Personal blog on early retirement, tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Posts about the MLB daily-fantasy lineup optimizer and MLB DFS modelling.
This is the last post in my series on rebuilding my daily fantasy lineup optimizer (it all starts here). The math was the easy part. This post is about the day I lost to a bug that didn’t exist on my computer and only showed up once the tool was on a real server — the kind of problem that makes you question your sanity before you find it.
This is part four of my series on the daily fantasy lineup optimizer I rebuilt this year (the series starts with the origin story). Everything up to now has been about finding the single best lineup. Here’s the uncomfortable truth that took me a while to accept: the single best lineup is the easy part, and it’s not what wins tournaments. The hard, interesting problem is building a set of lineups that are each strong but smartly different. That’s where the real work — and the real edge — lives.
This is part three of my series on rebuilding the daily fantasy lineup optimizer I started in Excel in 2012 (start here if you missed the first one). This post is about a small, clever trick I used in the spreadsheet for years to handle players who can fill more than one position — and why, when I rebuilt the tool, I deliberately threw it away.
This is the second post in my series about rebuilding the daily fantasy lineup optimizer I first wrote in Excel back in 2012 (the origin story is here). Before I get into the clever parts, I want to start with the simplest and most important idea: a fantasy lineup is just a knapsack problem wearing a baseball cap. Once you see that, everything the optimizer does makes sense.
Back in 2012 I got into daily fantasy baseball, and like a lot of people with an Operations Research degree and a little too much free time, I couldn’t just play. I had to model it. That turned into an Excel spreadsheet that picked my lineups for me, which a few years later turned into a small side business selling those spreadsheets on Fiverr, which then sat untouched in a folder for the better part of a decade. This summer I finally dragged it back out and rebuilt it as a free lineup optimizer that runs in your browser at mlb-lineup-optimizer.kindoflost.com. This is the story of how it got here, and the first post in a short series about the rebuild.
