Tag Archives: solver

How to Use Solver to create a daily fantasy football lineup for Fanduel

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Many people use Excel for helping them in choosing their daily fantasy lineups.  Using Solver in Excel is a great way to help narrow down who you want to choose in your lineups.  However Solver can be tricky.  Even after using it for a long time, I still run into issues.  So I made this video on how to use solver to pick your daily fantasy football lineup for Fanduel.

I already made one for baseball.  It is at https://optimizelineups.com/2015/05/06/how-to-use-solver-in-excel-to-generate-optimal-lineups-for-daily-fantasy-sports/

This video below will explain how to set up your spreadsheet.  Tells you that Solver only looks at the top 200 records so you need to sort them for the best players to be at the top.  It shows how to set up the constraints for solver and the type of Solver program to use.  While it is similar to the baseball one, it has some differences so please let me know if you run into problems.

 

 

How to use Excel Solver to create a lineup with a Flex or Utility spot

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In a previous blog post, I made a video showing how to run an optimal lineup in Excel using Solver.  That post is here.  That post showed a straight forward lineup without a flex spot.  However, some websites require you to pick a flex or utility spot.  That makes it a little trickier.

Click here to download the spreadsheet

I’m not going to go over every step again of setting this up for Solver. But I will describe the main differences. The main difference is to change the Solver requirements for each position. Say we want to add one utility spot. Instead of entering into Solver an exact match, we need to make a minimum and maximum.

For example, for 1B, instead of saying we want one first baseman, we will say we want a minimum of 1 but a maximum of 2 first basemen. Then you have to set that up for all the positions. In addition, you need to make sure the total number of players is updated. This way Solver will pull the correct number of players and find which positional player will be chosen for the utility spot.

solver_with_flex

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How to Use Solver in Excel to generate Optimal Lineups for Daily Fantasy Sports

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I created this video to show how to generate optimal lineups for Daily Fantasy Sports.



Here is the download link for the Excel spreadsheet to follow along:

http://excelbyjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Optimal-lineup-video.xlsx

In this video, I use these steps to create the lineup spreadsheet:

1. Copy and paste your player data into the spreadsheet
2. Add a column to divide salary by projected score to get your top 200 players. Solver only looks at 200 records.
3. Created columns for each position and used an IF statement to tell if the player is in our lineup or not.
4. Set the parameters for Solver to look at which include the max salary, number of players at each position and total players.
5. How to install Solver
6. How to use solver to read the parameters we set up
7. How to see which players were chosen by Solver for our optimal lineup

optimal_lineup