How stacking works
Correlation in plain English, the common shapes, and when a naked quarterback is fine.
Two players are correlated when one scoring makes the other more likely to score. The obvious case is a quarterback and his receiver: the same touchdown pays both roster spots. A stack is simply a deliberate bet on that.
Why it changes the shape of your outcomes
Nine uncorrelated players average out. Their good and bad games cancel, and the lineup lands near its expected score most weeks — which is exactly what you want in a cash game and exactly what loses a tournament. Correlated players move together, so the lineup's range gets wider: more terrible weeks, and more of the enormous weeks that actually win large fields.
You are not increasing your expected score by stacking. You are trading the middle of the distribution for the top of it. In a contest that pays the top fraction of a percent, that trade is usually worth making.
The shapes
| Shape | What you are betting on |
|---|---|
| QB + 1 | This offence throws for a good day. The lightest version of the bet |
| QB + 2 | The same, harder. It pays more when the passing game explodes, and hurts more when it does not |
| QB + 3 | A concentrated bet that one passing game carries the slate. Rare, and correspondingly rarely duplicated by the field |
| Bring-back (QB + catchers + an opponent) | The game itself is a shootout, not just one side of it. Protects against the case where the other team scores enough to keep your quarterback throwing |
| RB + his own defence | A grind-it-out game script: your defence gets stops, your running back closes out the lead |
When not to stack
A naked quarterback — no pass catchers of his own — is not automatically wrong. In a low-scoring environment, or where a quarterback's value is largely on the ground, the correlation is much weaker and forcing a stack costs you a roster spot for nothing. The build recognises this and relaxes its own preference for stacking in those spots rather than manufacturing stacks for their own sake.
Bring-backs are the same story. They are useful in genuine shootouts and expensive elsewhere, and historically only a minority of winning lineups have used one. Requiring one in every lineup is a common and costly overcorrection.
Doing it here
- You do not have to ask. Just Pick For Me and Balanced already treat correlation as part of a lineup’s quality, so you will get a mixture of shapes without any rule. The Stacks tab shows exactly what was built.
- Guarantee a mixture with a shape rule: QB plus 2 pass catchers and 1 bring-back, in at least 40% of lineups. Any team qualifies unless you narrow it to one quarterback.
- Bet on one specific stack with an exact-players rule: these players, together, in this many lineups.
- Spread within a bet with a pool stack: whenever this quarterback is used, take any two of these four receivers. Which two varies lineup to lineup, which is diversification inside a conviction.