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Draft Dominator Preview (1 Viewer)

Looks great, David. However, you lost me at "DDGamebygame4" with the talk about weighting certain weeks. Why & how would this be used?

 
This was my favourite product last year. It was very helpful for my auction leagues. Looking forward to this. Thank you FBG! :D
We don't show the screen shots here, but we have added a lot more auction stuff.Specifically, we record each value when a player is taken and recalculate the VBD (and dollar values) for every player.We also track cap by team so you can see who has what, what they paid, and cap dollars left.
 
Some cool new features!I just hope this version will allow us to enter value points directly, rather than having to play with yardage/TD numbers to get the value number you want.That was my only complaint from last year's version.Thanks!!

 
This was my favourite product last year. It was very helpful for my auction leagues. Looking forward to this. Thank you FBG! :D
We don't show the screen shots here, but we have added a lot more auction stuff.Specifically, we record each value when a player is taken and recalculate the VBD (and dollar values) for every player.We also track cap by team so you can see who has what, what they paid, and cap dollars left.
waiting for the MXC japanese guy to crash into a wall.Looks great though.
 
Looks great, David. However, you lost me at "DDGamebygame4" with the talk about weighting certain weeks. Why & how would this be used?
Think of it like this.Case 1 - You are in the middle of drafting a great team. You want to focus to the fantasy playoffs, you could make weeks 14-16 count more in your calculation of fantasy points. The Dominator would then rank players that maximize fantasy points against that new calculation.Case 2 - You don't play week 17 so you zero that week. Projections are now spaced over the 16 weeks.Case 3 - You adopt a strategy to draft your two best players and then zero their corresponding bye weeks with the hope of drafting players that will maximize the rest of the weeks.This goes on and on. The point is you can change this at any point in the draft.Let's say you draft Tom Brady as your QB. You want to know who the best complimentary QB is to your team. You zero Brady's good weeks and then look to see which QB ranks atop the list. Maybe he is someone with an ADP of three rounds later so you wait.
 
Looks great, David. However, you lost me at "DDGamebygame4" with the talk about weighting certain weeks. Why & how would this be used?
Think of it like this.Case 1 - You are in the middle of drafting a great team. You want to focus to the fantasy playoffs, you could make weeks 14-16 count more in your calculation of fantasy points. The Dominator would then rank players that maximize fantasy points against that new calculation.

Case 2 - You don't play week 17 so you zero that week. Projections are now spaced over the 16 weeks.

Case 3 - You adopt a strategy to draft your two best players and then zero their corresponding bye weeks with the hope of drafting players that will maximize the rest of the weeks.

This goes on and on. The point is you can change this at any point in the draft.

Let's say you draft Tom Brady as your QB. You want to know who the best complimentary QB is to your team. You zero Brady's good weeks and then look to see which QB ranks atop the list. Maybe he is someone with an ADP of three rounds later so you wait.
I gotcha now. Looks like tons of non-stop fun just getting to know this feature :thumbup:
 
This was my favourite product last year. It was very helpful for my auction leagues. Looking forward to this. Thank you FBG! :D
Any tips on how you used it for Auction?
It calculates auction values based on our (or your) projectionsThe best way to use this in my opinion is waiting in an auction draft. Because it records all players and you can easily see their rosters, available cap space, etc you can control the mid to late part of an auction better than anyone.and since it recalculates values based on bidding, you can see early if the auction is overpricing talent. This comes in handy to steal midlevel talent for pennies on the dollar.Plus all of the features (game by game stuff) work too so you can still target complimentary players.I can't imagine drafting in an auction league without this tool.
 
There is also one more piece that is worth noting (that is still being developed).Each player will also have a distribution chart assigned to him. For 90% of the players, this will be a straightline distribution (ie the player is expected to play the same role for 16 weeks)But imagine rookies for a moment?You have someone that you predict will start playing more around week 5. A guy like Byron Leftwich last year comes to mind.You can weight weeks 1-4 to be zero and start increasing his weights from week 5 to the end. This then targets his fantasy points to when they will actually occur.Similarly, someone like Jimmy Smith who was suspended for 4 games. Just zero these first 4 weeks so that he shows up as the complimentary player he would be for the weeks where he will help.

 
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What makes this all very cool (in my opinion), is even with the same projections two people could be targetting radically different players based on maximizing different conditions during the draft.

 
DA BOMB! WOW this looks great. I guess I will pony up $20 bucks for 3rd year! in row. Just got stay away from inj prone players like Faulk this year and I might win it all! :excited:

 
I am giggling like a school girl!!! This thing looks great! I can't wait to get started with it so I can know all the ins and outs before draft day even gets close.This product alone justifies my subscription. A quick testimonial. Got a call the day before a draft, a guy needed somebody at the last minute and knew I played. However, it was an IDP league and I had never done that. Not to fear, I punched in the scoring and went and drafted. I won the league, had the BEST defenisve players in almost every category and all this with 12 hours notice (got paid $200). You guys rock!!!

 
Someone in another thread wanted to know about the wait until X players have been taken...This is just as it sounds. Suppose you don't even want to look at kickers until 8 have been taken. You enter 8 and the Draft Dominator will NOT ever recommend picking this position until this criteria is met.

 
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A couple of other items have been added or tweaked too:Quick buttons for setting the Draft Pick Order - on the Setup->Pick Order screen there are buttons for Straight, Serpentine, and Double Serpentine.Sort buttons for the projections – on the Setup->Projections screen there are two buttons for sorting by Name and sorting by Fantasy Points.The Best Value window now recommends IDP players for IDP Leagues.It now shows the version of projections being used on the Help About screen.You can now select a player from the Best Value window by Double Clicking. The player position colors are now configurable. Keepers are now marked off the printed Cheatsheets. Likewise any players that have already been selected are marked off of the printed Cheatsheets.Importing the VBD Spreadsheet now imports the Scoring system too. After importing the player projections, it prompts you to see if you want to import the Scoring system too.You can now export the Draft Summary and Keeper List to a CSV file.The Best Value Need Multiplier calculations have been tweaked a little bit to correspond with the GameByGame projection Team Strength calculations.

 
Very nice. How many programmers worked on this? Looks like several hundred hours went into the program. :thumbup:

 
This was my favourite product last year. It was very helpful for my auction leagues. Looking forward to this. Thank you FBG! :D
Any tips on how you used it for Auction?
It calculates auction values based on our (or your) projectionsThe best way to use this in my opinion is waiting in an auction draft. Because it records all players and you can easily see their rosters, available cap space, etc you can control the mid to late part of an auction better than anyone.and since it recalculates values based on bidding, you can see early if the auction is overpricing talent. This comes in handy to steal midlevel talent for pennies on the dollar.Plus all of the features (game by game stuff) work too so you can still target complimentary players.I can't imagine drafting in an auction league without this tool.
Thanks Dodds!
 
Guys,Some of us had a chance to test drive this two months ago and it blew our minds. Honestly, when Dodds and Bruce were describing what could be done, I just didn't believe them particularly in the sense that I couldn't see how you could accomplish some of these tweaks and optimizations in the heat of a live draft...yet, once they loaded it up and started running it, it was like the Holy Grail of draft software. It stole the show at our Vegas retreat. :thumbup:

 
Very impressive.

Many of the features might be too overwhelming to utilize in a draft with strict time limits between picks. Do I concede week 3 or maximize the playoffs ... What? Times up? Uh Maurice Clarett :wall:

However, the weekly projection feature could be invaluable in a keeper league where you (a) know the schedule and (b) know at least some of the keepers.

I also like the max/min players. Should help in running through quick mock draft simulations. Although last year's was great, ending up with mocks where teams had too many at one positions was less than optimal.

Looking forward to it.

 
Is there a link that explains what the draft dominator is? Is it a program you run on a laptop and take to the draft and input picks as you go, but put league rules, draft order in before hand?That past few seasons on here I just have put my league's rules into those VBD programs from FBG and press print, take those sheets with me and I've been doing awesome. Do you actually get better information from this thing or does it just have more bells and whistles, I'm a meat and potato guy.

 
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It's a little bit scary. I've been playing FF a long time. I've thought about and experimented with different draft strategies, and I know a lot about each team and each player. If there were some kind of spontaneous fantasy football draft that broke out around my office complex, with no preparation or even cheatsheets allowed, I would totally clean up. The advantage I'd have would be overwhelming.But I think if you took Jessica Simpson, or even Shakira, and showed her how to use the Draft Dominator (with FBG projections) five minutes before the draft, most of my advantage would be gone. It's like a good chess player going up against a total novice who happens to have Deep Blue running in the background . . . the total novice can suddenly play like an expert.There's still an advantage to be gained from knowing how much risk is associated with each player and how they'll fit together as a team -- stuff a computer can't tell you, precisely. And of course, well-informed owners still have a large post-draft advantage in making waiver-wire pickups and stuff.But if you're drafting against a field of Draft Dominator-users, you can't just run over them with clearly superior value picks all draft long. Even total novices will be able to make sensible picks based on player value (tailored to scoring system), team need, roster limits, strength of schedule, who's likely to still be available in the following rounds, etc.Philosophically, I don't know whether I really like that or not, but it's the new reality. Published "expert" cheatsheets have always leveled the playing field somewhat, but nothing like the Draft Dominator. You can totally mess up a draft going from a cheatsheet by failing to appreciate positional needs and so forth, but you really can't mess up a draft with the DD. (You can draft guys who tear their ACL the next day, but that's different.)

 
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It's a little bit scary. I've been playing FF a long time. I've thought about and experimented with different draft strategies, and I know a lot about each team and each player. If there were some kind of spontaneous fantasy football draft that broke out around my office complex, with no preparation or even cheatsheets allowed, I would totally clean up. The advantage I'd have would be overwhelming.But I think if you took Jessica Simpson, or even Shakira, and showed her how to use the Draft Dominator (with FBG projections) five minutes before the draft, most of my advantage would be gone. It's like a good chess player going up against a total novice who happens to have Deep Blue running in the background . . . the total novice can suddenly play like an expert.There's still an advantage to be gained from knowing how much risk is associated with each player and how they'll fit together as a team -- stuff a computer can't tell you, precisely. And of course, well-informed owners still have a large post-draft advantage in making waiver-wire pickups and stuff.But if you're drafting against a field of Draft Dominator-users, you can't just run over them with clearly superior value picks all draft long. Even total novices will be able to make sensible picks based on player value (tailored to scoring system), team need, roster limits, strength of schedule, who's likely to still be available in the following rounds, etc.Philosophically, I don't know whether I really like that or not, but it's the new reality. Published "expert" cheatsheets have always leveled the playing field somewhat, but nothing like the Draft Dominator. You can totally mess up a draft going from a cheatsheet by failing to appreciate positional needs and so forth, but you really can't mess up a draft with the DD. (You can draft guys who tear their ACL the next day, but that's different.)
What MT said. The harsh reality I believe is that you need this tool just to keep up now in most competitive leagues. It's that big.J
 
Is there a link that explains what the draft dominator is?  Is it a program you run on a laptop and take to the draft and input picks as you go, but put league rules, draft order in before hand?That past  few seasons on here I just  have put my league's rules into those VBD programs from FBG and press print, take those sheets with me and I've been doing awesome.  Do you actually get better information from this thing or does it just have more bells and whistles, I'm a meat and potato guy.
You can enter your league variables and scoring system similar to the VBD Spreadsheet. It also prints out cheatsheets by player position and Top 200 Overall. Some people stop here, and that is cool. The next step is to run mocks, and simulate real drafts at home to try out different strategies. What happens if I draft RB-RB-QB vs. RB-RB-WR... You can test out all of these strategies before hand.The final step is to take it to the draft with you. Here you are going to need a Windows Laptop with Windows 95 or greater on it. At the draft you will be able to keep track of each teams pick, use the Best Value Pick to help you with your picks, and look at the new GameByGame projections to see how your team will fair over the season. Basically, you can keep it simple, or you get as complicated as you want... or somewhere in the middle. The power is there if you want it.
 
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:thumbup: You continue to change the world of fantasy football for the better. Thank you FBG management and a big salute with hats off to Bruce Henderson, outstanding man. This application is a commisioner's dream on draft day and one of the better pieces of software I have used, period. Wish I had your skills Bruce, you truly are the man.
 
:thumbup: You continue to change the world of fantasy football for the better. Thank you FBG management and a big salute with hats off to Bruce Henderson, outstanding man. This application is a commisioner's dream on draft day and one of the better pieces of software I have used, period. Wish I had your skills Bruce, you truly are the man.
That's a pretty good compliment coming from the owner of the Raiders. Thanks Al. :thumbup:
 
Looks fantastic guys. I think you're developing a great tool.I don't claim to be the most experienced FF player, but I also somewhat regret the fact that joe somebody off the street can use this tool to be competitive in a draft without knowing even who a player is or what team they play on. Enough said.One thing I found last year was an inaccuracy in the auction projections was the min bid on a player was projected on too many scrub players, making the total $ amount in the spreadsheet greater than the total of all team's budget. Please fix this bug. If all $ for all players is greater than # teams * budget per team, then the auction values are indeed fantasy rather than mathematical.Keep up the great work

 
But I think if you took Jessica Simpson, or even Shakira, and showed her how to use the Draft Dominator (with FBG projections) five minutes before the draft, most of my advantage would be gone. It's like a good chess player going up against a total novice who happens to have Deep Blue running in the background . . . the total novice can suddenly play like an expert.
Which is why I take great pains to make sure I never, ever mention footballguys.com around any of my friends. I don't even mention it to people who aren't in my league. I don't even send people to blackeyedjoe.com for a laugh, in case they see the actual footballguys.com logo at some point and put 2 and 2 together.At my draft next fall, I will simply explain that the DD is my own creation. :rotflmao:(edited for poor grammar)
 
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:wood:One question. Is the Draft Summary report exportable to html? I imagine that its at least excel (think it was last year), so you can convert it there if need be. Great work Bruce and crew.

 
You can export cheatsheets out, but the power of the draft dominator is not to create a list, but to use it as a dynamic drafting tool. It reacts to what others do. It looks for complimentary players. It does things that simply aren't possible with a cheatsheet. And it can do those things in seconds.

 
wow...Are you really gonna need anything else on draft day? :excited:
Hi RFFA,That would be...no. ;)J
WOW I got a reply from joe! :eek: ;) Looks like my dynasty draft will still be going on come fri/sat. I should be able to fire this up and use it on the tail end of the draft where I can get my vaule picks. Plus several mocks to get full use out of this thing.I may have over looked this but can you add more value to the younger guys for dynasty leagues?
 
I thank you, my wife thanks you, and my 2 year old daughter thanks you! By including the projected points per game feature, you have saved me COUNTLESS hours of work. I have always done this by hand, and have used it for back-ups (i.e., my stud is on bye, or has a terrible matchup, who fits the spot on those given weeks the best). FBG's Rocks!

 

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