RotoRob Tries Draftster
Christian Bethancourt didn’t do much for our Draftster team. (Watchingmenbehindthemask.blogspot.com)
The absolutely hottest trend over the last couple of years in the Fantasy sports world has been daily fantasy sports. Why? Well, it’s super easy and accessible to play, you never have to worry about a season-ending injury tanking your team, and if you make a mistake, you can fix it — the very next day!
No wonder everyone is jumping on the daily fantasy sports train.
With this in mind, we recently gave daily fantasy sports contest provider Draftster.com a whirl. Here’s what we found.
Registration was child’s play, taking under 30 seconds. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but we really appreciate that in this age of complicated registration forms that demand the blood type of your pet hedgehog, there are still sites that are user friendly.
Once that’s done, the well-designed site immediately sends you to the contest lobby — it’s streamlined to get you playing right away, which is why we signed up in the first place, right?
When you click on a contest, you’re immediately shown everything you need: the payout structure, the scoring rules for hitting and pitching and a lineup of the scheduled games from which you can pick your lineup.
It’s also very easy to toggle back and forth between the contest details and your lineup.
You’re faced with empty position slots to fill, a salary cap and the average amount per player you have left to spend — the latter of which is a very handy tool that we’ve never seen on similar sites.
Pick your pitcher and the system automatically displays the next position. But you can shift over and click any position, so there’s no need to start at a specific position.
One bone we have to pick here is that you can’t look at the players available from a particular team or game, which would be useful.
When you’re done, simply press “enter contest.” It’s completely dummy proof. Of course, you’re free to edit your lineup until just before game time should you have a change of heart of hear about a last minute injury. Draftster automatically sent emails that confirmed our entry and another to let us know the contest was underway.
To keep things simple, we tried a freeroll to get a sense of the system. Playing on Thursday night, we anchored our team with super expensive SP Clayton Kershaw ($15,000) and opted to cherry pick what we thought were bargains on offense, including:
C: Christian Bethancourt, $3,800
1B: C.J. Cron, $4,700
2B: Tommy La Stella, $4,300
3B: Carlos Santana, $3,100
SS: Brad Miller, $3,600
OF: Gregory Polanco, $5,800; Josh Harrison, $5,100; and Mike Trout, $4,300
This team likely would have done better had we been aware that Miller was getting a day off, but the purpose of this exercise was to review the site, not embarrass the other contestants.
That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to check in with periodic strategy articles specifically related to Draftster.com, so stayed tuned.
Now it’s your turn. Let us know in the comments below if you’ve tried Draftster and what you thought of it.
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