Game Sim is the window into the simulation behind DFS Hero's projections. For every game on the slate it shows the simulated total, the ceiling spread, and a per-player table of scores at the 25th to 99th percentiles. Below the table a correlation heatmap shows which players rise and fall together, and in the sports that store one, the Replay tab plays one simulated game as a play-by-play feed. Use it to pick stacks, to judge a player's range before you edit My Proj, and to see why a projection sits where it does.
Before you start
- Open a slate that Game Sim covers: NFL, CFB, NBA, WNBA, CBB, MLB, NHL, soccer, or LOL. Golf, MMA, NASCAR, F1, and tennis show no button.
- Game Sim is open to both plans.
Open a game
- In the Players panel tab strip, click Game Sim.
- Click a game card in the left rail. The right pane loads that game with the Dashboard tab selected.
The game rail
Each card shows the two teams, the game total, and the Ceiling spread. Sort by orders the rail by Total or Ceiling spread, highest first. A green Lineups confirmed dot means both teams' lineups are in.
Ceiling spread is the average gap between a player's big night and a typical one.
Postponed and cancelled games do not show in the rail. Before the simulation window opens, the cards show implied totals only. The window opens 10 days before lock for NFL and CFB and 48 hours before lock for every other sport.
The Dashboard tab
Player outlook
The Player outlook table lists every player in the game with a projection and the simulated percentiles around it. Compare them to find steady players and high-upside players.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Proj (avg) | Your Hero projection, the simulated mean. The default sort, highest first. |
| 25th | The Floor shown across the app: a realistic cold game. |
| 50th | The middle game. Half the simulated games land below it. |
| 75th, 85th | The good and the very good game. |
| 95th | The Ceiling shown across the app: a near-best game. |
| 99th | The tournament-winning tail. |
Click a column header to sort by it. Ruled-out players and players with a zero projection show "Excluded" and sink to the bottom.
Proj (avg) and the 50th differ on purpose. A boom-or-bust player scores little in most games and spikes in a few, so his average lands above his middle game. A steady player's two numbers sit close. A large gap between the median and the upper percentiles marks a volatile player with tournament upside.
On a showdown slate, the Captain 1.5x toggle on DraftKings or MVP 1.5x on FanDuel scales Proj and every percentile by the captain multiplier.
Correlation heatmap
Scroll down for the Correlation Heatmap: every player against every player in the game, green where two players score big together and red where one player's big game means a small one for the other.
- Point at a cell to read the exact value, from -1 to +1.
- Boom together lists the three strongest positive pairs.
- Fade together lists the three strongest negative pairs.
When no pair reaches 0.10 in either direction, the card says so. The correlations in that game are small.
The Replay tab
Replay plays one of the simulated games as a feed. The tab appears when the simulation stored a replay for the game: a plate-appearance log for MLB, and a narrated feed for NFL, CFB, NBA, WNBA, and CBB. NHL and soccer games have no Replay tab.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play / Pause | Starts and stops the feed. |
| Restart icon | Rewinds the same game to the first play. |
| New game | Loads another one of the ten stored samples. |
| Speed | 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x. |
How it works
DFS Hero simulates each game 10,000 times. Each player's box scores become the distribution behind the percentile columns, and Hero Proj is its mean. Floor, Ceiling, and the hit rates in the player grid come from the same runs.
The correlation heatmap measures how often two players' scores move together across those games. A quarterback and his top receiver score together, and a defense scores against the other team's quarterback. Those are the pairs stacking rules are built on.
Tips
- Sort the rail by Ceiling spread for tournaments. A wide spread means the game has players with a real tail.
- Read Proj (avg) against the 50th. A wide gap for the sport's scoring scale is a boom-or-bust profile: good for tournaments, bad for cash.
- Use Boom together as a stack shortlist and Fade together as a list of pairs to keep apart. Then set them in the Stacks tab. See Stacks tab.
- Run the Replay a few times when a game feels odd. It shows example games; the table shows the full distribution.
Troubleshooting
"Sim data is temporarily unavailable, so the cards show implied totals only.": the simulation data did not load. Close and reopen the panel, or try again in a few minutes.
"Sims start {date, time}. Until then the cards show implied totals only.": the slate is outside the simulation window. Come back after that time.
"Sim generation is pending, so the cards show implied totals for now.": the run for this slate is queued. Check back a bit later.
"Not simulated yet": one game is missing from the run. Check back a bit later.
"Couldn't match this game's players to the simulation.": the simulation ran but its players did not line up with the slate. The dashboard still shows what matched.
"No replay data available for this game.": this game has no replay samples. The Dashboard tab still works.
"No games on this slate.": every game was postponed or removed.
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