If you have no idea which guys will perform, then yes.
Optimizers are widely popular, especially for large form daily fantasy sports GPP tournament submissions where the objective is similar to finding a needle in a haystack.
Many players see optimizers as a way to hedge their submission by using a large subset of players so that individual duds won’t ruin their day. Although, if you start doing the math on the number of combinations that a pool of 300 players can create it will put you far beyond millions.
As a Data Science masters and Finance major we tried countless optimizer strategies over the past five years, yet we’ve found that a core problem still exists – you have to make selections in your optimizer player pool to have any shot at winning. And the minute you start adjusting individual player projections for use by the optimizer, you are unknowingly increasing or reducing exposure to a number of comparable players in your pool.
No matter the strategy we ran, we’d always end up with a lot of junk lineups where we would have been better off paying specific attention to the few players that mattered as opposed to infinite darts that didn’t. We also had countless offline processes in spreadsheets, that were impossible to inject into the bulk lineups we were creating.
We knew there had to be a better approach.
In creating RPO our goal was to make it easier to focus on a set of core players, with simple metrics, that have a high propensity to perform. We wanted to empower all users to lose the spreadsheets and create dominant submissions across any fantasy football medium.
Instead of starting with the same optimizer and projections as thousands of other users, we passionately believe you should start at the players you want in your lineup and if you must use an optimizer, fill in the non-core players around those selections.
With better optics come better decisions, and better decisions equal better lineups.