Minimum exposure is a setting that many customers have requested and it led to a lot of internal discussions amongst our team on whether or not we should offer it and how we should build it. Ultimately, we decided to include the setting, and this tutorial will serve as a guideline to the rule, including how it works, its limitations, and why we ultimately feel the way we approach this feature makes sense.
Minimum Exposure is a way to guarantee you will have a certain percentage of a given player in your group of lineups. For example, if you want Joe Burrow on at least 10% of your rosters, you could set his minimum exposure at 10% to achieve that.
Using the “minimum exposure” setting, especially across other DFS products, is generally not recommended by us. The way it’s typically built is to force players at the end of the lineup generation process into your lineups. The issue with this is that it causes clumping - all of the players that you’ve selected a “minimum exposure” for tend to appear in the same lineups. This happens because players who need a “minimum exposure” generally don’t rate well to begin with, so some optimizers are coded to force them in at the end to meet the minimum exposure.
Let’s consider an example: You want a minimum of 20% each of two very cheap WRs in a NFL Showdown slate. You go into an optimizer and select a minimum of 20% for each. If using certain products, these two very cheap WRs end up in generally the same lineups towards the end of a run. That’s not ideal, you want these players spread out throughout your run, as you’re massively capping your upside with two very cheap players in the same Showdown lineup
We take a different approach to this. When you select a “minimum exposure” for a player, we boost their projection at the beginning of the lineup generation process. We then adjust that projection as lineups are generated to boost or dock it as needed to achieve the minimum exposure required.
Because we refuse to artificially force players into lineups, you may sometimes get a slightly lower amount than the “minimum exposure” selected. We strongly believe this is a better outcome than giving you artificially bad lineups.
Even with the way we are handling the “minimum exposure” setting, we still believe it’s best to use it with only a few players on a slate. Using this widely to force in players minimizes the effectiveness of the projections you are using.
Ultimately, we believe that using the boost feature, changing the projection, and using a larger Variance are the best ways to increase how much of a certain player you get into your lineups. This ensures that the same projection is used across lineups and that players are spread out evenly.
Since we are boosting players who have a “minimum exposure”, it’s not advised to use minimum exposure when looking for the “true optimal”.
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