As you get more and more into DFS, you start noticing that top players enter as many as 150 entries into the big GPP contests. You may have the urge to dabble in multi-entry instead of making just one lineup in these big GPPs.
The more entries you have in the contest, the more chances you have to win. You may also feel that it is hard to compete with others firing 150 bullets while you have one.
Mass multi-entry (MME) is a particularly beneficial strategy for MLB as baseball is more unpredictable than some sports. Any player, team stack, or pitcher can have a big game on any given slate. It can be hard to narrow the options down to one lineup, and MME allows you the best of all worlds.
It takes a bit of practice to get good at MME for DFS, but here are some tips to help you on your way.
Get A Lineup Optimizer And Learn To Use It
Yes, a person can build many lineups manually, one at a time. Yet to mass-enter contests efficiently, you will want to get comfortable with a lineup optimizer. Multiple DFS sites with optimizers enable you to create as many lineups as you want based on your criteria quickly and efficiently.
These sites also offer player projections. Even if you are entering one lineup, you would be well served to subscribe to a provider with quality projections and a good optimizer. Even though it is easy to build one lineup by hand, using an optimizer can reveal lineup constructions that you may not have thought of independently.
A common mistake that newer DFS players make is to think that lineup optimizers will do the work for you. All you have to do is click the “build” button, and many great lineups will manifest from thin air. This is unfortunately not the case. We’d all be wealthy if it were.
Using an optimizer correctly should be equivalent to hand-building the multiple lineups you are making but far quicker due to technological intervention. The goal is to get the optimizer to do what you want it to do, not the other way around.
Pick Player Stacks
One of the first decision points you will want to make when entering a set of lineups for a slate is what teams you want to stack hitters from. Some DFS players choose to diversify their stacks significantly and may even have at least one stack of every club on a slate. Others like to keep a more condensed stacking pool. Neither strategy is right or wrong.
Lineup optimizers will give you the option to make sure your lineups contain three, four, or five-man stacks of your choice and select a percentage of each stack that you want to make up your pool. So, you may decide that in your 20 lineups, you want 20% Braves stacks, 10% Yankees stacks, 15% Dodgers stacks, and so on.
If you don’t set these criteria, the optimizer will generate lineups based solely on the highest possible projected points based on the player projections. This is not generally what you want for tournaments.
Select Your Pitchers
Since you are going to be entering more than one lineup, you have the opportunity to diversify your pitching pool if you so choose. Just like with stacks, you could decide to be very diverse and allow a lot of pitchers into your lineups or whittle it down to two or three pitchers.
You may want to be mindful of pitcher pricing and include pitchers in your pool of varying price ranges. You can only fit in hitters/stacks based on what is allowed salary-wise by your pitching choices.
This is a vital part of the process since a lineup is unlikely to succeed without good pitching performances. Deciding on the right pitchers to include across your MME build will likely make or break its success or lack thereof.
Set Player Exposures
An optimizer is essentially just a calculator that will add up projected player points based on the projections used to generate the highest fantasy point lineups. For this reason, left unchecked, the optimizer will tend to give you substantial percentages of the top point-per-dollar plays according to the projections you are using.
This can be very problematic, particularly for baseball, considering that player performance is quite unpredictable. For this reason, it is generally a good idea to set some constraints in terms of player exposure. Optimizers will typically have an option to select a maximum percentage per player globally, or you can opt to do this on a player-by-player basis.
Not only will you tend to get more than you may want of certain players if you don’t set criteria, but you may also get less than you want of others. One of the main goals of MMEing is to diversify your lineup set. 20 lineups that all look close to the same is not the usual goal.
Set A Salary Cap
Optimizers will give you the option to allow only a certain amount of salary left on the table. You should consider how you set this. Only allowing lineups that use all or most of the cap will limit your options and eliminate many possible player combinations. This may or may not be a good thing depending on the slate. Still, it is good to keep in mind that setting your salary cap in an optimizer will affect what lineups are being generated.
One strategy is to run some lineups without setting a cap. According to your player projections, there may be optimal lineups that leave a certain amount of salary on the table. If there are, you may want to lower the salary cap accordingly.
Another general rule to go by is that setting your salary cap higher on bigger slates and lower on smaller slates tends to be a good strategy. It is more important to differentiate your lineups on smaller slates. Leaving salary is a great way to do this.
On larger slates, since there are so many players to choose from, it is less likely that leaving a lot of your cap unused will result in the optimal lineup for that contest. This is not a steadfast rule, but it’s something you can go by when getting started.
This is only scratching the surface of the many nuances of MME DFS play. Still, these are five of the first steps to developing a good mass multi-entry process for MLB DFS. It is a lot more fun to sweat 20 lineups than one, so give it a try if you haven’t.
I'm a DFS player (JackG1111), DFS content provider, and musician.
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