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

Naming the right quarterback or the chalk running back is the easy part of NFL DFS. The hard part is deciding how much of each one to play across a whole pool of lineups, and then knowing which of those builds actually gives you the best shot at the top of a tournament. That second problem is what the Stokastic NFL Sims exist to solve, and below I will walk you through exactly how I use them to attack large-field football GPPs on DraftKings and FanDuel.

This is a hands-on tour of the workflow: take the lineup pool you built in the Contest Sims, run it against itself across tens of thousands of simulated contests, let simulated ROI rank every build, then shape your player exposures with leverage, ROI boosts, hard caps, and stacking filters. If you have not played since last NFL season, or you are brand new and staring at a screen full of columns you do not recognize, this is your orientation. Pull up the week's board in the NFL DataHub and follow along.

In Summary

• Set The Inputs First. On the projections page, confirm league, site, contest type (classic or showdown), and the exact slate, then set "percentage to first" so the Sims know how top-heavy your contest is.
• Let Simulated ROI Rank Your Lineups, not a single projected score. Every build you made plays against the others tens of thousands of times, with QB-to-pass-catcher correlation baked in, and gets sorted by Sim ROI.
• Shape Exposures On The Exposures Page with leverage, ROI boosts, exposure caps, and player groups. Want no more than 50% of a running back? Set that cap and the pool re-favorites to match.
• Trust The Process Over Any One Result. Even if you change nothing and run the default Stokastic projections, every lineup is ranked by simulated ROI instead of a gut read, and that edge plays out over a large sample, never on a single Sunday.

Watch: How The Stokastic NFL Sims Work

The walkthrough sets the slate, runs the contest simulation, and shapes exposures step by step. The written version below carries the exact settings and a worked leverage example so you can run it yourself.

Watch on YouTube

Get The Inputs Right Before You Simulate

Your lineup pool gets built in the Contest Sims (that is its own walkthrough). Once the pool exists, head to the projections page, and before you touch a single number, confirm the selections running across the top of the screen:

Setting	What to pick	Why it matters
League + Site	NFL, and DraftKings or FanDuel	Optimal builds and scoring differ by site
Contest Type	Classic or showdown	Single-game showdown is fully supported and plays very differently
Slate	Main, afternoon, or any other live slate	The NFL posts several slates a week; pick the exact one you are entering
Percentage To First	First-place prize divided by the total prize pool	A top-heavy contest rewards a very different lineup than a flat one

That last row is the one people breeze past, and it quietly shapes every lineup the Sims favor. Percentage to first is simple division: take the payout to first place and ask what share of the entire prize pool it represents. A $400,000 contest paying $100,000 to first is 25% to first, because $100,000 is 25% of $400,000, so you would select 25%. When your contest's exact figure is not on the list, pick the closest one.

The Stokastic projections come pre-loaded here, so you can press run immediately and never edit a thing. But if you have a real read the model does not, this page is where you apply it:

• Upload Your Own Projections as a CSV with three columns: player name, projection, and ownership. Every number on the page updates to yours.
• Hand-Edit A Single Player. We have Jahmyr Gibbs projected for 25.41 fantasy points on this slate. Think that is rich? Type 22 and the Sims will run him at 22. The plus and minus arrows nudge a player one point at a time.
• Undo Cleanly. The rewind button reverts one player to the Stokastic default; the reset button wipes every change you made on the page at once.

None of those edits are required, and that is the point. The defaults are doing real work; the customizations are there for the handful of spots where you genuinely disagree with the model, not for tinkering for its own sake.

New to Stokastic? The NFL Sims take the lineup pool you built, run it against itself across tens of thousands of simulated contests, and rank every lineup by simulated ROI, then hand you the leverage, ROI-boost, and exposure-cap controls covered below. Run the workflow on an upcoming slate for free with our free DFS Sims, and code NFLSIMS10 takes 10% off your first Stokastic+ NFL payment for the full build: grab the NFL package.

Run The Contest Simulation And Read The Columns

With your inputs set, press run contest simulation. Here is what actually happens under the hood: every lineup you built plays against all the others tens of thousands of times, on a play-by-play simulation of each game. When a quarterback throws a touchdown to a wide receiver in a single sim, the quarterback scores, the receiver scores, and the opposing defense loses points. That is how full games get simulated over and over with correlation baked in to every player, which is the entire reason stacking a quarterback with his pass catchers wins in football.

When the sims finish, every lineup is ranked by simulated ROI: how profitable that build was across all the runs, inside the payout structure you set with percentage to first. That ranking, not a projected score, is what you sort and select from. Next to Sim ROI you will see a row of supporting columns:

• Projected Fantasy Points and ownership for the full lineup.
• Stack Type, which for NFL shows both the team and the shape: a QB+1, a QB+2, or a QB+2 with one opponent (a double stack with a runback on the other side of the game). You will also see unstacked builds, like a naked Jacoby Brissett lineup with no teammates around him.
• Dupes, how many other entries are projected to play your identical lineup.
• Win Percentage, top-10 percentage, and min-cash percentage, pulled straight from how often that build landed there across the sims.

Two things about those columns separate people who use the Sims well from people who fight them. First, dupes barely move the needle on a big NFL main slate, but on a showdown, a holiday slate, or a two-game Saturday slate they matter a lot: a lineup that wins but gets duped several times pays out far less than the same lineup coming in clean, and the simulation folds that straight into Sim ROI. Second, and this is the common trap: win percentage, top-10, and min-cash are already inside Sim ROI. Re-sorting by them on top of the ROI ranking just counts the same information twice.

The key shift: you are not hunting for the single highest-projected lineup. You are ranking thousands of builds by how they actually finish against a simulated field, with correlation, dupes, and payout shape all priced in. That ranking is what you build from.

A Worked Example: Shaping Your Exposures With Leverage, Boosts, And Caps

Once the sims rank your pool, the real work is deciding which exposures to keep, and that flows naturally from the ranking. Here is the exact sequence I run on a live slate. Start by favoriting your lineups: favorite 100, 150, or a custom number to match exactly how many you are entering. Favorite 150 with no uniques and you simply get the top 150 builds by Sim ROI.

Want them more diverse? Set a number of uniques. At four uniques, each favorited lineup has to differ by at least four players from a lineup already selected, so as you scroll the favorites you will see builds skipped for being too similar to a previous pick. That diversity costs a little ROI, and the tool shows you the exact trade at the bottom of the screen:

Uniques Setting	Minimum Sim ROI	Average Sim ROI
4 Uniques	64%	79.8%
0 Uniques	70.4%	83.4%

So four uniques trades a few points of ROI for a wider spread of distinct builds, which is the move when you want to be a touch more risk-averse. You can also filter by build shape: tell it the stack type does not contain 3 to strip out every QB+3 lineup, or does contain 3 to see only QB+3 builds, depending on which shapes you do and do not want exposure to.

Now open the exposures tab. It lists your most-rostered players (filterable by position) with each one's Sim ROI, projected points, pool ownership (effectively the field's projected ownership), your exposure (how much of your favorited pool the player is in), and the column that decides tournaments: leverage, which is your exposure minus pool ownership. Sort it both directions:

• Sort By Negative Leverage to find where you are underweight the field. In this run, only one of 150 lineups had the Texans defense, leaving us 9.4% underweight to them.
• Sort By Positive Leverage to find your overweight spots: 44% of lineups on Justin Jefferson, 30% on the Titans defense.

Leverage is the whole game at this stage. You are not just rostering highly projected players; you are finding the spots where the field piles onto one or two names and leaves similar-projection players under-owned. Sitting 44% on Justin Jefferson while the field is much lower is an overweight tournament stance on a productive player: if he beats his ownership, your pool gains separation from the field. Showing up on the Texans defense in one of 150 lineups is a deliberate fade.

When you want to change a number, do it here on the exposures page, not back on the build page. There are three controls, from loosest to most precise:

1. ROI boost (loose). Give a player a positive or negative ROI boost and every lineup he is in moves with it. A 10% boost on DK Metcalf, then adjust favorites, pushed his exposure to 65%, because every Metcalf lineup got that bump and more of them rose into the favorites. It re-favorites automatically when you adjust, and clearing the boost snaps his exposure back. Use it when you just want "more" or "less" without an exact target.
2. Exposure cap (hard maximum). Jahmyr Gibbs sat at 59%. Cap him at 50%, adjust favorites, and you land at exactly 50%. Turn the cap off any time to release it.
3. Player groups. Select two or more players to control them as a unit. Joe Burrow and Ja'Marr Chase started in 5.3% of lineups together; a 15% ROI boost on the group, then adjust favorites, lifted that pair to 11.3%, while a negative 15% dropped them out of the top lineups entirely. The trash icon deletes a group and re-favorites without it.

There is also a stack exposures toggle that breaks your quarterbacks down by stack shape, for example JJ McCarthy at roughly 11% (2% as a skinny stack, 8% as a double stack). The stack ROI and player ROI tabs round it out, showing how every stack type and every individual player graded across the full field of lineups they appear in.

This Is A Tournament Workflow, Not A Cash-Game One

One scope note before you run this on a real slate. Everything above (building a large pool, simulating it against a tournament field, setting percentage to first, leveraging ownership) is the GPP, or tournament, process. The Contest Sims are built around tournament dynamics: a top-heavy payout, beating thousands of entries, and getting leverage off the chalk.

	GPP (tournaments)	Cash (double-ups, 50/50s)
Goal	Beat thousands of entries for a top-heavy prize	Beat roughly half the field
Lineup Shape	Leveraged, correlated, simulated pool	Highest-floor build off projections
The Sims Workflow Above	Built for this	Tune for floor off projections instead

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, simulated pool. Build cash lineups around the projections in the NFL DataHub rather than running your GPP pool into them.

Why Simulated Lineups Beat Picking The Best Players

Picking the right players is only half of NFL DFS. The other half is roster construction and contest selection, and that is where the simulation earns its keep. Instead of one projected score, it shows you how often each lineup wins, hits the top 10, min-cashes, and gets duped, the full range of outcomes rather than a single number that hides the variance underneath it.

Even if all you ever do is build a pool, run the contest sim, and make zero manual adjustments, that process still puts a simulated ROI ranking behind every lineup instead of a gut read. The leverage, boost, and cap controls are fully in your hands, but they are a bonus on top of that, not a requirement. No tool makes any single NFL Sunday predictable, and that is exactly why the goal is win probability over a large sample, not a promise on any one week.

Run It On Your Next NFL Slate

Ready to put this on a real NFL slate? Everything starts in the Stokastic NFL DataHub, with the week's projections, ownership, and slates in one place. Sample the workflow with our free DFS Sims first, then step up to the full Contest Sims, ownership leverage, and the exposure controls above when you want the complete build. Every Stokastic+ subscription also includes our Discord, where the content team and the developers answer questions directly. When you are ready for the full NFL package, code NFLSIMS10 takes 10% off your first Stokastic+ payment: grab the NFL package.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are NFL DFS Sims? They are a DFS contest simulator that takes the lineup pool you built, runs it against itself through tens of thousands of simulated contests (paying out a real GPP structure), and ranks every lineup by simulated ROI instead of a single projected score. Every game is simulated play by play with QB-to-pass-catcher correlation baked in, so stacking is valued correctly.

Do I have to use Stokastic's projections? No. Most players run the default Stokastic projections and never touch them. You can also upload your own via CSV with player name, projection, and ownership columns, or hand-edit individual players with a typed value or the plus and minus arrows, and rewind any change.

What is "percentage to first" and how do I set it? It is the first-place prize divided by the total prize pool, and it tells the Sims how top-heavy your contest is. A $400,000 pool paying $100,000 to first is 25% to first. Set it to match your contest, or to the closest option available.

What is the difference between leverage and ownership? Pool ownership is how much of the field is projected to roster a player; leverage is your exposure minus that ownership. Positive leverage means you are overweight a lower-owned player, the kind of spot that wins tournaments when it hits.

How do I cap a player's exposure? Use the exposures page, not the build page. For a hard maximum, set an exposure cap (say 50%) and adjust favorites; a player sitting above it lands right at that number. To nudge a player up or down without a fixed target, use an ROI boost. To control two players together, build a group and boost or fade the group.

Can I use the Sims for showdown? Yes. Single-game showdown is fully supported. Watch dupes more closely on showdown, holiday, and two-game slates, where the small player pool makes identical lineups spike, and the Sims fold that dupe risk into Sim ROI. Setting a few uniques helps spread your builds out.

Will the Sims win me every contest? No. Nothing in NFL DFS does, and football carries real week-to-week variance. The Sims are built to improve your win probability over a large sample, not to promise any single result.