Boris Chen -

The internet exploded. By 2015, the "Boris Chen tiers" were no longer a secret. Reddit’s r/fantasyfootball worshipped him as a demigod. Twitter analysts debated his methodology. Even casual players began screenshotting his grids and sharing them in group chats.

For nearly a decade, the answer for savvy managers has come from an unlikely source—not a former NFL coach, nor a loud TV pundit, but a quiet, unassuming data scientist named

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

If you’ve ever Googled “fantasy football rankings” on a Wednesday morning, you’ve seen his work. A cascading wall of colored rectangles—red for "must-start," blue for "flex," green for "deep sleepers"—organized not by simple point projections, but by tiers . Chen’s visualizations have become the Rosetta Stone of fantasy football, and his story is a masterclass in how one person can use design and data to deconstruct an entire industry’s anxiety. Chen, a New Jersey-based technologist with a background in computational biology and web development, never set out to be a fantasy guru. In the early 2010s, he was just another obsessive manager frustrated by the status quo.

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. The internet exploded

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?

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. Twitter analysts debated his methodology

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