10/3/2015

Building Lineups in Spreadsheets

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Building Lineups in Spreadsheets
By Ethan, Last Updated 2 months ago (Incentives Only)

Building lineups in a spreadsheet can be really easy if you set yourself up with a good
foundation to build from. For starters, take a look at this lesson from Microsoft Office on how to
set up your fantasy football team with the same general principles for daily fantasy basketball.

Step One: Define Your Variables

In this instance, you are searching for the optimal lineup based on some projection model. I
personally set up my Excel file so I can paste in a daily update with the following organization of
columns:
Col.A
PLAYER

Col.B
TEAM

Col.C
POS

Col.D
OPP

Col.E
Salary

Col.F
Projection

Col. G
PLAYER

Player, Team and Opp Pretty clear, but these are the basic variables to include for
organizational purposes.
Position (POS) With position its important to realize you want the players listed position on
a given site and not necessarily their true position. For example, FanDuel lists (playerpopup)Avery Bradley:/players/avery-bradley-941(player-profile):/players/Avery_Bradley-941
as a PG despite him playing majority of minutes at the SG position. You want the position listed
for a FD Optimal lineup creator to show PG not SG.
Salary Given salary for site youre looking at.
Projection Projection for that day.
Beyond this you can set your file up so you can weight your projections to better fit what you
want to find. So if a guy is a late scratch, you can mark that player to a weight of 0 quickly and
then adjust his replacements up to quickly recalculate the optimal lineup.

Setting up the Solver Sheet

Open a new sheet. In this sheet youll want to set up the columns as shown below. NOTE: In
this example, I am looking at working with FanDuel. Use the Excel lesson linked above and trial
and error to work this same process out for other sites, but understand that the process is
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Building Lineups in Spreadsheets

somewhat different for other sites.

Column A: Play? The Play column should be set to all 0s to start. Type 0 into A2 and drag
that all the way down to A201. Its important to note that you can only have 200 max entries
when using solver. Entries below that will create issues in the program.
Column D: Projection Im skipping straight to this column because youll need to set your
file up so you have the Top 200 projected players showing instead of a randomly sorted 200
players. In the first sheet of your file you should have projection in Column F. Lets say, for
example, we titled that sheet PROJECTIONS. In cell D2 of your Optimal Lineup sheet, youll
want to use the following formula:
IFERROR (LARGE (PROJECTIONS!$F:$F,1),)
That formula will produce the largest projection number of all players into Cell D2 of the
Optimals sheet. Drag that down to Cell D201. The annoying aspect of this is youll have to go
through each cell manually and change the 1 in the formula above to 2,3,4, etc. all the way
down to 200.
Column B: Player Name Well now use the Projection found in Column D to VLOOKUP the
player name. First go back to your PROJECTIONS sheet and youll find out why we have 2
player columns in that sheet. You want to use a VLOOKUP function to search for the projection
total and connect it to a player name. So in Cell B2 youll want to use the formula:
IFERROR (VLOOKUP ($D2,PROJECTIONS!$F:$G,2,FALSE),)
This formula will return a player name associated with the projection number.
Column C: Salary The next step is to find the salary associated with that player. For this one
I like to lookup the player name in the PROJECTIONS sheet by using this formula in Cell C2:
IFERROR (VLOOKUP ($B2,PROJECTIONS!$A:$G,5,FALSE),)
Columns E: Position Use the same formula as above to search the player name in the
PROJECTIONS sheet to return a position instead of a salary.
Columns F, G, H, I and J: Positions Part 2 This is where it gets a little tricky. You need to
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Building Lineups in Spreadsheets

set it up so that you can create min and max limits for number of positions. For example, on
FanDuel you have the following roster format:
2 Point Guards, 2 Shooting Guards, 2 Small Forwards, 2 Power Forwards and 2 Centers
The values returned in Columns F-J will tally the number of players at each position being used
in your optimal lineup later on in the calculation process.
So for Cell F2, under PG, I would use this formula for FanDuel:
IF ($E2=PG,$A2*1,IF(OR($E2=SG,$E2=SF,$E2=PF,$E2=C),,))
And here would be the other positional formulas:
SGs IF ($E2=SG,$A2*1,IF(OR($E2=PG,$E2=SF,$E2=PF,$E2=C),,))
SFs IF ($E2=SF,$A2*1,IF(OR($E2=SG,$E2=PG,$E2=PF,$E2=C),,))
PFs IF ($E2=PF,$A2*1,IF(OR($E2=SG,$E2=SF,$E2=PG,$E2=C),,))
Cs IF ($E2=C,$A2*1,IF(OR($E2=SG,$E2=SF,$E2=PF,$E2=PG),,))
Drag all of these down to Row 201 as well.

Setting Up the Calculator: Part 1

For the next section, youll want to highlight an area of your OPTIMALS sheet so you know
where these formulas are. Weve dragged the stats discussed above down to Row 201, so I
use Cells A202 through J208 (as shown in the image below):

To keep this simple and understandable, Ill just breakdown the formulas in each cell:
Cell A204 SUM (A2:A201)
Cell A206 9 This is just the number of players needed to fill out the roster, which on FanDuel
is 9
Cell C204 SUMPRODUCT ($A$2:$A$201,$C$2:$C$201)
Cell C206 $60000 This is the max salary allowed on FanDuel
Cell D204 SUMPRODUCT ($A$2:$A$201,$D$2:$D$201)
Cell H203 SUM (F2:F201)
Cell H204 SUM (G2:G201)
Cell H205 SUM (H2:H201)
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Cell H206 SUM (I2:I201)

Cell H207 SUM (J2:J201)
Cells I203 to J207 These numbers represent the Maximum or Minimum allowed number of
players for each position. On FanDuel its easier since they do not offer utility positions, so
every position except Center has a Max and Min of 2 per position. Center has a Max and Min of
just 1.

Ready to Set Up Solver

Alright youre finally ready to set up Solver. Go to the Data tab and on the far right there should
be an option for Solver. If you dont see this, youll need to go to the Add-Ins page on
Options and enable Solver.
Open up Solver and, for FanDuel, enter the parameters exactly as shown below:

Hit Solve after youve set up the parameters and youll see the number 1 in Column A of the
file. The players with a 1 next to their name are the guys who made your optimal lineups.
There are infinite options of how you can build your own file out to make it bigger and badder
but for the case of this lesson I thought Id try to keep it as simple as possible. Excel is a
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Building Lineups in Spreadsheets

tremendous tool and using Solver to create optimal lineups can be applied to any sport and site
for DFS purposes!

INSTRUCTOR

Ethan Haskell
COURSES BY ETHAN HASKELL
Intro to DFS Research
Advanced DFS Bankroll Management
Stacking in MLB
Creating Daily Fantasy Basketball Spreadsheets

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