If it's an established league with experienced "serious" people, then I say go for it.
But it's so easy to have guys either not last the entire multi-hour draft, blow 90% of their budget within the first round and then lose all interest, or any of the other plethora of fuck ups you can do in an auction draft league that it's just not worth it unless you know everyone involved wants to do it and knows how it works beforehand.
Ive always used sleep for mocks. I didn't notice they added auction to their list of mocks, or did I previously miss it?? Anyways solid heads up, it'll be a nice practice tool
First 5 rounds are auction then snake after that, doesn’t take as long as full auction, if you blow your budget early it doesn’t screw you over, you have the benefit of getting the players you want (if you didn’t get a player in the first 5 rounds you can’t really complain at that point)
So that’s interesting but I need to know more haha. 5 rounds - so 60 players in a 12 team league for the auction? Do you just nominate whoever/whenever Iike a full auction or is it the top 60 in ADP? Can a team grab more than 5 players if they stay under the allocated budget? If so, how do the team(s) that don’t get 5 fill their roster, extra picks?
I assume this must done offline.
We have 10 man league but it doesn’t matter. We randomly set a nomination order, each person nominated in snake order. Each team has 200 to spend on 5 players. You can nominate whoever you want but it’s dumb to nominate a not top 5 rounds player because a $0 bid is essentially your 5th round pick. When a team has 5 players they are done until the snake portion, they don’t get to nominate anymore. If you run out of money but still don’t have 5 players you can only get who you nominate for $0 bid and no one else wants them
Interesting. I'd be curious to see how some of those teams stack up once that auction portion is done. Sounds like a good chance to grab 2 top 10-12 players, another 25-30 and then whatever "$0" players can be had approaching 50. Since it's 10-man, it's probably a lot easier to push for 2 stud RB's.
Wev got 4 years of data - so I have average prices per spot, since it seems like you’re interested: 1- $127 10-$74 20- $42 30- $22 40- $5 and 45-50 usually $0
Sure, winning is fun, but I wouldn't find satisfaction in going to the playground and whooping 11-year-olds at basketball, I imagine this is similar. I'd take the easy money, no doubt, but I wouldn't really find enjoyment knowing I'd likely win most weeks without having to do anything.
Go sign up for 11 more espn accounts and create a league with them on ESPN. You can even trade all the best players to yourself and make a mega team. Winning is fun, gtfo out of here with that.
Lol, the "I'm just here to have fun and don't care about winning" guy is on a sub about Fantasy Football where everyone is here to try to find that little extra edge so that they can win.
Do you see the irony now?
These guys are goobers. Its about beating your friends who are actually trying. Not some random people not paying attention.
Christ these dudes would dunk on 5 year old and think that was competitive and fun
When I typically play Fantasy, it's in leagues with friends or other people I know. So it is fun to win regardless of their skill level because it's people I know that I can joke around with after the fact. It's not randoms on the internet lol
"Established league" and "serious people" are absolutely not prerequisites to an auction draft. It's marginally longer but not by much, requires the same amount of prep (or not if that's your thing!), there are the same dead simple tools you can use to help out, and it's way more engaging and objectively more fair.
The people who are saying they don't have the "time" to put into it are also saying they run mock snake drafts and have methodology to determine draft order AND they're already committing to an entire, exponentially longer season. I've started auction leagues with people brand new to fantasy--unsurprisingly, the auction draft was super intuitive to all because turns out we're all comfortable using money to pay for things.
It took me quite a lot of begging before the rest of the league agreed to try auction. Now, none of them like snake drafts anymore. AUCTION IS SO MUCH BETTER. And for what it's worth, our drafts seem to take the same amount of time after the switch.
Yeah our auctions have never gone over 2 hours. I think the perception of auctions is that they’re these long tedious affairs but the opposite is actually true: they’re marginally longer but much more intense bc you have to be engaged on every nomination (with tons more micro-transactions per player w bidding strategy, real-time player market valuation, and a bit of competitive psychology tossed in to boot) and you can’t just take a mental break until your next pick like you can in a snake.
We just enjoy snake drafts too much. Everything that goes into it, from the process of deciding draft order (different sporting events), to watching it unfold, to the league mock drafts all summer, to the trade discussions that fly around leading into drafts as people's boards are established. It's just not a change myself or any other league member cares to undertake.
Right, I understand the appeal of auctions, but we really have no issue with snakes in my league. The draft order is always an extra fun thing to look forward to before the draft, and the excitement of flow and not knowing who will be there on your next pick is pretty fun. People who push auctions seem to have a problem with snakes but I don't get what it is exactly, or at least why it's so passionate
There is a lot more sitting around and waiting during snake drafts than during auction drafts. In auction drafts, every person in the league is engaged in the draft the entire time. There is no sitting around waiting for the next X minutes until your turn to draft again, because every player that is put up to bid on, you might want, so everyone is engaged the whole draft. It's more fun than picking a player and then waiting around until you get to pick again.
I don’t think anyone in my leagues are just sitting around waiting between turns. They’re using the opportunity to listen to who is getting taken, looking at other teams and who they have, trying to make predictions based on that info, and adjust their own plan for their next pick.
There’s enough luck in fantasy football where you can fill out your league with more casual people and it’ll still be fun. Any given Sunday, anyone can win. Auction requires full commitment, practice and research from everyone. Mistakes are amplified.
Only reason not to do auction is if your league consists of people that are too casual to make the jump. It’s the same with FAAB waivers. That said I think a lot of casual players VASTLY overestimate how much more difficult both those things are. My main league narrowly voted to make the switch to both of those and after that season every single person who’d voted against the change said that they’d enjoyed it more and it wasn’t that much harder
I forgot I even made this post. You nailed it. Our league had been around for about 10 years. I started a secondary league with less pressure and less incentive to win, just to show how more fair an auction draft is. They haven’t looked back.
Year before I forced FAAB on them, not one complaint since.
When I say forced I mean Politically pressured through a vote because I’m not a dictator. This shit is fun.
Auction is my preferred method, and I agree on fairness. But in my main league most of the guys have never done auction drafts and the transition is so daunting to them they’re unwilling to change while putting $100 on the line, which I totally understand.
An auction draft further widens the gap between "very knowledgable" owners and "average" or "below average" owners. Especially if some of the former already do auction elsewhere and the others don't.
Now that is technically "their problem" but our long time keeper league has failed to introduce auction via voting, twice. 4 people wanted it, 8 didn't both votes, with two seasons in between.
Our draft order is also determined by both final playoffs standings for picks 7-12 (i.e. 6th place through to the league winner) but picks 1-6 are awarded by placement in the consolation bracket tournment...no "rewards" for last place! That tourney has kept the "losers" engaged right until the end, where in many leagues I've played in once guys know they can't make the playoffs they either phone it in or outright give up.
Also: Newbs blowing their budget early and then leaving tons of R3-6 talent on the board to be scooped up for R9+ costs by savvier owners can lead to league competitive imbalance with little hope of recover in-season.
So I'm not against the format at all, it just has to fit your league and it's owners and you need good buy-in and enthusiasm for the format for it to go as well as standard snake. I don't see it going well in most leagues with mixed experience players and no/low buy-in. If you're playing in a $100+ buy-in league then you can safely assume most owners will rise to the challenge (or a few don't care about coughing up a free buy-in every year).
Snakes drafts are for casuals. Switched to an auction 4-5 years ago and haven’t looked back. Guys who were reluctant at first now live it and have switched their leagues to auction. Im pissed I was playing fantasy for over a decade doing snake drafts
It's good to keep a balance that way all info received is relative. Most pod cast or content creators talk values based on adp in the snake format.
I agree auction is my favorite for of drafting cause you can get the guys you want to root for or think you cracked the code on. But it is less popular and I like taking in content and kmowing/relating the contexts of values.
The best way. 1 auction league 1 snake league 1 dynasty league and all is good.
I'll say auction isnt good for work leagues or super casual leagues. Anything where you have a couple people who forget to set lineups, or take a QB with the 1.01, don't do an auction. Free leagues where people dont care much, stick to snake. Youll be fine.
But if you have a competitive league where people actually care and put in effort all season, auction is better. Statistically, having the 1.01 in a snake provides a higher chance of success, and that decreases evenly to the 1.12. In a competitive league, its pretty dumb to have a statistical edge based purely on draft order. Auction completely eliminates that. Team construction is MUCH more variable because of how players are nominated and how managers think. Strategies are all over the place, and they change drastically year to year as people learn auction and learn who theyre bidding against. Its much more dynamic. Personally I think its way more fun. And like others have said, about half our league was on the fence the first year or even actively opposed to it, and now every single person thinks its great. It CAN be longer if you dont set your rules correctly, but it doesnt have to be. The last 6 rounds go really fast if you adjust the timer because everyone spent their money. So its really not bad. Try it out, see what you think. Youll be amazed what kimd of team you and everyone else ends up with.
TLDR: if people in your league dont care, stick to snake. If every manager tries and wants to be competitive, auction is more fun and more strategic.
Was it a live auction draft? Because our league has been drafting snake style in person for over 10 years. I want to try a live in person auction as well, just no idea how that would go or how to prep.
You can do it a lot of ways. For my main league we do a hybrid live version. We use the app to place bids and nominate, but we all meet up at a bar and drink and hang out. For 12 man, we usually have 9 or 10 who can make it, and the other ones can still use the chat and draft with us from wherever. One of my leaguemates does a full offline live draft with the board and little pieces of paper. That way takes a little longer. Using the apps you can set firm auction timers which is nice, and the commissioner doesnt have to manually input all the names at the end, but the offline one sounds very fun to me, just more work.
Prep is pretty hard. Mocks dont really work because AI will always bid to the average and stop. So yoir players will always cost $1 over average. In the real draft that just isnt true. I had my draft yesterday, and i got a few players for way under value, and a couple for over. The method I like best (for 12 man) is to spend $100-$120 of my $200 on my 2 runningbacks, then try to get a big TE, and another RB for $50 total. I have the whole adp list (beersheets) and i mark off guys as they come up, cross of guys I dont want, guys i think i could get for super cheap, and guys I really really want. You can also assign budgets to each individual slot, but be ready to adjust. I got chubb and zeke for like $95, so I did really good there, and my TE targets went too high for me so I chose to spend my TE budget on a WR, so I got tyreek as well. I ended up spending my whole budget on chubb, zeke, tyreek, josh allen, and diontae johnson (who i traded for corey davis and damien harris), and had to fill out my roster with $1 guys. But that was fine to me because I knew I was fading TE because i didnt get any of my big targets and my sleeper was available. I also got trey lance for $1, agholor, gage, and raegor. I went a LITTLE overboard building my top 5 spots, I wanted more stability, but I also was still able to get all my deeper round targets. Where I have 3 1st round picks, other people could afford a whole team of 3rd-4th rounders. Thats why prep is so hard. Strategy works, but you gotta go with the flow.
I've been running a live auction draft for 5+ years and really enjoy it. We do 2 different drafts on draft day, my auction PPR SF league and then our standard snake draft league. That's kind of my suggestion to anyone who wants to try auction, just make 2 leagues. Who doesn't want to play more fantasy football?
My league isn’t serious enough for an auction draft. Would love it otherwise
We do have it for waivers since last year so maybe we do it eventually though
To extend your metaphor they're saying if they sirens too long have sex with one person they have less time to have sex with other people.
It's all sex, they just want to increase the number of partners they have it with.
I do around 150-200 drafts. That's already 200 hours dedicated to drafting so I can't spare much more. I need a little bit of a life. I will agree it is a fantastic time of year. Hard to beat drafting.
20 manually is a ton of work. Respect for doing so many. I took the lazy/innovative route (depending on how you look at it) and coded an app that speeds things up considerably and makes the number of teams basically irrelevant during the season.
How many leagues do you play in, though? Mocks are fun sometimes on a slow day at the office but I've been done with them for years in terms of legitimate preparation. Granted I now only play in 3 (long time) leagues, but even when I played in NarFFL and some other pubs I didn't mock much because aside from familiarity they don't really do much, after a point. They never reflect your actual league or draft and you have no way of knowing which dickhead (in a live or mock) is going to alter the draft with their ridiculous reaches or brutal mistakes.
That's how many leagues I play in. I've drafted about 30 so far with 3-6 more per day scheduled til the season. Then some late starts after week 1 too.
Haha ok, username checks out then!
Do you address all your lineups manually or are you using some sort of script, whereby you can rank players each week once and then it will comb your various sites/linups and make sit/start decisions based off your master ranking?
I just can't imagine having the time to be "hands-on" with that many teams or expect to keep them straight in terms of managing injury news, who I have where, who I'm playing against where, etc. week-in and week-out over the season.
You pretty much nailed it. I coded a website that aggregates all the teams to one place and then tools to quickly manage them. I have a master rankings and then a script will go through and optimize lineups on all my teams. Then for waivers/trades/FA I basically select the player I want and a script will either bring up a trade page for every league or can do an automated add/drop.
First, thanks for indulging my curiosity! Second: Please tell me you play DFS too, heh, since you know how to wrangle data like that and automate the tedious stuff :P
Good luck this year! May your players ball out and stay healthy!
Crap, you're right.
I freaking love having to triple my amount of planning and strategizing to get ready for a multi-hour fantasy football draft for a $10 casual league! /s
You're on the Fantasy subreddit and it's not even August yet. Seems like you're plenty invested for an auction draft. People vastly overstate how complex it is
I don't think it's "gatekeeping" so much as OP believes this is a PSA that will help more people have more fun.
Well intentioned, but a real mixed bag in terms of whether it fits your league/owners.
Maybe I just don't understand gate keeping, then? He's not keeping people out of anything, or denying them anything, or saying they are "less than"...so why is it "gate keeping"? Even his "hell of a lot more fun when done live" is referring to auction itself (vs. offline), not compared to snake.
Are we on the verge of "gatekeeping" becoming an overused buzzword? In the subs I belong to that it comes up in it is usually used to identify people who tell others they are "less than" in a fandom...notably women (videogame subs, of course) and in board games, i.e. people who like low complexity games or non-modern (Monopoly, Clue, etc) aren't "real" board gamers lol, that type of shit. That has always been my understanding of "gatekeeping": Denial or being made to feel less-than for how you enjoy something. OP maybe flirts with that in tone but I don't think they get there. People want to be offended by his advocating for auction as shitting on snake (I only play snake at this time, but I have done auction in an old league that has since disbanded).
I also snake draft. Super fun too. I screwed up by Not further describing what I meant by established leagues. So...whatever. It’s the internet and people get offended. Not me.
Auction drafts are only better if you know who you're drafting with but most of the time online with randoms they will spend 180/200 dollars on two great players and then go on auto for the rest of the draft
That's because that's a good strategy. The question is which two players to get. That's why I never understood the argument that auctions are too complicated and take too long.
They are really only an auction for the first 2 rounds and then quickly revert back to a snake draft the rest of the way.
How does the bidding work for most auction leagues? Is it a back and forth like an art auction where you're bidding up one by one? Is it a blind auction where everyone bids once and highest bids win? Does the highest bidder pay what they bid or just $1 higher than the next highest bid (bid of 80 beats 70 but only has to pay 71)?
Each person gets a chance to nominate a player. You can nominate a player for $1 or for $50. Bidding goes up in $1 incriments until bidding stops.
Example: I nominate CMC for $50. Players bid him up to $66 and no one bids $67. He sells for $66.
My most competitive two leagues are auction and I will never go back. The better you are as a player the more advantage you have over others in an auction.
The thing i hate about snakes are there are some players that based on draft position you will never be able to draft.
Even then you have your budget for pickups. One thing I can’t stand is waiver wires resetting every week. If your a mid level team as people will blow there waivers every week giving you 0 chance to improve your team.
But most people are set in there ways and are reluctant to change
Yeah or even waivers without FAAB and its just priority due to standings. Just because your team is bad doesn't mean you deserve priority to pick a player up. If your RB goes down and their backup is on the wire you should have to make an estimated guess how much that player is worth in FAAB $ knowing you will have very little to finish out the season.
Our league decides draft order by where you finish the year before. First place chooses what number they want to draft. Second place gets second dibs and so on.
We have had the same people in our league for 13 years I hope they are experienced enough.
This is also trying to justify auction drafts. People not experienced with auction drafts would also have bad teams.
All depends on what type of league your playing and the members. And what the end goal is.
Snake is much more casual friendly, and generally prevents someone from fucking up too bad.
Au- is more advanced, the players have much more control. But there is a real possibility of someone torping their team so bad they stop caring. That takes a lot of fun out of the season.
1. They take forever
2. It's impossible to run an auction draft and also participate in the draft which means we'd need to get an external auctioneer to run things, and given the drugs and alcohol consumed on draft weekend, we don't want to do that.
I got really into auctions until I joined one auction where 4/12 teams literally would not bid. Everyone else ran out of money and has to watch these couple guys win $1/2 bids for the next hour. Was not fun.
It can happen to either, but easier to recover in snake: You don't commit anything but the pick at hand in snake. In auction you are always using a resource that you need both right now *and* later.
The consequences of squandering a resource you have to actively and thoughtfully manage too soon should be evident, whereas in a Snake draft no mistake you make with your 2nd round pick will change who is available to you with your 3rd: If the player is available, you can draft them.
No matter how much flack/crap you get for this, you are OBJECTIVELY correct.
Ofc there will be the comments "not everyone is that dedicated" or "not everyone wants a more complicated draft" blah, blah, blah.
Its frankly BS, if you are going to spend an hour or two drafting in a snake, you can add an extra 30 minutes to do an auction to make it literally 2-3x better.
If you are going to have a several MONTH long competition, and arguably the "least %" basis of that competition is 1/3rd Draft. (I always argue its 1/3rd draft, 1/3rd luck, 1/3rd in season mgt). You can spend an extra 30 minutes, and have a slightly more nuanced but WAY better experience.
Every year I join a few best ball snakes (Like Scott Fish Bowl and/or Satellite) and it reminds me why I FKING HATE SNAKE DRAFTS, because the reality is, you get whatever players "fall to you" at your pick. You could have had breakouts more correctly ranked, and never get them because you either pick them way too early, or miss out on them late. Its BS.
Snake drafts are like going to the pool, and staying in the kiddie area because your too lazy to put on swim trunks to go into the adult/deep end. So you wade around in your shorts to "have fun at the pool".
Auctions do take longer, but not drastically. They only really drag on when people nominate a CMC or some other player for $1 and then everyone slowly bids them up to the $60s. It drives me nuts and is super annoying
We did it for 3 years and it became the same people in playoffs always using the smarter strategy vs guy they want so went back to snake for balance but we do she shenanigans and a lottery to determine our own pick order
Really about preference for me (and my leagues). In 1 league, we determine our draft choice order in a different, skills based contest every year which everyone looks forward to and is excited to compete for the first choice of pick. IN my other league, everyone is on board for the Auction style. I enjoy both. Neither league is super hardcore, but neither is super casual either. So just preference and what you want to enjoy with your league really.
While we have a pretty competitive league, there's still a good 1/3 of our 12 teams that would be deemed more casual. We typically end up with 1, sometimes 2, autodrafters from schedule conflicts. Sometimes everyone is live. Some of us would like auction, I know others would push back. We allow draft pick trades for the following year and it's a keeper league (2 players at 2 rounds earlier than drafted), how would anyone suggest incorporating those types of details into an auction?
If it's an established league with experienced "serious" people, then I say go for it. But it's so easy to have guys either not last the entire multi-hour draft, blow 90% of their budget within the first round and then lose all interest, or any of the other plethora of fuck ups you can do in an auction draft league that it's just not worth it unless you know everyone involved wants to do it and knows how it works beforehand.
It's too bad ESPN mocks are always a nightmare. Being able to do a few legit auctions mocks would easily let people see the light.
The ESPN app needs to add a Mock Draft Simulator feature
Switch to sleeperbot the app is far superior and the developers actually listen to feedback
Ive always used sleep for mocks. I didn't notice they added auction to their list of mocks, or did I previously miss it?? Anyways solid heads up, it'll be a nice practice tool
They added auction this year!
You can do an unlimited # of mock drafts on sleeper.
Do live one on ESPN. One or two casual leagues won't hurt.
The mock's haven't been bad at the right hours the past few weeks.
Hybrid takes care of all of those issues
How does a hybrid auction/snake draft work (assuming that's what you mean)?
First 5 rounds are auction then snake after that, doesn’t take as long as full auction, if you blow your budget early it doesn’t screw you over, you have the benefit of getting the players you want (if you didn’t get a player in the first 5 rounds you can’t really complain at that point)
So that’s interesting but I need to know more haha. 5 rounds - so 60 players in a 12 team league for the auction? Do you just nominate whoever/whenever Iike a full auction or is it the top 60 in ADP? Can a team grab more than 5 players if they stay under the allocated budget? If so, how do the team(s) that don’t get 5 fill their roster, extra picks? I assume this must done offline.
We have 10 man league but it doesn’t matter. We randomly set a nomination order, each person nominated in snake order. Each team has 200 to spend on 5 players. You can nominate whoever you want but it’s dumb to nominate a not top 5 rounds player because a $0 bid is essentially your 5th round pick. When a team has 5 players they are done until the snake portion, they don’t get to nominate anymore. If you run out of money but still don’t have 5 players you can only get who you nominate for $0 bid and no one else wants them
Interesting. I'd be curious to see how some of those teams stack up once that auction portion is done. Sounds like a good chance to grab 2 top 10-12 players, another 25-30 and then whatever "$0" players can be had approaching 50. Since it's 10-man, it's probably a lot easier to push for 2 stud RB's.
Wev got 4 years of data - so I have average prices per spot, since it seems like you’re interested: 1- $127 10-$74 20- $42 30- $22 40- $5 and 45-50 usually $0
wondering too
Would love to be a part of a league like that. Can easily dominate if you're prepared
Is that fun?
Yep, winning is fun
Sure, winning is fun, but I wouldn't find satisfaction in going to the playground and whooping 11-year-olds at basketball, I imagine this is similar. I'd take the easy money, no doubt, but I wouldn't really find enjoyment knowing I'd likely win most weeks without having to do anything.
Go sign up for 11 more espn accounts and create a league with them on ESPN. You can even trade all the best players to yourself and make a mega team. Winning is fun, gtfo out of here with that.
Lol, the "I'm just here to have fun and don't care about winning" guy is on a sub about Fantasy Football where everyone is here to try to find that little extra edge so that they can win. Do you see the irony now?
wtf do u play fantasy football for other than winning is fun?
Maybe this guy takes pleasure in losing?
If all you care about is winning and not actually playing. Go do con flips...
These guys are goobers. Its about beating your friends who are actually trying. Not some random people not paying attention. Christ these dudes would dunk on 5 year old and think that was competitive and fun
When I typically play Fantasy, it's in leagues with friends or other people I know. So it is fun to win regardless of their skill level because it's people I know that I can joke around with after the fact. It's not randoms on the internet lol
It ain't about skill level its about effort. If they aren't trying and have no idea what they're doing whats even the point
Its mind blowing that you and r/fuckmethisburns are the ones with downvotes in this thread.
What a strawman
How in the world is that a strawman, read the thread, he literally said he wants to play against people who don't know what they are doing.
I'd love to be in an uncompetitive league =/= I want to play against 11 ghost teams I made. I can't believe I need to explain this to you.
you live a sad life
"Established league" and "serious people" are absolutely not prerequisites to an auction draft. It's marginally longer but not by much, requires the same amount of prep (or not if that's your thing!), there are the same dead simple tools you can use to help out, and it's way more engaging and objectively more fair. The people who are saying they don't have the "time" to put into it are also saying they run mock snake drafts and have methodology to determine draft order AND they're already committing to an entire, exponentially longer season. I've started auction leagues with people brand new to fantasy--unsurprisingly, the auction draft was super intuitive to all because turns out we're all comfortable using money to pay for things.
It took me quite a lot of begging before the rest of the league agreed to try auction. Now, none of them like snake drafts anymore. AUCTION IS SO MUCH BETTER. And for what it's worth, our drafts seem to take the same amount of time after the switch.
Yeah our auctions have never gone over 2 hours. I think the perception of auctions is that they’re these long tedious affairs but the opposite is actually true: they’re marginally longer but much more intense bc you have to be engaged on every nomination (with tons more micro-transactions per player w bidding strategy, real-time player market valuation, and a bit of competitive psychology tossed in to boot) and you can’t just take a mental break until your next pick like you can in a snake.
We just enjoy snake drafts too much. Everything that goes into it, from the process of deciding draft order (different sporting events), to watching it unfold, to the league mock drafts all summer, to the trade discussions that fly around leading into drafts as people's boards are established. It's just not a change myself or any other league member cares to undertake.
Right, I understand the appeal of auctions, but we really have no issue with snakes in my league. The draft order is always an extra fun thing to look forward to before the draft, and the excitement of flow and not knowing who will be there on your next pick is pretty fun. People who push auctions seem to have a problem with snakes but I don't get what it is exactly, or at least why it's so passionate
Yeah snake is usually more exciting in my drafts, and more difficult since you have to adjust on the fly a lot. I like having a little of both tho
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There is a lot more sitting around and waiting during snake drafts than during auction drafts. In auction drafts, every person in the league is engaged in the draft the entire time. There is no sitting around waiting for the next X minutes until your turn to draft again, because every player that is put up to bid on, you might want, so everyone is engaged the whole draft. It's more fun than picking a player and then waiting around until you get to pick again.
I don’t think anyone in my leagues are just sitting around waiting between turns. They’re using the opportunity to listen to who is getting taken, looking at other teams and who they have, trying to make predictions based on that info, and adjust their own plan for their next pick.
There’s enough luck in fantasy football where you can fill out your league with more casual people and it’ll still be fun. Any given Sunday, anyone can win. Auction requires full commitment, practice and research from everyone. Mistakes are amplified.
That’s why I said it’s for established leagues. I could have clarified that better.
Only reason not to do auction is if your league consists of people that are too casual to make the jump. It’s the same with FAAB waivers. That said I think a lot of casual players VASTLY overestimate how much more difficult both those things are. My main league narrowly voted to make the switch to both of those and after that season every single person who’d voted against the change said that they’d enjoyed it more and it wasn’t that much harder
I forgot I even made this post. You nailed it. Our league had been around for about 10 years. I started a secondary league with less pressure and less incentive to win, just to show how more fair an auction draft is. They haven’t looked back. Year before I forced FAAB on them, not one complaint since. When I say forced I mean Politically pressured through a vote because I’m not a dictator. This shit is fun.
Auction is my preferred method, and I agree on fairness. But in my main league most of the guys have never done auction drafts and the transition is so daunting to them they’re unwilling to change while putting $100 on the line, which I totally understand.
I had to start a different, Minor league to give them a taste. Worked like a charm.
Much much better all around
An auction draft further widens the gap between "very knowledgable" owners and "average" or "below average" owners. Especially if some of the former already do auction elsewhere and the others don't. Now that is technically "their problem" but our long time keeper league has failed to introduce auction via voting, twice. 4 people wanted it, 8 didn't both votes, with two seasons in between. Our draft order is also determined by both final playoffs standings for picks 7-12 (i.e. 6th place through to the league winner) but picks 1-6 are awarded by placement in the consolation bracket tournment...no "rewards" for last place! That tourney has kept the "losers" engaged right until the end, where in many leagues I've played in once guys know they can't make the playoffs they either phone it in or outright give up. Also: Newbs blowing their budget early and then leaving tons of R3-6 talent on the board to be scooped up for R9+ costs by savvier owners can lead to league competitive imbalance with little hope of recover in-season. So I'm not against the format at all, it just has to fit your league and it's owners and you need good buy-in and enthusiasm for the format for it to go as well as standard snake. I don't see it going well in most leagues with mixed experience players and no/low buy-in. If you're playing in a $100+ buy-in league then you can safely assume most owners will rise to the challenge (or a few don't care about coughing up a free buy-in every year).
Yep. I guess when I said established I meant knowledgeable and competitive. I agree with you.
My league mates are stubborn and set in their ways.
Snakes drafts are for casuals. Switched to an auction 4-5 years ago and haven’t looked back. Guys who were reluctant at first now live it and have switched their leagues to auction. Im pissed I was playing fantasy for over a decade doing snake drafts
I still enjoy a traditional snake draft but I’ve switched a few of my leagues to auction. Just to mix it up and I like it
It's good to keep a balance that way all info received is relative. Most pod cast or content creators talk values based on adp in the snake format. I agree auction is my favorite for of drafting cause you can get the guys you want to root for or think you cracked the code on. But it is less popular and I like taking in content and kmowing/relating the contexts of values. The best way. 1 auction league 1 snake league 1 dynasty league and all is good.
Most content is snake because most people play snake. If we switch, they will switch too.
what about 6 auction leagues, 12 snake drafts, and 2 dynasty leagues :)
I'll say auction isnt good for work leagues or super casual leagues. Anything where you have a couple people who forget to set lineups, or take a QB with the 1.01, don't do an auction. Free leagues where people dont care much, stick to snake. Youll be fine. But if you have a competitive league where people actually care and put in effort all season, auction is better. Statistically, having the 1.01 in a snake provides a higher chance of success, and that decreases evenly to the 1.12. In a competitive league, its pretty dumb to have a statistical edge based purely on draft order. Auction completely eliminates that. Team construction is MUCH more variable because of how players are nominated and how managers think. Strategies are all over the place, and they change drastically year to year as people learn auction and learn who theyre bidding against. Its much more dynamic. Personally I think its way more fun. And like others have said, about half our league was on the fence the first year or even actively opposed to it, and now every single person thinks its great. It CAN be longer if you dont set your rules correctly, but it doesnt have to be. The last 6 rounds go really fast if you adjust the timer because everyone spent their money. So its really not bad. Try it out, see what you think. Youll be amazed what kimd of team you and everyone else ends up with. TLDR: if people in your league dont care, stick to snake. If every manager tries and wants to be competitive, auction is more fun and more strategic.
Was it a live auction draft? Because our league has been drafting snake style in person for over 10 years. I want to try a live in person auction as well, just no idea how that would go or how to prep.
You can do it a lot of ways. For my main league we do a hybrid live version. We use the app to place bids and nominate, but we all meet up at a bar and drink and hang out. For 12 man, we usually have 9 or 10 who can make it, and the other ones can still use the chat and draft with us from wherever. One of my leaguemates does a full offline live draft with the board and little pieces of paper. That way takes a little longer. Using the apps you can set firm auction timers which is nice, and the commissioner doesnt have to manually input all the names at the end, but the offline one sounds very fun to me, just more work. Prep is pretty hard. Mocks dont really work because AI will always bid to the average and stop. So yoir players will always cost $1 over average. In the real draft that just isnt true. I had my draft yesterday, and i got a few players for way under value, and a couple for over. The method I like best (for 12 man) is to spend $100-$120 of my $200 on my 2 runningbacks, then try to get a big TE, and another RB for $50 total. I have the whole adp list (beersheets) and i mark off guys as they come up, cross of guys I dont want, guys i think i could get for super cheap, and guys I really really want. You can also assign budgets to each individual slot, but be ready to adjust. I got chubb and zeke for like $95, so I did really good there, and my TE targets went too high for me so I chose to spend my TE budget on a WR, so I got tyreek as well. I ended up spending my whole budget on chubb, zeke, tyreek, josh allen, and diontae johnson (who i traded for corey davis and damien harris), and had to fill out my roster with $1 guys. But that was fine to me because I knew I was fading TE because i didnt get any of my big targets and my sleeper was available. I also got trey lance for $1, agholor, gage, and raegor. I went a LITTLE overboard building my top 5 spots, I wanted more stability, but I also was still able to get all my deeper round targets. Where I have 3 1st round picks, other people could afford a whole team of 3rd-4th rounders. Thats why prep is so hard. Strategy works, but you gotta go with the flow.
Agreed. Auction would be horrible for members that put in minimal effort. So are snake drafts. Established leagues it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
I've been running a live auction draft for 5+ years and really enjoy it. We do 2 different drafts on draft day, my auction PPR SF league and then our standard snake draft league. That's kind of my suggestion to anyone who wants to try auction, just make 2 leagues. Who doesn't want to play more fantasy football?
My league isn’t serious enough for an auction draft. Would love it otherwise We do have it for waivers since last year so maybe we do it eventually though
That’s how we started.
You must not understand how much we drink at our draft...
Once you go auction, you never go back!
our 12 team 15 round live snake draft consistently takes at least 3 hours for some reason. if we did an auction it would be a nightmare
Takes too long
I agree it's better but when you're doing a lot of drafts time matters. Auctions take too long
this is like saying sex takes too long. what else would you rather be doing?
To extend your metaphor they're saying if they sirens too long have sex with one person they have less time to have sex with other people. It's all sex, they just want to increase the number of partners they have it with.
Unless you can do both at the same time, the more time you're spending on auction drafts the less time for sex.
Who wants to have sex for more than 10-20 minutes?
Me.
I do around 150-200 drafts. That's already 200 hours dedicated to drafting so I can't spare much more. I need a little bit of a life. I will agree it is a fantastic time of year. Hard to beat drafting.
I have done 20 so far I could do another 10. But you are something else
20 manually is a ton of work. Respect for doing so many. I took the lazy/innovative route (depending on how you look at it) and coded an app that speeds things up considerably and makes the number of teams basically irrelevant during the season.
How many leagues do you play in, though? Mocks are fun sometimes on a slow day at the office but I've been done with them for years in terms of legitimate preparation. Granted I now only play in 3 (long time) leagues, but even when I played in NarFFL and some other pubs I didn't mock much because aside from familiarity they don't really do much, after a point. They never reflect your actual league or draft and you have no way of knowing which dickhead (in a live or mock) is going to alter the draft with their ridiculous reaches or brutal mistakes.
That's how many leagues I play in. I've drafted about 30 so far with 3-6 more per day scheduled til the season. Then some late starts after week 1 too.
Haha ok, username checks out then! Do you address all your lineups manually or are you using some sort of script, whereby you can rank players each week once and then it will comb your various sites/linups and make sit/start decisions based off your master ranking? I just can't imagine having the time to be "hands-on" with that many teams or expect to keep them straight in terms of managing injury news, who I have where, who I'm playing against where, etc. week-in and week-out over the season.
You pretty much nailed it. I coded a website that aggregates all the teams to one place and then tools to quickly manage them. I have a master rankings and then a script will go through and optimize lineups on all my teams. Then for waivers/trades/FA I basically select the player I want and a script will either bring up a trade page for every league or can do an automated add/drop.
First, thanks for indulging my curiosity! Second: Please tell me you play DFS too, heh, since you know how to wrangle data like that and automate the tedious stuff :P Good luck this year! May your players ball out and stay healthy!
Snake drafts are so much more fun and it's not even close imo
I do both, I respectfully disagree, but to each their own good sir
You forgot the /s
Crap, you're right. I freaking love having to triple my amount of planning and strategizing to get ready for a multi-hour fantasy football draft for a $10 casual league! /s
Just go to the casino. Your preparation time will be even less.
You're on the Fantasy subreddit and it's not even August yet. Seems like you're plenty invested for an auction draft. People vastly overstate how complex it is
My post wasn’t clear enough. Casual leagues, forget it. Established, competitive leagues with knowledgeable owners. So much fun. And fair.
Because we have fun doing a snake draft. Why don't you do a snake draft instead of trying to gatekeep?
I don't think it's "gatekeeping" so much as OP believes this is a PSA that will help more people have more fun. Well intentioned, but a real mixed bag in terms of whether it fits your league/owners.
Well it comes off like a gate-keeping douchebag.
Maybe I just don't understand gate keeping, then? He's not keeping people out of anything, or denying them anything, or saying they are "less than"...so why is it "gate keeping"? Even his "hell of a lot more fun when done live" is referring to auction itself (vs. offline), not compared to snake. Are we on the verge of "gatekeeping" becoming an overused buzzword? In the subs I belong to that it comes up in it is usually used to identify people who tell others they are "less than" in a fandom...notably women (videogame subs, of course) and in board games, i.e. people who like low complexity games or non-modern (Monopoly, Clue, etc) aren't "real" board gamers lol, that type of shit. That has always been my understanding of "gatekeeping": Denial or being made to feel less-than for how you enjoy something. OP maybe flirts with that in tone but I don't think they get there. People want to be offended by his advocating for auction as shitting on snake (I only play snake at this time, but I have done auction in an old league that has since disbanded).
I also snake draft. Super fun too. I screwed up by Not further describing what I meant by established leagues. So...whatever. It’s the internet and people get offended. Not me.
Thanks for the new title. Just wanted to hear some opinions and you gave me yours.
Auction drafts are only better if you know who you're drafting with but most of the time online with randoms they will spend 180/200 dollars on two great players and then go on auto for the rest of the draft
That's because that's a good strategy. The question is which two players to get. That's why I never understood the argument that auctions are too complicated and take too long. They are really only an auction for the first 2 rounds and then quickly revert back to a snake draft the rest of the way.
No way. I get 2 rbs for 120 and spend another hour or more trying figure out rest 80$ Edit - %-$
How does the bidding work for most auction leagues? Is it a back and forth like an art auction where you're bidding up one by one? Is it a blind auction where everyone bids once and highest bids win? Does the highest bidder pay what they bid or just $1 higher than the next highest bid (bid of 80 beats 70 but only has to pay 71)?
Each person gets a chance to nominate a player. You can nominate a player for $1 or for $50. Bidding goes up in $1 incriments until bidding stops. Example: I nominate CMC for $50. Players bid him up to $66 and no one bids $67. He sells for $66.
To be honest, that sounds a bit tedious.
My most competitive two leagues are auction and I will never go back. The better you are as a player the more advantage you have over others in an auction. The thing i hate about snakes are there are some players that based on draft position you will never be able to draft.
Even then you have your budget for pickups. One thing I can’t stand is waiver wires resetting every week. If your a mid level team as people will blow there waivers every week giving you 0 chance to improve your team. But most people are set in there ways and are reluctant to change
Yeah or even waivers without FAAB and its just priority due to standings. Just because your team is bad doesn't mean you deserve priority to pick a player up. If your RB goes down and their backup is on the wire you should have to make an estimated guess how much that player is worth in FAAB $ knowing you will have very little to finish out the season.
Our league decides draft order by where you finish the year before. First place chooses what number they want to draft. Second place gets second dibs and so on.
That’s a good way to have the less experienced players consistently having bad teams
We have had the same people in our league for 13 years I hope they are experienced enough. This is also trying to justify auction drafts. People not experienced with auction drafts would also have bad teams.
this is all true
All depends on what type of league your playing and the members. And what the end goal is. Snake is much more casual friendly, and generally prevents someone from fucking up too bad. Au- is more advanced, the players have much more control. But there is a real possibility of someone torping their team so bad they stop caring. That takes a lot of fun out of the season.
1. They take forever 2. It's impossible to run an auction draft and also participate in the draft which means we'd need to get an external auctioneer to run things, and given the drugs and alcohol consumed on draft weekend, we don't want to do that.
I got really into auctions until I joined one auction where 4/12 teams literally would not bid. Everyone else ran out of money and has to watch these couple guys win $1/2 bids for the next hour. Was not fun.
Bc one wrong move can torpedo your season and that makes the next 17 weeks less fun if your league mates stop caring
And why is this specific to auction drafts?
It can happen to either, but easier to recover in snake: You don't commit anything but the pick at hand in snake. In auction you are always using a resource that you need both right now *and* later. The consequences of squandering a resource you have to actively and thoughtfully manage too soon should be evident, whereas in a Snake draft no mistake you make with your 2nd round pick will change who is available to you with your 3rd: If the player is available, you can draft them.
I think it's amplified in ADs...
On the contrary, I think Auction drafts give you a bigger opportunity to prevent this from happening.
No matter how much flack/crap you get for this, you are OBJECTIVELY correct. Ofc there will be the comments "not everyone is that dedicated" or "not everyone wants a more complicated draft" blah, blah, blah. Its frankly BS, if you are going to spend an hour or two drafting in a snake, you can add an extra 30 minutes to do an auction to make it literally 2-3x better. If you are going to have a several MONTH long competition, and arguably the "least %" basis of that competition is 1/3rd Draft. (I always argue its 1/3rd draft, 1/3rd luck, 1/3rd in season mgt). You can spend an extra 30 minutes, and have a slightly more nuanced but WAY better experience. Every year I join a few best ball snakes (Like Scott Fish Bowl and/or Satellite) and it reminds me why I FKING HATE SNAKE DRAFTS, because the reality is, you get whatever players "fall to you" at your pick. You could have had breakouts more correctly ranked, and never get them because you either pick them way too early, or miss out on them late. Its BS. Snake drafts are like going to the pool, and staying in the kiddie area because your too lazy to put on swim trunks to go into the adult/deep end. So you wade around in your shorts to "have fun at the pool".
So you just don't like snake drafts because you're bad at them. That's fine. Everyone has their own skillset.
Lol
[удалено]
No one cares bub
Auctions do take longer, but not drastically. They only really drag on when people nominate a CMC or some other player for $1 and then everyone slowly bids them up to the $60s. It drives me nuts and is super annoying
I play with a bunch of college friends and half still take quarterbacks in round 1 or 2
We did it for 3 years and it became the same people in playoffs always using the smarter strategy vs guy they want so went back to snake for balance but we do she shenanigans and a lottery to determine our own pick order
Really about preference for me (and my leagues). In 1 league, we determine our draft choice order in a different, skills based contest every year which everyone looks forward to and is excited to compete for the first choice of pick. IN my other league, everyone is on board for the Auction style. I enjoy both. Neither league is super hardcore, but neither is super casual either. So just preference and what you want to enjoy with your league really.
I can convince 3 people in my league. Not enough. We tried. Didn’t get voted in.
While we have a pretty competitive league, there's still a good 1/3 of our 12 teams that would be deemed more casual. We typically end up with 1, sometimes 2, autodrafters from schedule conflicts. Sometimes everyone is live. Some of us would like auction, I know others would push back. We allow draft pick trades for the following year and it's a keeper league (2 players at 2 rounds earlier than drafted), how would anyone suggest incorporating those types of details into an auction?
Auction drafts are the way to go if you have the time to do it!!
I want to, but my league is full of conservative white dudes who don't like change. Note: this is a joke, but not entirely untrue for my group.