Walking into an online fantasy draft room is an experience not unlike walking into a Las Vegas casino.
Distractions are everywhere. A large number of options appear immediately. Strange noises are appearing. Lots of bad ideas start to present themselves – but maybe some of them are any less bad than others? Maybe some are even good ideas that, like you, just wandered into a strange place.
Everyone in the room is feeling like a winner, but everyone also understands that the rules dictate that most of us will lose.
The biggest difference between your fantasy draft and a casino is that one always keeps a clock visible and the other wants you to completely ignore the passage of time. In a draft room, we really want you to know when the harvest will begin. And when you’re on the clock, the clock is right there in the top left corner ticking down. In Las Vegas, of course, it’s always late at night, but somehow the night is always just beginning.
Another important difference: what happens in your draft room definitely affects no stay in the draft room. Instead, you’ll have to live with your decisions all year long, so you won’t be able to abandon common sense at any point. With that fact in mind, here are four tips to help you successfully navigate any online fantasy draft:
1) It is a sketch first room and a chat room second
Don’t get so caught up in talking nonsense that your attention is diverted from building the best list possible. Your priority on draft day is to assemble an unbeatable team, no to trigger a series of severe chat burns. (When you can do both effectively at a high level, you will be qualified to serve as an instructor at Fantasy University.)
Learn how to move around the draft room in advance. Be comfortable. Find out if you prefer to see players ranked by average draft position, expert rating, or some other method. Search the group of players to find out where your favorite sleepyheads are hiding. Decide whether you want to see projected stats or last season’s stats. If you’re determined to trash talk the rest of the league in chat, the best and easiest time to do so is a few minutes before someone actually picks players.
3) Keep filling and reloading your player queue
The player queue is an essential tool, not a decoration or distraction. Every draft will be full of small disappointments as other coaches prey on the players you were targeting. This is why we need to constantly review and update our priority player worklist, remembering that there are many different ways to solve the fantasy puzzle. It doesn’t cost anything to add players to your queue, so use that. When the draft is gone, your line should smell like a bus station.
4) It’s better to trigger position runs than chase them
This is particularly true if you find yourself on one end of the draft, near the first or last pick. It’s dangerously easy to fall into a pattern of reacting to the moves made by others. Ideally, you want to be a proactive manager who initiates job executions. If you want to win the league, you’ll need to get a premium option at one or two positions. Chasing after other people’s remains is generally not the best way to do this.
Now that we’ve covered a few draft tips, let’s dive into strategies you can consider.
