MLB Archives - Page 2 of 2

From Daily Fantasy to Fiverr to a Free Lineup Optimizer

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.

Timeline from 2012 daily fantasy to 2016 Fiverr tools to a 2026 free lineup optimizer

Hall’s Marriage Theorem Meets the DraftKings Entry Form

This is the last post in my accidental Fourier-Motzkin trilogy (part one: the method; part two: the baseball lineups), and it’s about the bill coming due. Because when you use elimination to throw variables out of a model, the mathematics is very clear about what you keep — and very quiet about what you lose. I found out exactly what I’d lost the first time DraftKings rejected a lineup my spreadsheet swore was legal. The story runs straight through a beautiful piece of combinatorics called Hall’s marriage theorem, so we’ll pick that up along the way.

A Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Example: DraftKings Lineups

In my last post about Fourier-Motzkin elimination I promised a real example involving baseball, and I keep my promises. This is the story of how a dusty 19th-century math trick ended up picking my daily fantasy lineups — and how I stumbled into a genuine Fourier-Motzkin elimination example without fully realizing that’s what I was doing until much later.

Continue reading “A Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Example: DraftKings Lineups”