Overview
Saber Score is a single, simple number that represents your lineup's upside. It distills the complex concept of "lineup upside" into an easy-to-understand metric that helps you evaluate and compare lineups at a glance.
Calculation
Saber Score is calculated as the return on investment (ROI) from a simple, generalized contest simulation.
While we offer more detailed contest simulation information in our documentation, the basic calculation process works as follows:
We take your lineup and place it in a simulated version of a contest with a GPP payout structure and lineups we expect your opponents to play
Using our game simulations, we simulate the slate one time, assigning fantasy point totals to all players in that simulation
We then distribute payouts to each lineup based on the contest payout structure
This process is repeated 100,000 times to calculate an average ROI for each lineup
The resulting ROI becomes your lineup's Saber Score.
"Old Saber Score"
The original Saber Score was calculated using a formula that incorporated three factors:
Projected score of the lineup
The lineup's 95th percentile outcome
Ownership levels
We backtested the optimal weighting of these three factors across different sports and slate sizes to create the formula.
Why It Changed
The original Saber Score was a heuristic—a well-backtested rule of thumb, but one that lacked precision. It used projected points, ownership, and lineup percentile as proxies for what actually matters in DFS: how much money the lineup is projected to make.
The new Saber Score directly solves for projected profitability rather than approximating it through proxy metrics.
Importance
In daily fantasy sports tournaments, scoring an arbitrary number of points isn't sufficient—you must outscore your opponents to win.
The simulation optimizer builds lineups capable of achieving high scores, but we need to identify which lineups beat opponents most frequently and generate the highest returns. When building 500+ lineups at a time, you need a simple way to measure overall lineup quality.
This is exactly what Saber Score provides.
Most other DFS tools handle this incorrectly, either ranking lineups solely by projected score (ignoring correlation and ownership) or using some kind of heuristic (as the old Saber Score did).
Interpretation
Higher Saber Score values indicate better lineups.
You should be cautious of lineups with negative Saber Score values, as they suggest the lineup may not be profitable.
However, if you're using Portfolio as your diversification method, playing lineups with negative Saber Score values can sometimes be the best way to strengthen the overall portfolio.
Limitations
Saber Score uses a generalized and simplified contest simulation. It is not contest-specific—you'll need Ultimate to access detailed, contest-specific simulations.
For example, Saber Score won't tell you how a lineup might perform differently in a single-entry contest versus the Milly Maker.
However, it should perform very well for the lower stakes contests that should comprise the bulk of your contest entries if you're not on Ultimate.
When to Use Saber Score
If you're not on Ultimate: Absolutely use Saber Score. It's likely to outperform virtually any other lineup metric available.
If you're on Ultimate: You'll want to rely on your more robust, contest-specific ROI metrics, which are automatically displayed for you.
By default, no action is needed to make sure that your lineups are sorted by the correct metric.