The invention discloses a hot rolling flat roller play control method which provides more specific roller play strategies for different tandem rolling plans. The play control method includes the steps of classifying all strip steels of a rolling plan into two categories, a wide plate and a narrow plate, based on a critical width; as to the narrow plate, calculating the roller play positions of all the strip steels in a recursion mode, and then extracting the roller play position of the narrow plate; as to the wide plate, determining a permitted variation range of each roller play position, building an objective function for evaluating the sectional shape of the strip steel based on the rolling plan, and then optimally calculating the roller play position of the wide plate by employing thegenetic algorithm. The hot rolling flat roller play control method breaks through the conventional roller play mode by providing more specific roller play strategies for different tandem rolling plans. The strip steels are classified into the wide plate and the narrow plate, and the narrow plate is calculated in a recursion mode, while the wide plate is optimally calculated by the genetic algorithm. Thus, the hot rolling flat roller play control method plays an active role in improving the quality of the strip shape of the tandem rolling strip steel.