DFS isn’t just about picking good players—it’s about picking the right players relative to the field you're competing against. To do that, you need two types of projections:

Together, these projections define a player’s true value. A chalk running back might project well in raw points, but if half the field is playing him, your strategy around using (or fading) him changes completely.

SaberSim’s projections are different. Both our point and ownership projections are powered by play-by-play simulations and field lineups tailored to the contests you’re entering. This makes them dynamic, contest-specific, and constantly updating as news breaks.

Point projections in SaberSim don’t come from averages—they come from thousands of play-by-play simulations of every game.

Instead of relying solely on historical statistics or a single "average" projection, SaberSim uses a one-of-a-kind play-by-play simulator to build every game from scratch, one play at a time, thousands of times.

This process generates thousands of realistic game scripts, capturing not just a player's median performance, but their entire range of outcomes (floor, median, and ceiling) and how their performance correlates with other players in the same game. (ex: QB + WR projections move together when they explode in the same sim.)

Each sim tells a complete story of how the game unfolds: who scores, who busts, and how players correlate. Each sim includes strategy, play-calling, coaching decisions, and game flow. From those results, it builds a projection.

In SaberSim, a player’s point projection is the average of their outcomes across all simulations.

This reflects one of the core truths of DFS: you aren’t betting on a spreadsheet—you’re betting on real, messy, unpredictable games. Player outcomes are not independent events, but interconnected parts of a larger story. A quarterback’s success is almost always tied to his receivers, just as a running back’s production often comes at the expense of passing volume when his team leads late. SaberSim’s projections capture these relationships by simulating the full game script from kickoff to final whistle.

Percentiles are used to represent a player's full range of possible outcomes from the thousands of game simulations.

Each simulation provides a realistic outcome for every player, and the collection of these simulations reveals their true range of outcomes.

Using percentiles helps you understand a player's potential, including their upside and downside, giving you a clearer sense of risk and reward when comparing players.

While point projections show how players might perform, ownership projections show how often those players will be used in lineups by the field you're competing against. A lineup’s value is never absolute—it’s always relative to the field.

SaberSim’s ownership projections are:

Note: It’s the field lineups themselves, not the ownership percentages, that power SaberSim Contest Sims.

Ownership is central to another DFS truth: you are betting against other people. Raw points only matter in the context of how many others are rostering the same players. A contrarian lineup projected for 135 points can be more valuable than a chalk lineup projected for 140, because it has paths to the top of the leaderboard when the field fails. SaberSim’s ownership projections reflect this by simulating not just players, but how entire fields of DFS opponents react to news, salaries, and projections.

By tying ownership directly to realistic contest fields, SaberSim ensures that your strategy is always based on the actual opponents you’ll face, rather than generic estimates. This makes ownership projections a core part of understanding a player’s real value on a slate.

Raw ownership tells you how popular a player is expected to be. Adjusted Ownership tells you whether that popularity is fair or misleading by comparing a player’s projected ownership against their performance in the sims:

Adjusted Ownership feeds directly into SaberScore as a negative factor, penalizing lineups overloaded with over-owned players and boosting lineups with the right balance of projection, upside, and leverage.

A player’s raw projection only tells you what might happen on the field. But the true value of that player is determined by how the field plays them, and whether their popularity matches their actual upside in the sims.

If half the field rosters a chalk running back who only hits a winning ceiling outcome in a small percentage of game scripts, that ownership is an opportunity. Being under the field on that player doesn’t just avoid a trap; it opens the door for your lineups to leap ahead when those game scripts fail. On the other hand, when a player’s ceiling outcomes appear often in the sims but the field underestimates them, Adjusted Ownership highlights the hidden leverage they provide.

In practice, this keeps you focused on Expected Value, not crowd bias. Over time, winning lineups are built not by blindly chasing points or blindly fading chalk, but by consistently identifying when the field is right about a player’s popularity and when it’s not. Adjusted Ownership makes that evaluation automatic.

On SaberSim Ultimate and above, you can upload your own point and ownership projections.

How it works:

Settings:

Custom projections allow you to build and sim using your personal view of the slate, incorporating your own research, models, or contest-specific assumptions.

Projections are the foundation for everything in SaberSim:

Together, these tools give you a contest-specific, fully contextual picture of both player performance and field behavior—so you can build lineups that win not just in theory, but in the actual contests you’re playing.

SaberSim’s projections aren’t just averages. They’re built from thousands of play-by-play simulations of every game on a slate. Each sim creates a full story—injuries, play-calling, rotations, weather, blowouts—everything that actually decides fantasy outcomes. From those stories, we see the entire range of what a player can do: their floor, median, ceiling, and how often each outcome shows up.

Traditional projections flatten that story into a single number. Other optimizers try to add randomness or stacking rules on top of static projections, but those are guesses layered on guesses. Because SaberSim’s projections come from game sims, correlations are already baked in. If a QB goes off, his WRs go with him. If a pitcher dominates, the bats against him fail in the same stories.

Alongside fantasy point projections, SaberSim also provides detailed stat projections (yards, attempts, strikeouts, etc.) and percentiles (10th, 50th, 90th, etc.), all derived from the same simulations.

This approach aligns with the first truth of DFS: you’re not betting on a spreadsheet, you’re betting on real games. Each projection reflects the messy, interconnected reality of how games actually unfold, not just an average pulled from past data.

Every projection starts with our play-by-play simulator. It models strategy, coaching tendencies, clock effects, player skill sets, and matchup dynamics. Each game is simulated thousands of times, producing distributions for every player.

The number you see in the projection column is just the average—but the real edge is in the shape of the curve: 5th percentile busts, 95th percentile blow-ups, and everything in between.

Because DFS moves fast, our sims re-run whenever news breaks—injuries, role changes, rotations. That way, projections always reflect the most current reality.

This constant updating is critical, because every new piece of information changes the game script. A backup starting, a weather shift, or a rotation surprise doesn’t just change one player—it reshapes the story of the entire game, and SaberSim adjusts instantly.

Yes. Small nudges are the best approach: moving a player up or down by 5% at a time allows you to apply your takes while still valuing the sims. Adjusting team totals shifts the story at the game level, letting the sims decide which players benefit.

This mirrors how DFS strategy should work: your goal isn’t to force outcomes, but to guide the stories you want to bet on. By adjusting at the team or player level, you’re influencing which game scripts the simulator emphasizes, while still letting the interconnected logic of the sims play out.

Percentiles show the spread of possible outcomes. A 75th percentile means that player meets or exceeds that fantasy point 25% of the time. Percentiles are primarily useful for visualizing the range of outcomes for a player in your research.

This matters because DFS isn’t about average outcomes—it’s about upside and ceiling paths. First place can often take 25% or more of the prize pool, so winning lineups come from players hitting the 90th or 95th percentile outcomes, not their median. Percentiles make those ceiling opportunities visible.

Ownership projections estimate how often each player will appear in opponents’ lineups. These aren’t guesses—they’re descriptive statistics of the lineups generated by our field simulator. The same field lineups are used directly in Contest Sims.

Ownership itself, and adjusted ownership, are only directly used in SaberScore. Contest Sims use the field lineups as inputs, not ownership numbers directly.

Ownership reflects another DFS truth: you’re betting against other people. Knowing how often the field will play a guy changes his value completely. A 20% owned player isn’t the same bet as a 2% owned player, even if their point projections are identical.

Ownership buckets let you view projected ownership across different contest types (single-entry, large-field MME, etc.). Different contests attract different field behavior, and SaberSim models that reality.

This is important because the field isn’t uniform. High-stakes single-entry players build differently than low-stakes mass multi-entry players. Ownership buckets give you visibility into those shifts, so you can tailor your strategy to the specific contests you’re playing.

Ownership drives adjusted ownership, which compares popularity to simulated performance. Adjusted ownership feeds into SaberScore:

This ensures lineups are scored based not just on points, but on their relative edge against the field. SaberScore simplifies the complexity of balancing projection, ceiling, and ownership into a single metric that points you toward +EV lineups.

Yes—on the Ultimate plan and above:

For ownership, use the ownership header in your CSV. SaberSim matches players by name or DFS ID. Uploading with the same source name overwrites the old file.

Custom ownership is optional but useful if you:

This lets you align the sims with your personal research. Instead of only relying on public numbers, you can stress-test your own assumptions directly inside Contest Sims.

At the core, the mistake to avoid is thinking DFS is predictable. It isn’t. Projections are probabilities, not guarantees. Your job isn’t to chase exact scores—it’s to consistently make +EV bets against the field using the best, most accurate data available.