Editor’s Note: Maybe your fantasy hockey team is sucking more than a $10 whore. You’re rapidly losing interest (hell, the other day you found yourself listening to women’s diving on the radio for your sports fix), yet there’s still several weeks left in the season. What to do? Hell, screw your current team and head on over to Draftbug.com, where you can dabble in very short fantasy seasons (how about daily leagues?). Don’t forget to tell the dudes at Draftbug.com that RotoRob sent ya. Every time one of our readers signs up for one of their contests, a box of Skittles arrives on our doorstep. Life is good.

BY ALEX ZELVIN, Draftbug.com

Traffic is beginning to increase on Draftbug. It’s likely that within the next few weeks, larger fantasy hockey contests will be available, with six, 10, 20 or more players in each. To succeed in these, you’ll need to keep one important principle in mind: in large tournaments with top heavy payouts, always use a high variance strategy. In other words, it does you no good to play it safe and go for second place in a winner-take-all contest.

This principle applies to all types of contests or tournaments, whether you’re playing fantasy sports, poker, or anything else. However, it’s easier to apply in some arenas than others. Draftbug fantasy hockey may just be the easiest place to profit from it.

One of the best ways to increase variance in your score in any fantasy contest is to pick players whose scores will be highly correlated. Draftbug hockey uses a scoring system that makes this very easy to do. Picking players who play on the same line is one of the keys. Whenever one scores a goal, the others are likely to get assists. Most of the time, they’re either all going to have good games on the same day, which is the key to running up a high enough score to win a large contest with six or more people entered. Additionally, players are rewarded for their plus/minus, which is generally going to correlate well with whether their goalie scores 15 points for winning the game, and also will have some correlation with the goalies’ success at preventing goals.

So the key to winning at Draftbug hockey is pretty simple: as much as possible, pick linemates and their goalie. Draftbug’s hockey scoring system allows such great correlation between picks, that this strategy should make you a consistent long-term winner.

I offer you just two warnings related to this: The first is that high variance only helps you in large tournaments. In a head-to-head contest, you should simply focus on picking the best team you can, without regard to the correlation among your players’ scores. The second warning is that Draftbug does not allow you to pick all your players from the same team. To maintain its status as fantasy sports rather than gambling, anybody who uses an entire team made up of players from the same team needs to be disqualified. So make sure that you mix at least one player from another team into your squad.

Editor’s Note: Did you miss the boat on joining an NBA fantasy league this fall? No problem-o. Over at Draftbug.com you can hop in whenever you like and play in a fantasy league that features a shorter season. Try daily or weekly leagues. That sure takes the sting out watching your team suck all season after a crappy draft. Go check out Draftbug.com and tell them RotoRob sent you (we get free Popsicles for every one who signs up!).

BY ALEX ZELVIN, Draftbug.com

I realize that most of you are primarily interested in fantasy baseball, but since it’s basketball season, I thought I’d share some fantasy hoops strategy to help you win at Draftbug and other daily fantasy basketball contests (such as Snapdraft). My approach to this (and it’s worth mentioning that I haven’t had time to try this out yet) is fairly similar to the approach I used to win the 2008 Rotohog Baseball contest. I’d recommend doing the following in MS-Excel:

1. Calculate player statistics in all scoring categories per minute played. This gives you an idea how good the player is when they’re actually in the game.

2. Estimate expected minutes played for all players. Assuming that you don’t follow basketball closely, I’d probably use something like the average of the last five or 10 games. You’re going to miss out on players filling in for very short periods when someone is injured (and those probably are the best values), but at least you’ll also avoid giving a high ranking to most players who were filling in and will be pushed to the bench by returning players. Giving someone who won’t play a top rating is a much worse mistake to make here than underrating someone who will play more than expected. For instance, don’t put too much stock into the fact that Daniel Gibson played 32 minutes Tuesday night in the Cavs’ win over the Raptors. First of all, it was a blowout win. Secondly, with Sasha Pavlovic sidelined with the flu, Boobie got extra run. That won’t happen consistently, so don’t let it fool you into overinflating his value.

3. Make an adjustment to play statistics based on whether the player is home or away. I would add 2 per cent for home players and subtract 2 per cent for players on the road. That may be slightly under adjusting, but in general I’d rather do this than overshoot with my adjustments.

4. Make an adjustment for opponent. You can get fancy with this and try to use statistics for how opponents affect specific statistics or players at specific positions’ stats, but for starters just calculate the impact specific teams have on opponents’ scoring, and adjust projections by that amount. So if a given team allows 95 points per game vs. a league average of 100 points per game, then adjust their opponents’ projections in all categories down the difference (in this case, 5 per cent, so your calculation will be projections x 0.95).

5. Calculate a points projection using Draftbug’s scoring system based on the statistical projection you’ve done.

6. Select a team that balances solid undervalued players based on your points projection with top rated players (who may or may not be underpriced).

You can refine this strategy to be more precise, but I’m fairly certain that it will be a winning one, even in the relatively crude form described above.