Underdog Tournament Best Ball Workshop: Does Zero RB Work in Tournament Play?

Blair Andrews
April 15, 2022

Blair Andrews uses two new Underdog Best Ball tools to examine optimal tournament constructions. Can Zero RB work in tournaments?

As a site, we’ve been able to leverage our tools and analysis to some impressive best ball wins. In just the last year, Conor O’Driscoll beat 4,607 other entrants to win the inaugural FFPC Best Ball Tournament, narrowly defeating the second-place team drafted by Colm Kelly, Shawn Siegele, and me. Curtis Patrick finished 25th out of 155,520 teams in Underdog’s Best Ball Mania II contest. RotoViz collectively captured over $140,000 in best ball tournament winnings in 2021.

Shawn has used the guidance from the best ball tools to dominate expert drafts such as the MFL10 of Death, earning three first-place finishes, two second-place finishes, and a third-place finish over the last seven years. Mike Beers, who built our current slate of best ball tools, took down the top prize in 2021. I’m of course biased, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we have some of the top best ball tools and content in the industry, with the receipts to prove it. In 2022, the data and tools that enabled this sort of success are getting even better.

Over the coming weeks we will be introducing a lot more Underdog content at RotoViz, including two new tools: the Underdog Tournament Roster Construction Explorer, and the Underdog Tournament Advance Rate Explorer. Both are based on data from the Best Ball Mania II tournament. The tools will give readers a huge advantage when it comes to building successful tournament teams in 2022. In the Tournament Best Ball Workshop, I’ll use the tools to find the structural elements that consistently lead to success.

Shawn provides all the best ball lessons you need to dominate 12-person leagues in a variety of formats. Michael Dubner takes a deep dive into various roster constructions. But tournament best ball is, in many ways, a different animal. Let’s start off by digging into the most important question.

Can Zero RB Work in Tournaments?

Check out how RotoViz writers and friends of the site approach the Underdog format in Michael Dubner’s write up of the RotoViz Staff Underdog draft.

This is obviously the first question we must answer. And the answer is complicated, for several reasons. First, we only have one year of data. But even in just that one year, the results for Zero RB are not exactly straightforward.

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Blair Andrews

Managing Editor, Author of The Wrong Read, Occasional Fantasy Football League Winner. All opinions are someone else's.

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