Fantasy Cruncher is an immensely powerful tool that most top pros use to build their lineups. There are many layers to FC, so it can be effectively used by anyone, from novice to advanced players. For most players, they want to build a large set of lineups in FC and then pick their favorites to enter on their DFS site of choice. Here’s how to get started and implement the strategies in our NFL DFS Quick Start Guide.
Fantasy Cruncher NFL Quick Start Guide
Uniques
FC allows you to set how much differentiation you want between lineups – if you set it to 8 uniques, for instance, each lineup it generates will have 8 of 9 players different from each other lineup in your pool. I like to set uniques to 3 because that guarantees that I won’t have any lineups that are overly correlated with each other entered in the same contest. To set your uniques, click advanced options on the top menu.
Randomness
If you just run Fantasy Cruncher without changing any settings, it’s going to generate a lot of lineups that are very similar to one another because the best ways to achieve a high projection are similar between lineups. Randomness varies the projections for each optimization so that it uses a different set of projections than the baseline numbers, so all of the lineups turn out more differentiated. I like to set randomness to 35% in FC Classic and 75% in FC Pro as a baseline.
Stacking
My baseline stacking rules in FC are to set at least two skill players paired with my quarterback. But utilizing a run-back can be a good strategy with certain stacks, and a third player matched up with your QB can be an excellent idea. I like to run several crunches with different settings to find the best ones for each of the stacks that I want to target.
Ready to Build
Once you have all of the settings above, make sure to select use Stokastic NFL DFS projections. Then you just have to type in how many lineups you want to build and hit crunch!
Ownership
Since we’re trying to avoid entering lineups with all popular plays, we can use FC to eliminate these possibilities a couple ways. The way I prefer is to run a crunch and find the highest total ownership lineup in my pool, and then to set a rule that any future lineup’s ownership can’t exceed 75% of that number. That generally gets you out of the top 5% of most popular lineups.
Projection
Once I have my lineups generated, I want to eliminate the ones that don’t project well. The best way to do that is to sort by projection after crunching and then to delete the bottom 50% of lineups. When you use significant randomness, you’re going to end up with a fair number of lineups that simply don’t make the cut.
Now you got a pool of great lineups to choose from. At this stage, I’m trying to find as many lineups as possible that fit my subjective preferences to enter into DFS contests for the week. The best way to do it is to unselect all lineups and then click the check of ones you want to save. Then hit export lineups and you can get the CSV to upload directly into your site of choice. Now you’re ready to ship some contests, and when you do, make sure to let us know on the Stokastic Hall of Fame!
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