One game.
1.5× changes everything.
DraftKings Captain Mode: six roster spots, both teams, and one armband that multiplies a player's points and his salary by 1.5. The armband is not a bonus — it's a price. SimSlate runs a fully separate engine for this format, because almost nothing from the main slate survives the multiplier.
Hand someone the armband
A real six-man build from a Chiefs–Bills sim. Tap a player to captain him. His projection multiplies by 1.5 — and so does his cap hit. Watch the salary bar: the best player is rarely an affordable captain, and that tension is the entire format.
What the single-game engine knows
Every rule below is measured, not vibes — burned in from calibration passes that made the boards worse before they made them better.
D-01Captain odds are tail data
The feed's CPT Optimal% is the probability a player captains the salary-best lineup. SimSlate tunes each player's tail weight until its own sims reproduce that ladder — the market's captain odds become the distribution's tails.
D-02Hot hands get more skew
At fixed mean and variance, raising tail weight lowers the p85–p95 region that decides optimal captaincy. TD-or-bust punts get more skew; volume alphas get less. Two earlier tunings assumed the opposite and made every board worse.
D-03Six-man builds herd hard
Punt captains stud their five flex spots — that's the whole point of punting the slot. The field generator herds those templates near-greedily, so "unique" cheap captains duplicate six ways, not 1.4.
D-04Dupes and win odds are one draw
A construction's duplication rate is measured from the generator's own process — the same distribution that sets its win odds. Pricing them separately is how punt DSTs end up faking 1,000% ROI.
D-05Budgets, not pairs
A per-sim scoring budget with lumpy within-team shares drives the rank dependence — six near-independent medians can't quietly stack into a winning cheap-captain build.
D-06Both ladders, always
CPT and FLEX are tracked as different assets everywhere — two ownership ladders,
slot-aware exposures, and exports headed CPT,FLEX,FLEX,FLEX,FLEX,FLEX.