Every term we use, in plain English.

ADP #

Average Draft Position: the average spot a player gets picked across a lot of drafts. It is a map of what everyone else thinks, not a ranking of who is best.

Our board shows ADP from several sites side by side, because they disagree more than people assume.

Best ball #

A draft format with no lineup decisions after draft day. You draft a roster and your best scorers each week are counted automatically. No waivers, no start/sit, no trades.

Rewards drafting for upside, since a boom week always counts and a bust week can be left out.

Redraft #

A normal season-long league. You draft in August, then manage the team all season with waivers, trades and weekly start/sit calls. Everything resets next year.

Snake draft #

Pick order reverses every round. If you pick 3rd in round one you pick 10th in round two in a 12-team league, so nobody keeps the best slot.

Flex #

A roster spot that accepts more than one position, usually a running back, receiver or tight end.

Superflex #

A flex spot that also accepts a quarterback. Because quarterbacks score the most points, this single rule change makes them far more valuable.

College best ball uses one superflex and one regular flex, which is why our mock rooms treat the two sports differently.

Tier #

A group of players close enough in value that picking between them is close to a coin flip. The useful question in a draft is rarely "who is better" but "is this the last player in his tier".

We cut tiers with a clustering algorithm on projected points rather than by eye, so the gaps come from the data.

Replacement level #

What you could get for free: the quality of the best player still available on waivers at a position. It is the baseline a player is worth measuring against.

VOR #

Value Over Replacement. A player's projected points minus replacement level at his position. It answers "how much does drafting him gain me over doing nothing", which raw projections cannot.

Stack #

Drafting two or more players from the same team so their good games happen together. Most often that is a quarterback with one of his receivers.

Bring-back #

Adding a player from the opposing team to a stack. The idea is that a high-scoring game lifts both sides, so you own the whole shootout rather than half of it.

Correlation #

How much two players' scores move together. A quarterback and his receiver are positively correlated; a running back and his own defence tend to be negatively correlated.

Correlation is the reason stacking works at all, and the reason it raises both your ceiling and your risk.

Floor / Ceiling #

Floor is roughly what a player scores on a bad day, ceiling on a great one. Two players can share a projection and have completely different shapes.

Boom / Bust #

A player with a high ceiling and a low floor. Great in formats that only count your best weeks, painful in ones where you have to start him.

Streaming #

Not rostering a position long-term and instead picking up whoever has the best matchup that week. Common at defence and kicker.

Waiver wire #

The pool of undrafted players you can add during the season.

DFS #

Daily Fantasy Sports. You build a lineup for one slate of games under a salary cap and it is scored that day. No season-long commitment.

Slate #

The set of games a contest draws from: a Sunday main slate, a Thursday single game, and so on.

Salary cap #

Every player has a price and your lineup has a budget. The game is finding points the pricing has underrated.

GPP #

Guaranteed Prize Pool: a tournament where most entries win nothing and the top finishers take most of the money. Being right is not enough; you have to be right differently from everyone else.

Cash game #

A contest where roughly the top half doubles up. Consistency wins here, where tournaments reward risk.

Min-cash #

Finishing just inside the money. In a tournament it usually returns close to your entry fee and nothing more.

Ownership #

The share of entries in a contest that used a given player. If a running back is on 40% of lineups, he is 40% owned.

We model this before contests lock and validated it against 15 million real entries.

Chalk #

The popular play. Highly owned, usually for good reason. Chalk is often genuinely the best option, which is exactly what makes it dangerous in a tournament.

Leverage #

Owning a player far more or far less than the field does. The point is not to be contrarian for its own sake, but to be positioned differently when the popular pick fails.

Our board shows projected ownership next to projected points so you can see where the two disagree.

Duplication #

How many other people submitted the exact lineup you did. Win a million-dollar tournament with a lineup forty other people also entered and you split it forty ways.

We model duplication directly rather than assume it away, because it changes what a first-place finish is actually worth.

Exposure #

Across all the lineups you enter, the share that contain a given player. Your personal version of ownership.

The field #

Everyone else in the contest, treated as one opponent. Most of tournament strategy is a claim about what the field will do.

Optimal #

The highest-scoring lineup that was possible after the games finished. Useful as a yardstick, impossible to target in advance.

Moneyline #

A bet on who wins, with no points involved. Priced as odds: −150 means risk $150 to win $100, +130 means risk $100 to win $130.

Spread #

A handicap that makes a mismatch close to even. A team at −6.5 has to win by seven or more for the bet to cash.

Vig #

Also called juice. The bookmaker's built-in margin, and the reason two sides of a coin flip are both priced at −110 instead of even money.

Our odds board strips the vig out before showing a probability, so you see the implied chance rather than the marked-up one.

Implied probability #

Odds translated into a percentage chance. −200 implies about 67%. Comparing that to your own estimate is the whole exercise.

Closing line #

The final price before a game starts, after all the money has moved it. It is the market's best guess, and beating it consistently is the strongest evidence a method works.

Hedge #

Betting the other side of a position you already hold, to lock in profit or cut a loss. Common when one leg of a parlay is left.

Parlay #

Several bets combined into one, where every leg must win. The payout multiplies, and so does the vig, which is why they are the most profitable product a book sells.

Arbitrage #

Prices at different books that can produce a positive calculated net result across the modelled outcomes, assuming both bets are accepted and settle under matching rules. Rare, small, and quickly closed.

EV #

Expected Value. What a bet is worth on average if you could make it many times. Positive EV means the price is better than the true chance; it says nothing about whether this particular bet wins.

ROI #

Return on investment: profit divided by what you risked, as a percentage. A 10% ROI means $100 risked returned $10 profit on average.

FPPG #

Fantasy Points Per Game. Total points divided by games played, so a player who missed time is not punished for the games he did not play.

Our NFL board carries a three-year FPPG column so you can see a trend rather than one season.

FPPM #

Fantasy Points Per Minute. Production divided by playing time, a way to spot a player who is efficient but has not been given the workload yet.

Edge #

The gap between what the market says and what a model says, about a price, a player or a lineup. An edge is only as good as the evidence that the model beats the market on that question.

Projection #

A forecast of points. Worth remembering that every projection is an average of many possible seasons, so it describes the middle of a range and never the outcome you will actually get.