Every term we use in the tool, defined the way we'd explain it to a friend — including the ones most sites define circularly.
The money you've set aside specifically for contests, kept separate from money you need for anything else. Managing it means deciding in advance what share you'll risk in a week, so a bad slate is an expected cost rather than a problem.
A draft-only format where your highest-scoring eligible players are counted automatically each week. No lineups to set, no waivers, no trades. See our best ball guide.
A player from the opposing team in a game you're already stacking. If you roster a quarterback and his receiver, the bring-back is a pass catcher on the other side — the idea being that a shootout lifts players on both teams.
A contest where roughly the top half of entries win, and everyone who wins gets paid about the same. Double-ups and 50/50s are the common forms. Because you only need to beat the median, the correct play is usually the highest-floor lineup, not the most unique one.
A realistic high-end outcome for a player, often expressed as roughly a 90th-percentile result rather than an absolute best case. Ceiling matters most in tournaments, where you need an unusual score rather than a dependable one.
A heavily rostered player. Chalk is usually chalk for a good reason — it's often the best play on the board. Fading it purely to be different is how people lose money feeling clever.
The tendency of two players' scores to move together. A quarterback and his own receiver are positively correlated: the same touchdown pays both. Two running backs on opposing teams are often mildly negative, since one team's game script usually comes at the other's expense.
Another entry with the exact same lineup as yours. In a large tournament, winning with a duplicated lineup means splitting the prize, which is why uniqueness has value in big fields.
The share of your lineups containing a given player. If he appears in 20 of your 100 entries, your exposure is 20%. Capping exposure spreads your risk so one wrong call doesn't sink an entire set of lineups.
To deliberately not roster a player, usually one you expect to be popular. A fade is a bet about the field as much as the player.
Everyone else in the contest, considered collectively. Most tournament strategy is really about the field: what it will roster, and where it won't be.
A realistic low-end outcome — how badly things go when they go badly. Floor is what cash games are built on, since you only need to beat half the field.
Guaranteed Prize Pool: a tournament where the payout is fixed in advance and is heavily top-weighted. Most entries lose; a few win a lot. Strategy is the near-opposite of cash games.
Ceiling divided by projected ownership — upside per unit of the crowd. A high ceiling almost nobody rosters is the tournament play. Leverage is not a rating: a huge leverage score on a player who never hits is still a loss.
A very large, very top-heavy tournament, typically with six-figure fields and a million-dollar top prize. Field size is the whole strategic problem: with that many entries, duplicated lineups are common and uniqueness matters enormously.
The percentage of the field projected to roster a player. Unlike points, ownership is a closed system — every lineup has exactly one quarterback, so quarterback ownership across the whole field must sum to about 100%. That constraint is what makes it more tractable to project than points.
A deliberately cheap roster spot taken to free up salary elsewhere. A good punt is a minimum-priced player with a real path to usable production, not just the cheapest name available.
The fixed budget you build a DFS lineup within — $50,000 on DraftKings Classic. Every roster decision is really a question about what you're giving up elsewhere.
A contest where each person may enter exactly one lineup. Fields are smaller and the skill distribution is tighter, so wild uniqueness matters less than in mass multi-entry tournaments.
The set of games available in a given contest. A main slate is typically the Sunday afternoon games; showdown slates cover a single game.
A quarterback rostered with one or more of his own pass catchers, so that a big passing day pays you several times over. Stacking is the most direct way to buy correlation.
Projected points per $1,000 of salary. Useful for finding affordable production, but the field chases value hard, so the best value plays are frequently also the chalkiest.
Most of these aren't academic — they're the actual controls and columns you'll use. Ownership and leverage are columns on the slate board; stacking and exposure are sliders in the build panel; GPP and cash game are contest presets that set all six sliders for you. The tutorial walks through each one, and how it works explains the model behind them.