Why diversification matters
Why 150 copies of your best lineup is a worse bet than 150 different ones, with the arithmetic.
Suppose you have found what you believe is the best lineup on the slate, and you want to enter 150 of them. There are two ways to spend that money.
The two portfolios
A: the same lineup, 150 times. If it is right, you have 150 winning entries — and so does everybody else who found it, so the prize is split many ways. If it is wrong, all 150 are dead. There is no middle outcome. You have made one bet and bought 150 receipts for it.
B: 150 lineups that share your best ideas but differ in the places you are genuinely unsure about. Most will miss. But the day is much more likely to contain some version of the outcome you were right about, and it only takes one entry landing near the top to change your week.
Portfolio B is not less confident than portfolio A. It expresses exactly the same opinion — it just stops pretending you know the parts you do not know.
Diversity is not randomness
Shuffling the last roster spot 150 times does not give you 150 different bets; it gives you one bet with cosmetic noise. Real diversification varies the things that actually decide the week — which game you are betting on, which quarterback, which stack shape, which price bracket you are attacking — while every lineup stays one you would be happy to enter on its own.
That is why the Diversity tab reports overlap rather than a vague score, and why it separates repetition your own rules require from repetition nothing explains. If you locked three players, every lineup shares those three, and calling that a diversity failure would be scolding you for using the product as intended.
How much is enough
- Mean overlap is the number to watch. On a nine-player Classic roster, two lineups sharing four or five players is normal for a portfolio with real convictions. Seven or eight means you have built one lineup with variations.
- Players used should be comfortably into three figures on a large Classic build. A 150-lineup portfolio that only touches 40 players is not covering the slate.
- Concentration near 1 means a handful of players carry everything. Sometimes that is what you asked for; if you did not ask for it, look at why.
You can force the issue directly with Max shared players under Advanced settings — no two lineups may share more than that many players. Be careful with it: it is a hard rule, and set too tight it can make your rule set impossible to satisfy.