Uploading a DraftKings CSV

Short version: most nights you don't need to. Here's when you do, how to do it, and the two mistakes that cause almost every failed upload.

Read this first. Tonight's slates are already loaded in the builder — with our projections, ownership estimates and the real contest payout ladders. A raw DraftKings export has none of that. It carries salaries and a season-average points column, nothing else. If you upload instead of picking the slate from the dropdown, you throw away everything you're paying for.

When you actually want to upload

You're playing a slate we haven't posted — an early-only, a turbo, a showdown we didn't cover.
DraftKings re-priced or added players after we built the slate.
You keep your own projections and want to build off those instead of ours.

Any other night, open the builder and choose the slate from the dropdown at the top. That's the whole step.

Getting the file from DraftKings

Open the contest you're entering on DraftKings and click Draft Team.

Click "Export to CSV" on the draft screen — top right, above the player list.

It saves as DKSalaries.csv, normally straight to your Downloads folder. Leave it exactly as it downloaded.

Loading it into the builder

Open the builder and either drag the file onto the player pool, or click ＋ Upload CSV and choose it. It reads instantly — nothing to configure.

You don't tell it which sport it is. The builder works that out from the roster slots in the file, so MLB, WNBA, PGA and UFC exports all just work.

The two mistakes that break uploads

1. Don't open it in Excel first. DraftKings puts each player's name and ID together in one column. Excel rewrites that column when it saves, and the builder can then no longer match players — you'll get a mostly empty pool. If you've already opened and saved it, don't try to fix it: just export a fresh copy from DraftKings and upload that.

2. Use the file for the slate you're actually entering. Every contest on the same slate shares one salary file, but a Main-slate file will not work for a Showdown contest — the roster slots are different. Export from the specific contest you're going to enter.

How to tell it worked

The player pool fills in and the salary cap appears at the top. If any players were skipped, the builder says so and tells you exactly why — almost always a missing team or game column, which means the file was modified after it left DraftKings.

What to do next

Pick your contest from the dropdown. This matters — it loads that contest's real payout ladder, so the build targets the way that contest actually pays, not a generic guess.

Set how many lineups you want. One for a single-entry, 20 for a 20-max, 150 for a 150-max.

Hit Build. It generates a large pool, runs every lineup through a simulation against a modeled opponent field, and returns your best ones ranked by how they'd actually finish in that contest.

Export DK CSV when you're happy, and upload that file back to DraftKings to enter.

Stuck? Say so in Discord with the sport and the contest and we'll sort it out. If an upload fails, the message the builder shows you is the useful part — paste that.