The Nucleus — Showdown Optimizer

01 LOAD DATA

DraftKings Export

Salary File

Straight from the DK contest page — DKSalaries.csv

CHOOSE FILE no file chosen

Projections

Projection File

Needs a name column and Proj. Uses CPT Proj, Total Own, CPT Own when present.

CHOOSE FILE no file chosen

Your files never leave this device — the optimizer runs entirely in your browser.

02 OPTIMIZER SETTINGS

Max Salary

Min Salary

Lineups

Max Exposure %

Randomness ±%

Min Projection

Drop players flagged OUT / IR / SUSP in the DraftKings file

Mode Strategy rules on. Switch to Pure Max to turn every rule off and just maximize projected points.

CAPTAIN RULES — winning captains averaged $13,012 and 23.6 projected points DEFAULTS SET

Positions allowed at CPT

K at captain carries a 0.78x win index; CPT D/ST ownership and points correlate at .09.

Min CPT Salary

Min CPT Projection

CPT Own Min %

Single-entry players over-index on sub-5% captains.

CPT Own Max %

Left open — a popular captain alone doesn't cause dupes.

CONSTRUCTION RULES — from top-1% finishing lineups DEFAULTS SET

Max K + D/ST

3+ appear in 1.1% of top-1% lineups.

CPT WR: max WR/TE same team

2+ appears in just 7.9%.

D/ST: max opposing players

Covers 88.8% of top-1% lineups.

CPT QB: min pass catchers

Set 2 to force a double stack.

CPT WR must be stacked with his own QB — usually right, but pushes expected dupes from 5.1 to 10.1

UNIQUENESS — product ownership predicts duplicates better than any other single variable DEFAULTS SET

Proj Band Low (% of max)

Trims lineups too far off the pace.

Proj Band High (% of max)

Set 96 to duck the chalk peak, where dupes live.

One FLEX Player Under % Own

0 = off. 5–8 is the aggressive leverage setting.

Favorite Team

Needed to label splits as 5-1 etc.

Allowed Splits (favorite–underdog)

Select none for no restriction. 3-3 has the lowest average sim ROI (-4.9%).

PLAYER RULES — hold Cmd/Ctrl to select more than one

Lock as Captain

Forces the CPT slot. 1.5x salary and points.

Lock in FLEX

Appears in every lineup in a FLEX slot.

Exclude

Removed from the pool entirely.

03 PLAYER POOL

Projections are editable — CPT follows automatically

Player	Team	Pos	Salary	CPT Salary	Proj	CPT Proj	Flex Own	CPT Own	Total Own

TheNucleus

01 LOAD DATA

Salary File

Projection File

02 OPTIMIZER SETTINGS

03 PLAYER POOL

04 LINEUPS

05 EXPOSURE VS. THE FIELD