NBA DFS Multi-Entry Strategy: How To Build And Manage A Lineup Pool

Mass multi-entry in NBA DFS is not about entering more lineups. It is about being wrong on purpose. On any given slate you cannot know which value play breaks out or which star gets rested, so instead of betting one lineup on one guess, you spread 20, 50, or 150 lineups across the outcomes you think the field has mispriced. The whole strategy lives in one number that I will keep coming back to: the gap between how much of a player your pool owns and how much of him the field owns.

In Summary

• The point of multi-entry is coverage, not volume. You own many versions of a mispriced player because you cannot know which one hits.
• Your one real lever is exposure, the percentage of your lineups a given player appears in, read against his projected ownership.
• Randomness and unique-lineup rules are two dials that pull against each other. Turn one up and you can turn the other down.

Watch The Video

The original walkthrough runs the entire process live, from an empty pool to exported lineups on both DraftKings and FanDuel.

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About the example numbers. The exposures, salaries, and player names below come from a 2018 NBA slate broken down in that video, back in the Awesemo days. The players have long since moved on and the salaries are dated. The process is not, which is why I still teach it exactly this way. If you want the ground floor first, the DFS beginner guide covers salary caps, GPPs, and ownership before you scale up.

Why One Lineup Is A Bad Bet

Start with the concession that makes multi-entry make sense. On a normal NBA night you have a read on which cheap players should hit value and which game will run fast, but you do not know. A starter gets scratched an hour before tip and the whole board reshuffles. A blowout empties the fourth quarter and your "full minutes" over dies on the bench.

A single lineup asks you to be right about all of that at once. So you stop trying. You enter many lineups, own many players, and let the slate tell you which read was correct. Every decision below follows from that one concession, and the good news is the process is identical whether you fire 20 lineups or 150. You just take more aggressive or more conservative stances as the entry count climbs.

Build The Chalk Before You Fade It

Before setting a single rule, run one pass with nothing constrained: projections only, no exposure limits, no randomness. You are not building a pool yet. You are drawing a map of where the field will pile in.

There is a small trick to this first pass. Cap every player somewhere reasonable, I use 65% and there is nothing magic about that number, purely so the map is readable. Leave it at 100% and your first build hands you a value guard in every lineup, which tells you nothing. At 65% the popular plays still float to the top without maxing out, and now you can see the chalk clearly enough to price it.

You want some of that chalk. Take a slice of your pool and simply play the obvious plays straight, because popular players are popular for real reasons and sometimes the obvious thing happens. The rest of the build works down from there, which is where the number I promised comes in.

The Leverage Read: A Worked Example

This is the core skill, and it is the same math every night. Every build gives you a player's exposure, how often he landed in your lineups, and next to it sits his projected ownership. Neither figure means much alone. The distance between them is the entire game.

On the slate in the video, the first pass returned three players worth walking through:

Look at Alex Len. My unconstrained pass wanted him in 64% of lineups while the field projected for 14%. That is more than four times the field on one player. I believe he should be owned more than 14%, so I want to be over the field, but four times over is a bigger swing than I need. I dial him to 40%, which still roughly triples the field and gives me real leverage without betting the night on one center. Omari Spellman told the same story and got the same treatment, 64% down to 40% against 17% ownership.

Gary Clark is the one worth narrating, because he is the one case where I break my own rule on purpose. At 29% exposure versus roughly 2% projected ownership, tripling the field would put him around 6%. But he is a cheap flier, and a low-priced player who posts value wins you nothing if you barely own him. So I go a touch further and set him at 12%, deliberately more aggressive than my rule, because that is exactly where a low-priced player earns extra rope.

The discipline is simple: be over the field where you have conviction, sized to your risk tolerance rather than a formula. If you want the theory underneath it, NBA DFS leverage and game theory is the deep dive, and grounding your reads starts with trustworthy NBA DFS projections.

Every Change Reshapes The Whole Pool

Here is the part that trips people up, and it is the callback to that first unconstrained map. When I cut Alex Len from 64% down to 40%, I did not just lose 24% of one center. That exposure has to go somewhere, and the build reappropriates it across every other player in his price range. Re-run the pool and suddenly you are heavier on Cody Zeller, Clint Capela, and PJ Tucker than you were a minute ago, players you never touched.

So multi-entry is not a checklist you complete once. It is a loop: sort your pool top to bottom, fix the biggest outlier, re-run, and see how the pool redistributes. Two or three passes in, the changes get small and you stop. What you cannot do is build once and walk away. A pool you never inspected is a pool full of exposures you did not choose, which is the fastest way to mismanage a lineup set.

Randomness And Uniques: Two Dials, One Job

Left alone, any lineup builder hands you the same players over and over, because it keeps solving the same math. Two settings break that up, and the key is that they pull against each other.

Randomness is the subtler one. Set 50% randomness on a player projected for 50 points and the builder treats him as anywhere from 25 to 75 in a given lineup. That does two things. Your lineups stop being clones, and the builder starts surfacing value plays your raw projection had buried.

The rule to remember: the more randomness you use, the fewer uniques you need, and vice versa. On the slate in the video, heavy per-player randomness meant a single unique was enough to produce a wide pool. Zero out the randomness and take projections at face value, and now you need uniques doing the heavy lifting or every lineup collapses onto the same chalk. How many uniques you actually need walks through where to land that balance.

The sharper version ties randomness to each player's own volatility. A boom-or-bust scorer who swings from a dud to a 60-burger deserves a wider range than a steady veteran who posts the same line every night. In a GPP you want that volatility, because upside is what wins tournaments, so the high-variance guys should get more wiggle room than the floor plays. This is what the Stokastic Sims do natively: instead of one projection with a guessed randomness percentage, the tool surfaces each player's real distribution of outcomes and builds from that, which is the difference sims vs optimizers turns on.

This is why you cap at all. If you cannot know which read is right on a given night, you cannot let one player ride in nearly every lineup. Exposure caps are not a limit on your best plays. They are insurance against being all the way wrong at once.

Managing Exposure At Scale

Once you are firing 150 lineups, a little arithmetic keeps you out of trouble. On a site like FanDuel, you fill two of most positions, so your total exposure at any two-slot position has to clear 200%, with room to spare because the builder never solves to the exact percentage. If your shooting guards add up to 204%, you are too thin and the build will choke trying to find enough lineups. Get that number comfortably above 200 and it flows. (DraftKings Classic adds flex spots, so the arithmetic loosens, but the logic is the same.)

A fast default for the whole pool is a global cap set as a multiple of public ownership. If a player projects for 10% ownership, auto-set his cap somewhere around three to four times that, tuned to your own risk tolerance. It gives every player a sane starting exposure in one move, and then you hand-tune the handful of names where you have a real opinion. That blend, a formula for the pool and judgment for the outliers, is the diversification that keeps 150 lineups from turning into 150 copies.

Basketball earns one liberty other sports do not. A cheap player in a locked-in role is almost certain to clear his salary, so think of a $3,700 value guard as about as safe as NBA DFS gets. You can run 80% of a player like that without blinking, because unlike sports where a cheap starter can post a flat zero, an NBA value play with real minutes has a floor. Spend that certainty on the punt so you can pay up elsewhere. Higher-salary chalk is the opposite. A $5,900 forward everyone owns is where I cap tighter, usually 40% to 50%, unless the field and I happen to land in the same place and there is no better option at the price.

The Late-News Safety Net

The last practical piece is protection against the thing that actually blows up multi-entry: a starter ruled out after you have built. Get one full-slate pool locked and uploaded 30 minutes before lock, even if you plan to refine it, so that no matter what you have 150 clean lineups in with nobody in them who is confirmed out. Then, if news breaks late, do a single quick player-swap rather than rebuilding under a clock. Uploading a finished pool once and swapping surgically beats hand-editing 150 lineups with your gut at 6:58. When you push them live, the mechanics of uploading DFS lineups to DraftKings are the same every night.

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Slate Size And Blowouts

Everything above assumes a full board. On a big slate there is too much opportunity to concentrate, so let exposures breathe and cover more players. Shrink to a three-game night and it inverts: fewer places to hide means chalk is more acceptable, and you can carry a heavier dose of a great value play because the whole field is stuck with him too.

As for blowouts, across 150 lineups I do not try to game them. Some games run away, some stay tight, and over a large pool it evens out. I would rather set my exposures well than guess which game turns into a fourth-quarter clear-out. If you were entering a five-max instead, that is where you tighten. Cap your favorite plays around 80% so no single player rides in all five lineups. The tournament strategy shifts with the number of bullets you are firing.

Building This With The Stokastic Sims

The 2018 walkthrough was an optimizer workflow: load projections, run a build, cap exposure, tune randomness, export, upload. The Stokastic Sims do that job now, and they do the one thing that whole process was reaching for. An optimizer ranks lineups by projected score. The Sims run the contest thousands of times and rank your pool by how often each lineup actually wins, which folds the variance, the ownership, and the exposure question into a single output instead of leaving you to eyeball it.

Practically, you set the same rules (exposure caps, randomness, locked players, a banned list) and read Ownership Projections for the leverage gap instead of building a column by hand. How to use the NBA DFS Sims walks the interface, the NBA DataHub carries the projections, ownership, and stacks underneath all of it, and the free Sims will show you the shape of a pool before you pay anything.

More on this: MLB DFS Multi-Entry Strategy: Build A Stack Portfolio · NBA DFS Usage Rate Strategy: How Injuries Create Value · NBA DFS Tournament Strategy: How To Build Better GPP Lineups · DFS NBA Strategy: Win Bigger On DraftKings & FanDuel · NBA DFS Contrarian Strategy: Fade Chalk, Beat the Field

Bottom Line

The slate in that video had a value center my build wanted at 64% while the field sat at 14%, a cheap flier nobody was touching, and a fistful of chalk everyone else was buried in. I never knew which of them would hit. What I knew was where the field was mispriced and how many differentiated ways I could own those spots, and that dialing one player down reshuffled the entire pool behind him.

That is the shift, and it outlasts every roster change since 2018. You stop asking which lineup is going to win, because nobody knows, and you start asking which players the field is mispricing and how many ways you can hold them. The exposure is the lever. The pool is the strategy.

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