for UFC slates that builds a large pool of lineups, runs the whole card thousands of times against a realistic field (inside a real GPP payout structure), and ranks every lineup by simulated ROI instead of a single projected score. Think of it as an MMA DFS lineup optimizer that ranks lineups by simulated ROI, not a single projected score.

How many lineups should I build? Match your pool size to the contest field. For a large-field GPP, the biggest pool (up to 10,000 lineups on Sims Max) models the field most closely; the base package tops out around 500. In a small single-entry contest, pick the size nearest that field.

Do I have to use Stokastic's projections? No. Run the Sims on Stokastic projections and ownership (most players do), upload your own via CSV with fighter-name, ownership, and projection columns, or hand-edit any single fighter's number in the table and rewind the change if you don't like it.

What's the difference between ownership and leverage? Projected ownership is how much of the field is expected to roster a fighter; leverage is your exposure minus that ownership. Positive leverage means you're overweight a lower-owned fighter, the kind of upside that wins large-field MMA tournaments.

Why do dupes matter so much in MMA specifically? MMA slates are small (few fights, a short roster, a limited fighter pool), so the field piles onto the same handful of "obvious" builds. A winning lineup that's duplicated many times splits the prize; a unique one keeps it. The Sims fold expected dupes into simulated ROI so your top builds are the high-ROI ones the field is least likely to also play.

Will the Sims win me every contest? No. Nothing in DFS does, and MMA is high-variance. They're built to improve your win probability over a large sample, not to promise any single result.

The MMA DFS Sims Workflow: A Quick Summary

The MMA DFS Sims replace guesswork with a repeatable loop: build a pool that mirrors the field, simulate the whole card thousands of times against a real payout, and let simulated ROI (not a lone projection) rank your lineups, then shape exposures with the ROI-boost feature and lean on the dupe read that a small MMA slate makes so valuable. It pairs naturally with our guide to winning DFS tournaments: learn the GPP concepts there, then let the Sims execute them at scale. It won't make a high-variance sport safe, but run this every card and you're playing the long game the math actually rewards.

Want to feel the workflow before you subscribe? Sample it with our free DFS Sims first. When you're ready for the full Contest Sims, ownership leverage, and dupe controls above, the Stokastic+ MMA package unlocks all of it. Code MMADFS10 takes 10% off your first payment: get the MMA package.