roto//points/h2h pools and auction/salary/snake

[87Flyer]

up until last year i had pretty much just done yearly pools. some with picking a team and others with picking players from boxes.when i moved back home from BC i was asked to join a keeper league with some old friends. i had so much fun last year in the keeper league that i am trying to get involved in a couple more keeper leagues.

i was hoping to get some feedback on the different styles of pools as well as the different formats for drafting and what types are the most fun and competitive.

i read a post somewhere that said an auction pool is way better than a normal snake format.

[gdon]

It really comes down to who you\'re in with. Having interested (and interesting) guys makes any pool no matter the format. Being able to sit around and trash talk during a draft is better than randomly plunking a list into yahoo or something. Auctions I found were tougher for me. It took a couple of years to really get a handle on how much to pay or overpay for talent, but it was fun. But anything will work as long as the guys are all into it.

[Mercs]

I agree with gdon that the people in the pool make all the differance, but I perfer the auction style as it takes out the element of chance ie: I also seem to end up picking 8 or 9 out of 12 teams. If the pool is just starting up that limits your ability to get a top team right away, with the auction style every one has an equl chance at all players.

[87Flyer]

cool thnx for the info. it definitely sounds like an interesting way to go. would be a lot more thinking involved i\'d think than just a regular straight snake style draft. thnx again guys, much appreciated.

[blindedbyfear]

This is mostly just re-written a little from a previous post like this I did a few weeks ago. Hope it gives you some ideas:

A few pieces of advice from my league that is now going into it\'s 3rd season.

Drafting - We didn\'t do an auction draft when we started, we did a snake draft. If I was to start a new league now, I would definitely consider an auction draft. I\'ve been in a couple of football leagues that had them and they can get really cool if the people are knowledgeable enough. If you\'re doing the league with friends and you can actually have a draft party like at someone\'s house, by all means do an auction draft.

Format - Do an H2H league with regular season and playoffs as opposed to Roto if at all possible. H2H keeps people interested much longer into the season.

Scoring - I would strongly consider scoring by category (we use 11 stat categories, each one is a win or loss each week). You could lose most weeks 4-5-2 but still be in playoff contention late in the season. Even with H2H, 54-54-24 is a lot better than 4-8. And we all know what can happen if you get hot at the right time. I had a guy with Lundqvist and Backstrom smoke me in the finals last season and I owned him in the regular season.

Stat Categories - Especially if you do H2H categories, be careful what you choose for categories. We\'re dropping GWG because every week the score on that is like 3-2 and it offers no real insight on what\'s going on. You\'re sitting there Sunday afternoon hoping that Jason Blake scores a GWG against Washington. Kind of lame. We have SOG to make snipers more valuable. We\'re adding Face-off wins this season to make true centers more valuable in place of GWG. We\'d love to drop +/- for hits or blocked shots to make physical defensemen (and forwards if it\'s hits) more valuable, but we can\'t find a scoring service that implements that. For goaltenders, we use 4 categories. Wins, SO, SV %, and Saves. Saves are there for the classic \"Roberto Luongo\" effect. That is, a goaltender who has a .915 save percentage but faces 50 shots a night should somehow be rewarded over a goaltender who has a .915 save percentage but only faces 20 shots a night, especially because the guy who only faces 20 shots a night probably has more wins and more shutouts.

Give hope to all - Especially if you\'re playing for money, do something for teams that don\'t make the playoffs. Here\'s what we do. We split the money evenly between regular season and playoffs. 3 teams win money for the regular season, 3 for the playoffs. We have 3 divisions, so each division winner in the regular season wins money. For the playoffs, we have 8 of the 12 teams in the league make it. The 2 finalists get money. The 4 teams that don\'t make the playoffs face off in a 2 round tournament. For the second round of that, the winner gets the same amount of money as the 3rd place regular season team, but they get the 4th pick in next season\'s draft. The loser of that second round gets the #1 pick in the draft. So basically that 2nd round of the non-playoff team tournament is the difference between the #1 pick in the draft and no money or the #4 pick in the draft and winning back your league entry fee. The losers of the 1st round pick 2 and 3 depending on their regular season record. This massively reduces any real probability of tanking. UPDATE - This year we\'re considering actually making that person who wins the non-playoff $50 pick after the other money-winners for the following season\'s draft.

Transaction Fees / Limits - I tend to agree with the idea of a $1 pick up fee. I\'ve tried to implement that for my league and it hasn\'t gone through so far. We do not limit add/drops. However, we\'re implementing an earlier trade deadline for the upcoming season and we will not be allowing any add/drops after the trade deadline.

Trade voting/vetoes - When I first started the league, I was a little heavy handed on the whole veto thing, or at least admonishing teams for making \"foolish\" trades. I\'ve noticed over a couple of years, that even as smart as I think I am, I\'m wrong, long-term, on a good % of the trades that I look at. If there are, say, 14 teams in your league, I\'d make it that trades have a 4-5 day voting period and it takes 6 votes to veto it (or to make you look at it if you\'d prefer that). The 6 is 50% of the league minus the 2 teams involved, and assuming you as commish don\'t generally vote unless it\'s egregious, that means over half the league needs to object. Dobber has a good saying that in 10 years no trades should be vetoed or something to that effect. Going with the above guidelines I think you\'ll find that\'s a good \"common sense\" threshold. Remember, it\'s not really your job to prevent teams from doing stupid things with their rosters, it\'s your job to prevent collusion. Those are 2 very, very different things. Some on these boards make the assertation that there should be no trade voting, and that the commisioner is the only one that can veto a trade, and that it should basically never be done. I do agree, at the very least, that trades should never be vetoed unless in case of collusion and/or dumping.

Non-participating managers - These are the bane of any good league. I\'m fortunate in that I\'m able to run a keeper league with people that I am friends with in real life (or are friends of friends), and since it\'s for money (enough to make it competitive, not enough to make people really upset) that tends to mean that people try. I\'d write something in where if someone really just abandons their team, you can swoop in right away and have the commisioner take over the team.

That\'s it for now. Any other questions, ask! And good luck!

Post edited by: blindedbyfear, at: 2007/07/11 11:47

[87Flyer]

thanks for the info. so it seems the key to the stats cofiguration is trying to get the proper mix that allows all the various types of players some spot in the scoring. you want to make sure that guys are picking from all 4 lines and not just the 2 scoring lines. i like how you explained the goalies as well, finding that balance so the goalie getting pounded by shots with the lower regular stats still gets recognition.

sounds like their is a lot more involved in running that type of league than a regular points league. drafting a proper mix i\'m thinking would be the key(whereas in a points pool you just go for the best scorers you can get). are your rosters in a H2H league based around how many stat categories you have (11 players for 11 stats + a bench with some spares), we use 40 players in our points pool(25+15 bench). I think i was on CBS reading their rules and they had said 16 players(i could be wrong on that tho).

i guess the best way to get experience would be to try to get into one of those free ones on yahoo or cbs. prolly get an ass whooping but at least the experience would be there. thnx again for the info. this definitely seems like there\'s much more involved than a straight points one.

[blindedbyfear]

87Flyer wrote:

thanks for the info. so it seems the key to the stats cofiguration is trying to get the proper mix that allows all the various types of players some spot in the scoring. you want to make sure that guys are picking from all 4 lines and not just the 2 scoring lines.

That is correct. And you don\'t need to go overboard. Make sure you pick categories that get a decent amount of numbers adding up. That\'s why we use SOG. That\'s why we\'re dropping GWG in place of faceoff wins. Unless you\'re in a huge league (20 teams, big rosters) you\'re still probably going to be sitting second liners on your bench. The thing that I\'m kind of going for is we have 4 categories that are really universal (G,A,PPP,+/-) and 3 (PIMS more for D, SOG more for W, FOW more for C) that are more individual. So with those last 3 you can really try and do some interesting things if you\'re inclined, but it\'s not insane.

i like how you explained the goalies as well, finding that balance so the goalie getting pounded by shots with the lower regular stats still gets recognition.

If you\'ve got more than around 10 teams and/or if you\'re starting 2 goaltenders, you kind of have to do this. Otherwise a couple of teams will have Brodeur/Lundqvist and Luongo/Miller and Kiprusoff/Turco goaltending tandems and the guy who is playing one of those and has Manny Legace and Tim Thomas needs to have some sort of prayer of maybe winning a goaltending category or two if his guys play decent, because the previous teams are most likely going to, at the very least, win more.

sounds like their is a lot more involved in running that type of league than a regular points league.

You learn as you go along. We made quite a few changes between out 1st and 2nd seasons, and are making more between our 2nd and 3rd. You learn what works and what doesn\'t.

drafting a proper mix i\'m thinking would be the key(whereas in a points pool you just go for the best scorers you can get). are your rosters in a H2H league based around how many stat categories you have (11 players for 11 stats + a bench with some spares),

it really depends on how each owner wants to build their team. when you get beyond the really top offensive guys, you\'re left with 100 guys who all score 40-60 points (I\'m illustrating, I don\'t know if that\'s the real ratio). what it really does is allows you to choose between maybe augmenting the strengths of your top guys with your depth guys or trying to get a real balance. If you have a bunch of top centers as your real team leaders then with your depth do you lean towards centers who might get you FOW and let you really win that category every week or do you try and find a couple of guys who, while they may not score as much, really shoot all the time (I\'m talking guys with 200+ SOG) to try and balance it out. It\'s fun to try and make those decisions. In the long run teams who are good in all categories will obviously tend to do better, but that\'s also easier said than done.

we use 40 players in our points pool(25+15 bench). I think i was on CBS reading their rules and they had said 16 players(i could be wrong on that tho).

We used a pay manager from CBS last season ($99 US early-bird special) and will probably use them again this year. We do daily lineup changes and we have 9 F, 4 D, and will be going from 1 G to 2 G this season. Our rosters, including IR, are around 25 players total and we don\'t do a prospect pool. Our CBS league settings allow you to customize all aspects of roster size, I don\'t know details on any CBS free product.

i guess the best way to get experience would be to try to get into one of those free ones on yahoo or cbs. prolly get an ass whooping but at least the experience would be there. thnx again for the info. this definitely seems like there\'s much more involved than a straight points one.

There\'s more involved at the beginning but if you can get a good group together it will really hit its groove in a year or two. My league is just starting to really mature. Most every team is solid, the people who were newer really know what they\'re doing now, and it\'s a lot of fun. ESPN also will have a free one this year from what I\'ve heard, and we may take a look at that as well, especially if they offer hits or blocked shots.

But I would go with a free one this year and see how you like it. You can always tweak it next year. As much as I like to talk about what we do, it may not be what everyone likes to do. One thing we do as a league is every rule change or addition has to be unanimous. That usually allows you to implement pretty good ideas.

Good luck!

Post edited by: blindedbyfear, at: 2007/07/12 09:19