Optimizers chase
a number.
We run the tournament.

Your inputs come back out undistorted

A common industry shortcut is to "add randomness" — jitter projections, normalize ownership to 100%, hand-tune fudge factors until output looks diverse. Every one of those moves injects noise between your research and your lineups.

• Ownership is never normalized. A real NFL slate sums to ~900% (nine roster spots); rescaling it corrupts every exposure downstream.
• Variance comes from the fitted model, not a dice roll. The spread in outcomes is each player's measured volatility — nothing is jittered.
• Runs are reproducible. Pinned seeds give bit-identical results, so a difference between two runs is a difference in inputs, never in luck.

AI where it helps. Statistics where it counts.

SimSlate's models are built and calibrated with AI: boom/bust thresholds are learned from slate data instead of copied from folklore, distribution fits are auto-solved against five constraints per player, and the field generator self-calibrates through repeated passes until exposure fidelity is met.

But no AI touches your results at simulation time. The engine that scores 50,000 contests is closed-form statistics with proven invariants — conservation of prize money to the rake, negative ownership–ROI correlation within score deciles, positive semi-definite correlations. AI tunes the instrument; math plays it. You get the pattern-finding without a black box between you and your bankroll.

GPPs are won in the tail, so the tail is the product

Cash-game logic — maximize the median — actively loses money in tournaments. Everything in SimSlate is oriented to the payout curve's shape: skewed marginals preserve ceiling probability, correlations let stacks spike together, duplication modeling discounts the crowded routes to the top, and the final ranking is ROI in your contest's structure, from single-entry to milly-maker top-heaviness.

The result is a board that surfaces leverage — lineups with live paths to first that the field underweights — instead of re-serving you the chalk everyone already has.