"I was tired of looking at massive, monolithic spreadsheets," Chen recalled in a rare 2018 interview. "Experts would give you a list of 200 players ranked 1 to 200. But the difference between player #12 and #13 is often statistically meaningless."
As for Chen, he still updates his charts every Tuesday night during the NFL season, manually tweaking the algorithm’s output to account for late-breaking injuries. He remains an enigma: no podcast, no face cam, no merchandise. Just a GitHub repo, a love of clean data, and a quiet pride in helping millions of managers avoid starting a "sure thing" who puts up a goose egg. boris chen
So, he borrowed a technique from machine learning: The Algorithm Behind the Art Chen began scraping consensus rankings from the industry’s most accurate experts (sources like FantasyPros, ESPN, and Rotoworld). Instead of averaging their numbers, he applied a clustering algorithm—similar to how Netflix groups similar movies or how biologists classify species—to group players who were statistically indistinguishable from one another. "I was tired of looking at massive, monolithic
In the sprawling, chaotic ecosystem of fantasy football, information is currency. Every Sunday, millions of managers drown in a tsunami of stats: targets, air yards, rushing attempts, defensive matchups, and weather forecasts. The difference between a championship trophy and a last-place punishment often comes down to one question: Who do I start? He remains an enigma: no podcast, no face
The result was not a list, but a A series of horizontal blocks, arranged from top to bottom. If two players are in the same tier, flip a coin. If they are in different tiers, start the better one without hesitation.
In an era of hot takes and confirmation bias, Boris Chen proved that the most powerful tool in fantasy sports isn't a crystal ball—it's a well-designed grid. Trust the tiers. Start your studs. And thank the anonymous data artist in New Jersey who taught us that sometimes, the answer is simply "red over blue." [End of Feature]
That insight was revolutionary. Chen realized that traditional numerical rankings create a false sense of precision. The gap between the 5th-ranked wide receiver and the 8th-ranked one might be tiny (a bad route, a dropped pass), while the gap between the 8th and the 15th might be enormous.