Because of the fantastic tools at RotoViz and articles like those Sam Wallace highlighted yesterday, Shawn was able to turn a handful of FFPC Main Event teams into more than $10,000 last year. Today, he’ll demonstrate how to turn some of these tools to profit in your own leagues.
In the previous edition of the Best Ball Workshop, we talked about using the RCE to juice your win rates as high as 17%. Today we’re going to focus on how the FFPC Best Ball Command Center can make those teams even better.
Why am I plowing profits back into FFPC Best Ball?
- Best ball leagues offer a year-long practice session to prepare you for those big September drafts.
- The Roster Construction Explorer turns these leagues into a money machine.
- It’s fun! Drafting fantasy teams is the best part of our hobby and the reason we enjoy it so much.
I can’t emphasize enough how these three elements work together. If you can have fun while you make money and prepare for the big events, that’s really the perfect storm.
We talk a lot about structural drafting at RotoViz, and whether it’s deploying Zero RB or taking full advantage of the insights from the RCE, readers will often ask me if these strategies limit my flexibility in drafting teams.
The answer is no. Structural drafting will take your player-picking prowess and amplify it. We also want to squeeze every single drop of value out of every single league. Blair Andrews and I are currently involved in four FFPC best ball leagues, and we’ve been able to load our teams with a ton of excess value using the Best Ball Command Center.
FFPC Best Ball Command Center in Practice
First, let’s look at how the Command Center works, and then I’ll show you just how much value you can get from deploying it in a real draft.
1. Visualizing the Values at Your Selection
The Command Center shows you where you are in your draft and then offers a visualization of the best values at this point. Anthony McFarland and the Chargers defense are both options for our particular needs, and we can see where they’ve been taken over the last 11 days.
2. A Full List of Player ADPs and Exposures With Odds Available
This is an example from a different draft where we’re four picks away at 115th overall.
I love the ability to take in this view and do a lot with it quickly. For example, it’s possible to look merely at ADP to make some of these decisions, but it’s a lot easier with the Command Center to translate.
- If you’re choosing between two players with a similar ADP, does one of them go in a much wider range of picks, therefore increasing the chances he might fall to you in the following round?
- If you need a specific position with your following pick, how likely are you to get your top choice? If you don’t, is there a good consolation choice available?
- How much exposure do you already have to a player? Depending on your number of leagues and your overall tactics, you might want to prioritize a player with high ownership to increase your payout if you’re right, or you might want to diversify in order to spread out your risk.
3. Rosters, Full Draft Grid, News, and More
The Command Center also has a lot of other nice features to simplify your process. It will toggle between all of your different drafts. It displays your rosters. It gives you the full draft grid. There’s even a news section so you don’t make a pick just to find out the player suffered a season-ending injury a few minutes earlier.
I like all of these features, but I love the ability to visualize ADP and reference the odds. It’ll make you much more comfortable with taking the values and refusing to reach. The results of this patience can be quite stunning when you add them up throughout the draft.
Big Values in a Real FFPC Best Ball Draft
In this exercise, I’m going to walk you through one of our drafts and demonstrate how we were able to gain serious value throughout. If you’re less interested in that element, it’ll also give you a feel for the tactics early drafters are employing. I’ll also discuss our picks in the context of Blair’s recent Wrong Read. As always, we want to combine every small edge we can.
