How to win roto fantasy basketball

How to play Fantasy Basketball: Rotisserie (Roto) Edition

Written by Micah Lamdin (@mlamdin) on 23 October 2015

Written by Micah Lamdin
(@mlamdin) on 23 October 2015

If you've never played it before, roto is pretty simple: instead of adding up category totals each week, you add them up over the course of the entire season.

If you've never played it before, roto is pretty simple: instead of adding up category totals each week, you add them up over the course of the entire season.

So there you are, staring glumly at another bad beat in the fantasy basketball playoffs. Your star has two games this week for some reason, and your lower-seeded opponent snatched your top waiver choice and rode him to victory. Screw this, you think. The best team over the course of the whole season should win.

Welcome to the exciting world of roto!

If you’ve never played it before, roto is pretty simple: instead of adding up category totals each week, you add them up over the course of the entire season. For each category, you get points based on your finish in the category - first place gets as many points as there are teams in the league, with each subsequent place falling off one. So if you’re in a 10 team league, the guy with the most steals over the course of the season gets 10 points, the guy with the second-most gets 9, and so on. The winner is the person with the most cumulative points across all categories. Also, each position is generally limited to 82 games so you can’t just win all the categories by making 400 more starts than the next guy.

So that two-start week? Who cares? You’ve had a whole season to build up a lead over that guy. Barring injuries (and there are always injuries), a roto league is much more likely to crown the actual ‘best’ team than the vagaries of the h3H playoffs. If that sounds appealing to you, jump right in!

First, the bad news: if you’re in fantasy for the trash talk, there’s nothing here to fully replace beating your best friend head to head and rubbing it in his face all offseason. There’s plenty of excitement and drama to be had (I’ll get to that), but you lose the one on one factor.

If that’s not a deal breaker, here’s how to get started:

I put this first because playing in a non-active roto league is basically guaranteed to put you off the format, and that’s a real shame. Yes, guys who abandon their teams in h3H suck - they gift people weekly wins and there are no bragging rights in beating the guy who started four injured players. But by the time the playoffs roll around, you’re generally going up against other active owners, and the slackers have no way to affect the outcome.

In roto, because totals are cumulative across the entire season, non-active owners can massively skew the results by plummeting to the bottom of categories their teams should be good in just because they don’t make starts (think the guy with Chris Paul getting a 2 in assists).

I’ve spent quite a few nights swearing at people for handing points to the guy making a run at me because they just wouldn’t keep up in starts. This is another area where the lack of 1 on 1 matchups hurts - it’s easy for less invested people to realize they have no shot whatsoever at winning and, lacking “well at least I ruined your playoff hopes in our matchup” as an incentive, give up on the league altogether. But you’re reading this on a fantasy basketball website, so hopefully you have enough buddies who care that this won’t be a problem.

And if you DO have an active league, the end of the season can become an absolute nail biter as you care desperately what four or five teams are doing - not just people close to you. I spent much of my last basketball season deeply invested in a blocks competition between three teams 100+ blocks behind me.

I recommend 8-cat over 9-cat - because the league is decided by cumulative point totals, there’s no need for a tiebreaking 9th category for the purpose of h3H matchups. And let’s face it - turnovers suck as a category. They’re a tax on ball handlers, and they’re particularly awful for roto because they punish you for actually making your starts - anyone who gives up on the league will suddenly shoot to the top of the turnovers leaderboard because, hey, they aren’t making starts anymore.

This is not behavior you want to reward. Still, up to you.

Honestly, there’s nothing particularly complicated here - set the standard 82 game limit for each position, decide how many bench spots you want, figure out how you want to do waivers (I like FA auction, but you can just do daily waivers easily enough). Most of the settings aren’t any different from your h3H league.

I do recommend adding an injury spot or two - over the course of an 82 game season, everyone’s going to need it, and too many injuries at once can put you in too big a starts hole to climb out of otherwise.

Which brings us to our next section.

How to Draft a Roto Team

If you gain nothing else from this article, please take the following two words to heart: NO. PUNTING.

Seriously, don’t ever do it. I tell people all the time that you couldn’t pay me to roster Dwight, DeAndre or Drummond in a roto league, and I’m not kidding. If I cloned myself nine times and we all played fantasy basketball together, they’d probably go undrafted. And the larger the league, the more important this advice is (at least, until you reach a size where everyone sucks horribly at something).

Here’s the simple, brutal mathematical truth about punting in roto: Your team basically needs to be perfect everywhere else if you want to have a chance to win.

Let’s say you and I are playing a 10-man 8-cat league together and you decide to punt FT because you’ve won your last few h3H leagues on the back of DeAndre and co. I, meanwhile, build my team around James Harden and his ridiculous free throw volume and I win the category.

I now have 10 roto points to your 1 - and you have only 7 other categories to make up that enormous deficit. Well, you got the punt FT guys - maybe you win rebounding. But I make my starts and finish 3rd there, earning an 8 - you’ve only made up 2 points. And meanwhile, your FT punters are generally only great in a few categories - so you’ve got excellent rebounding, FG% and blocks, but where are your assists, steals, threes and points coming from?

You need to be great in ALL of those categories to make up for your atrocious free throw shooting.

The only possible exception to the rule is turnovers, if you decided to play with them for some reason, just because the best roto teams all tend to suck at turnovers - if nothing else, the most competitive teams are likely to make all their starts, which will naturally push them below teams that don’t. So you probably won’t cripple yourself if you’re bad at turnovers.

Along the same lines, there’s no point in being absurdly dominant in one category if it comes at a real cost elsewhere. You get the same number of roto points if you win blocks by 30 or 130 - don’t invest TOO many resources in the same place unless the players you’re getting help you in a lot of other places as well.

You need a balanced team, so target guys who are good at everything, or at least don’t hurt you anywhere. Someone like Kawhi is a much better roto pick than h3H - in h3H, he’s not elite anywhere but steals, but in roto he’s contributing (or at least not hurting) in all 8 categories. 1/1/1 guys are really helpful here - people like Draymond Green or Danny Green.

A good rule of thumb for snake roto drafting is to take the best player available for at least the first half of the draft. At that point you’re probably down to players who are only really good at a few things, and can target whoever you need to fill in the holes on your team.

Get strong percentages. Because roto lasts the entire season, and because high usage players tend to be rostered, percentages are usually the hardest category to make up ground in - it’s easy to find a waiver guy who hits a ton of threes, but finding someone who has enough shooting volume to really boost your FG% off the waiver wire usually isn’t a thing.

Finally, make sure you’ve drafted a guy or two that you’ll be willing to drop - you don’t want to miss out on the next Draymond Green because you just can’t let go of anyone on your roster.

Now that you’ve drafted, it’s on to the actual season.

How to Manage Your Team

There are three key elements to managing your roto team: starts, trades, and (most importantly) the waiver wire. Each of these has its own roto-specific quirks.

Pace yourself! If you’re coming from h3H, where the number of starts can easily swing a matchup, it can be tremendously tempting to just rotate all your guys in whenever they have a game. This is a mistake - one I’ve seen sink some very good roto teams.

The easiest way to illustrate this: would you prefer 60 games of Russell Westbrook and 22 games of George Hill, or 82 games of Russ? That’s not a particularly hard question, right? Well, if you mismanage your starts, you’ll end up with the first one. You have 82 games per playable roster spot, and when those 82 games are used up - no matter who uses them - you’re locked out. No more guy in the PG slot for you.

Now, if everyone in the league played 82 games, this would be easy - set your roster and be done with it. Unfortunately, they don’t - guys get hurt, Timmy gets a DNP(Old) from Pop, contenders rest their stars down the stretch, and “general soreness” takes out a whole lot of people the last week of the season. h3H does its best to avoid all of this stuff by scheduling the playoffs a few weeks beforehand, but in roto your season isn’t over until the final day, so you’d better be ready for all of these scenarios.

If you have an injury risk, or someone who’s likely to miss a few games to prepare for the playoffs near the end of the season, it usually pays to be a couple of starts ahead of pace so you aren’t caught without a starter the last few days of the season. Don’t get too far ahead, though, and consider not getting ahead at all if you’re riding someone who might play the whole season (for example, a young guy on a rebuilding team who’s likely to get all the minutes they can handle down the stretch).

Keeping a spreadsheet is actually helpful here, since the pace calculators aren’t always accurate and you’re otherwise stuck manually comparing the number of games you have left for the roster spot to the number of games remaining for that player’s team.

Try to keep the same players in the same slots as much as you can to make this easier. If you suddenly switch out Boogie for Aldridge at PF, and the Spurs have played 2 more games than the Kings, you’re now on pace to miss 2 games (probably more, actually, because Pop). If someone misses time with an injury, try to fill their roster spot with someone else for each game they miss to avoid throwing off the pace. If you can, do this from one of your util slots - if you’re playing a standard ESPN line-up, you have 3, and it’s easy to catch up there since anyone can be started in one.

If you have util slots, you want to pace things a little differently, because you can get a couple extra starts out of them. Roto starts aren’t counted at 82 per specific util slot - they are counted as 82*X starts for all of your X util slots combined. So if you have 3 slots, you have 246 starts to play with.

The nice thing is that you can go over this limit as long as all extra starts are made on the day you go over. So let’s say you’ve made 245 util starts by the second to last day of the season. You’re now free to start 3 guys on the last day and make 248 starts in total. Sure, it may not seem like much over the course of a whole season, but a few extra rebounds or points could actually make or break your season. Don’t discount it.

Trading in roto isn’t too different from trading in h3H. Category swaps are still a great thing to target - you need blocks, and your friend needs threes? Maybe you guys can work something out. The difference is you’re more likely to be shoring up your weak spots in roto, not make your strong categories stronger. Once again, you get the same number of roto points if you win a category by 30 or 130 - if you’re blowing away the field in blocks, ship one of those guys for something else you need.

However, there’s one type of trade you should be particularly aiming for if you can: the 2 for 1 or 3 for 1, if you can acquire a superstar.

Remember, you have limited starts - so you’re not trading the production of 3 guys for 1, you’re trading the production of 3 guys for the production of the superstar plus the 2 guys you bring off your bench to plug the holes in the line-up. The drop-off in per-game value from the very best players in fantasy basketball to the tier below tends to be enormous, and chances are your 3 for 1 will bring you better overall value from your roster spots even if you lose a little from spots 2 and 3.

Note that this also depends on the size of your league - the smaller the league, the better this type of trade is because of the kind of player you’re likely to bring in to fill the empty spots. If you’re in a 16 man league and trading three starters for a star and a couple guys who play 15 minutes a game, that’s probably not worth it.

And that brings us to the single most important management element in roto: the waiver wire.

Ah, the waiver wire. I love the waiver wire. Want to know if you’re a great roto manager or merely a good one? Tell me what you did on the wire. I won a league I should have lost last year because of the wire, and if I’d been managing his team instead, I’m pretty sure I’d have won that too.

Early season, you’re doing what everyone in fantasy basketball is doing: looking for the breakout stars. You don’t always get someone like Draymond Green or Hassan Whiteside, but you can damn well give yourself a shot at it. Remember what I said about making sure you have a player you’re willing to drop on your roster? Yeah, you don’t want to be the guy who tries to pick someone up a day late. No, you’re not always going to be right, but it’s better to pull the trigger too early. After all, if you’re wrong, you can always drop the guy you just picked up.

Do your usual homework - is there real talent here? Are you seeing a possible breakout? Is this a temporary thing while the starter is nursing a bruised knee, or is your guy here to stay? Is he getting minutes for the Sixers, in which case most of this is irrelevant and complete assholes like Spencer Hawes can become temporary stars?

Hopefully you’ll get a starter or two this way. But that’s not the fun part. The fun part comes in the second half of the season.

Somewhere in the second half of the season, your league’s settled down a bit. The contenders know who they are, teams have started to separate themselves, and most people have a pretty good sense of where they’ll finish in most categories. Here’s where you can make your move.

Are you pretty locked into a position in one of the categories? Way up in blocks? Stuck in third in points? Excellent. It’s time to find some one-category studs and run people down.

In most leagues, the wire at this point will be full of people who are only good at a couple of things. Think Ed Davis, getting you 8-10 rebounds and 1-2 blocks in 20 minutes a game. Or Anthony Morrow, averaging 3 threes a game in March and April while doing basically nothing else. Normally, you wouldn’t waste a roster spot on these guys - but now’s your chance.

If you’re not in danger of losing ground in a category, you should be able to afford a couple of roster spots that contribute absolutely nothing to it (or even hurt it a little - if your FT% lead is dominant enough, you can run a guy who goes 2 for 4 from the line for a bit). And this allows you to come out of absolute nowhere in some categories, especially threes. I’ve seen a guy make up a deficit of more than 100 threes in less than a month - if you start playing a couple assholes who do nothing but hit three point shots, it’s astonishing how fast they pile up. There are ALWAYS three point assholes on the waiver wire late in the season.

You can also use this to lock in a tight race. Someone is right behind you in rebounds but you’re 300 up in points? Well, how about you start playing Omer Asik - so what if he doesn’t score? The closer to the end of the season you get, the more your fantasy fortunes get narrowed down to a specific few categories and the more aggressive you should get about ignoring everything else. Last season, for example, I actually benched Boogie for a couple of his April games - the ones where he averaged 25/18/9/1.7/3.3.

Why? Well, for some reason he decided to shoot sub-50% from the line despite being around 80% most of the year. Locked in a tight battle there, I simply couldn’t afford the risk, not with my finish in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks all basically assured. Boogie could drop 30/20/10 and it wouldn’t matter to me if he missed five freebies.

Be smart, and pay attention to what the other owners are doing. Is there a guy 120 rebounds up on you who have stopped paying attention to his roster? You might be able to catch up to him even if he looks out of reach on the surface. Similarly, if you notice somebody making countermoves, or you lose a key player, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else - I thought I’d be able to steal the top spot in assists last year, but Rubio went down again and the other guy grabbed some waiver insurance (plus Chris Paul decided to play 82 for him). So I gave up and went for a FG% point instead.

Also, if you need to make up starts, don’t be afraid to churn through players to grab guys on days when there are only a couple of games just because they’re the only ones playing.

If you play the wire right, I guarantee you can steal yourself at least a few roto points that you wouldn’t have sniffed otherwise. And that can make all the difference.

TLDR;

• Build a balanced team
• Don’t be afraid to make 2 for 1 trades
• Dominate the waiver wire
• Feel free to mercilessly mock your friend who ran out of starts three weeks before the end of the season and had nowhere to play Steph Curry while you ran him down in threes (see, there is still trash talk in roto!)

I hope you enjoy the format as much as I do!

So there you are, staring glumly at another bad beat in the fantasy basketball playoffs. Your star has two games this week for some reason, and your lower-seeded opponent snatched your top waiver choice and rode him to victory. Screw this, you think. The best team over the course of the whole season should win.

Welcome to the exciting world of roto!

If you’ve never played it before, roto is pretty simple: instead of adding up category totals each week, you add them up over the course of the entire season. For each category, you get points based on your finish in the category - first place gets as many points as there are teams in the league, with each subsequent place falling off one. So if you’re in a 10 team league, the guy with the most steals over the course of the season gets 10 points, the guy with the second-most gets 9, and so on. The winner is the person with the most cumulative points across all categories. Also, each position is generally limited to 82 games so you can’t just win all the categories by making 400 more starts than the next guy.

So that two-start week? Who cares? You’ve had a whole season to build up a lead over that guy. Barring injuries (and there are always injuries), a roto league is much more likely to crown the actual ‘best’ team than the vagaries of the h3H playoffs. If that sounds appealing to you, jump right in!

First, the bad news: if you’re in fantasy for the trash talk, there’s nothing here to fully replace beating your best friend head to head and rubbing it in his face all offseason. There’s plenty of excitement and drama to be had (I’ll get to that), but you lose the one on one factor.

If that’s not a deal breaker, here’s how to get started:

I put this first because playing in a non-active roto league is basically guaranteed to put you off the format, and that’s a real shame. Yes, guys who abandon their teams in h3H suck - they gift people weekly wins and there are no bragging rights in beating the guy who started four injured players. But by the time the playoffs roll around, you’re generally going up against other active owners, and the slackers have no way to affect the outcome.

In roto, because totals are cumulative across the entire season, non-active owners can massively skew the results by plummeting to the bottom of categories their teams should be good in just because they don’t make starts (think the guy with Chris Paul getting a 2 in assists).

I’ve spent quite a few nights swearing at people for handing points to the guy making a run at me because they just wouldn’t keep up in starts. This is another area where the lack of 1 on 1 matchups hurts - it’s easy for less invested people to realize they have no shot whatsoever at winning and, lacking “well at least I ruined your playoff hopes in our matchup” as an incentive, give up on the league altogether. But you’re reading this on a fantasy basketball website, so hopefully you have enough buddies who care that this won’t be a problem.

And if you DO have an active league, the end of the season can become an absolute nail biter as you care desperately what four or five teams are doing - not just people close to you. I spent much of my last basketball season deeply invested in a blocks competition between three teams 100+ blocks behind me.

I recommend 8-cat over 9-cat - because the league is decided by cumulative point totals, there’s no need for a tiebreaking 9th category for the purpose of h3H matchups. And let’s face it - turnovers suck as a category. They’re a tax on ball handlers, and they’re particularly awful for roto because they punish you for actually making your starts - anyone who gives up on the league will suddenly shoot to the top of the turnovers leaderboard because, hey, they aren’t making starts anymore.

This is not behavior you want to reward. Still, up to you.

Honestly, there’s nothing particularly complicated here - set the standard 82 game limit for each position, decide how many bench spots you want, figure out how you want to do waivers (I like FA auction, but you can just do daily waivers easily enough). Most of the settings aren’t any different from your h3H league.

I do recommend adding an injury spot or two - over the course of an 82 game season, everyone’s going to need it, and too many injuries at once can put you in too big a starts hole to climb out of otherwise.

Which brings us to our next section.

How to Draft a Roto Team

If you gain nothing else from this article, please take the following two words to heart: NO. PUNTING.

Seriously, don’t ever do it. I tell people all the time that you couldn’t pay me to roster Dwight, DeAndre or Drummond in a roto league, and I’m not kidding. If I cloned myself nine times and we all played fantasy basketball together, they’d probably go undrafted. And the larger the league, the more important this advice is (at least, until you reach a size where everyone sucks horribly at something).

Here’s the simple, brutal mathematical truth about punting in roto: Your team basically needs to be perfect everywhere else if you want to have a chance to win.

Let’s say you and I are playing a 10-man 8-cat league together and you decide to punt FT because you’ve won your last few h3H leagues on the back of DeAndre and co. I, meanwhile, build my team around James Harden and his ridiculous free throw volume and I win the category.

I now have 10 roto points to your 1 - and you have only 7 other categories to make up that enormous deficit. Well, you got the punt FT guys - maybe you win rebounding. But I make my starts and finish 3rd there, earning an 8 - you’ve only made up 2 points. And meanwhile, your FT punters are generally only great in a few categories - so you’ve got excellent rebounding, FG% and blocks, but where are your assists, steals, threes and points coming from?

You need to be great in ALL of those categories to make up for your atrocious free throw shooting.

The only possible exception to the rule is turnovers, if you decided to play with them for some reason, just because the best roto teams all tend to suck at turnovers - if nothing else, the most competitive teams are likely to make all their starts, which will naturally push them below teams that don’t. So you probably won’t cripple yourself if you’re bad at turnovers.

Along the same lines, there’s no point in being absurdly dominant in one category if it comes at a real cost elsewhere. You get the same number of roto points if you win blocks by 30 or 130 - don’t invest TOO many resources in the same place unless the players you’re getting help you in a lot of other places as well.

You need a balanced team, so target guys who are good at everything, or at least don’t hurt you anywhere. Someone like Kawhi is a much better roto pick than h3H - in h3H, he’s not elite anywhere but steals, but in roto he’s contributing (or at least not hurting) in all 8 categories. 1/1/1 guys are really helpful here - people like Draymond Green or Danny Green.

A good rule of thumb for snake roto drafting is to take the best player available for at least the first half of the draft. At that point you’re probably down to players who are only really good at a few things, and can target whoever you need to fill in the holes on your team.

Get strong percentages. Because roto lasts the entire season, and because high usage players tend to be rostered, percentages are usually the hardest category to make up ground in - it’s easy to find a waiver guy who hits a ton of threes, but finding someone who has enough shooting volume to really boost your FG% off the waiver wire usually isn’t a thing.

Finally, make sure you’ve drafted a guy or two that you’ll be willing to drop - you don’t want to miss out on the next Draymond Green because you just can’t let go of anyone on your roster.

Now that you’ve drafted, it’s on to the actual season.

How to Manage Your Team

There are three key elements to managing your roto team: starts, trades, and (most importantly) the waiver wire. Each of these has its own roto-specific quirks.

Pace yourself! If you’re coming from h3H, where the number of starts can easily swing a matchup, it can be tremendously tempting to just rotate all your guys in whenever they have a game. This is a mistake - one I’ve seen sink some very good roto teams.

The easiest way to illustrate this: would you prefer 60 games of Russell Westbrook and 22 games of George Hill, or 82 games of Russ? That’s not a particularly hard question, right? Well, if you mismanage your starts, you’ll end up with the first one. You have 82 games per playable roster spot, and when those 82 games are used up - no matter who uses them - you’re locked out. No more guy in the PG slot for you.

Now, if everyone in the league played 82 games, this would be easy - set your roster and be done with it. Unfortunately, they don’t - guys get hurt, Timmy gets a DNP(Old) from Pop, contenders rest their stars down the stretch, and “general soreness” takes out a whole lot of people the last week of the season. h3H does its best to avoid all of this stuff by scheduling the playoffs a few weeks beforehand, but in roto your season isn’t over until the final day, so you’d better be ready for all of these scenarios.

If you have an injury risk, or someone who’s likely to miss a few games to prepare for the playoffs near the end of the season, it usually pays to be a couple of starts ahead of pace so you aren’t caught without a starter the last few days of the season. Don’t get too far ahead, though, and consider not getting ahead at all if you’re riding someone who might play the whole season (for example, a young guy on a rebuilding team who’s likely to get all the minutes they can handle down the stretch).

Keeping a spreadsheet is actually helpful here, since the pace calculators aren’t always accurate and you’re otherwise stuck manually comparing the number of games you have left for the roster spot to the number of games remaining for that player’s team.

Try to keep the same players in the same slots as much as you can to make this easier. If you suddenly switch out Boogie for Aldridge at PF, and the Spurs have played 2 more games than the Kings, you’re now on pace to miss 2 games (probably more, actually, because Pop). If someone misses time with an injury, try to fill their roster spot with someone else for each game they miss to avoid throwing off the pace. If you can, do this from one of your util slots - if you’re playing a standard ESPN line-up, you have 3, and it’s easy to catch up there since anyone can be started in one.

If you have util slots, you want to pace things a little differently, because you can get a couple extra starts out of them. Roto starts aren’t counted at 82 per specific util slot - they are counted as 82*X starts for all of your X util slots combined. So if you have 3 slots, you have 246 starts to play with.

The nice thing is that you can go over this limit as long as all extra starts are made on the day you go over. So let’s say you’ve made 245 util starts by the second to last day of the season. You’re now free to start 3 guys on the last day and make 248 starts in total. Sure, it may not seem like much over the course of a whole season, but a few extra rebounds or points could actually make or break your season. Don’t discount it.

Trading in roto isn’t too different from trading in h3H. Category swaps are still a great thing to target - you need blocks, and your friend needs threes? Maybe you guys can work something out. The difference is you’re more likely to be shoring up your weak spots in roto, not make your strong categories stronger. Once again, you get the same number of roto points if you win a category by 30 or 130 - if you’re blowing away the field in blocks, ship one of those guys for something else you need.

However, there’s one type of trade you should be particularly aiming for if you can: the 2 for 1 or 3 for 1, if you can acquire a superstar.

Remember, you have limited starts - so you’re not trading the production of 3 guys for 1, you’re trading the production of 3 guys for the production of the superstar plus the 2 guys you bring off your bench to plug the holes in the line-up. The drop-off in per-game value from the very best players in fantasy basketball to the tier below tends to be enormous, and chances are your 3 for 1 will bring you better overall value from your roster spots even if you lose a little from spots 2 and 3.

Note that this also depends on the size of your league - the smaller the league, the better this type of trade is because of the kind of player you’re likely to bring in to fill the empty spots. If you’re in a 16 man league and trading three starters for a star and a couple guys who play 15 minutes a game, that’s probably not worth it.

And that brings us to the single most important management element in roto: the waiver wire.

Ah, the waiver wire. I love the waiver wire. Want to know if you’re a great roto manager or merely a good one? Tell me what you did on the wire. I won a league I should have lost last year because of the wire, and if I’d been managing his team instead, I’m pretty sure I’d have won that too.

Early season, you’re doing what everyone in fantasy basketball is doing: looking for the breakout stars. You don’t always get someone like Draymond Green or Hassan Whiteside, but you can damn well give yourself a shot at it. Remember what I said about making sure you have a player you’re willing to drop on your roster? Yeah, you don’t want to be the guy who tries to pick someone up a day late. No, you’re not always going to be right, but it’s better to pull the trigger too early. After all, if you’re wrong, you can always drop the guy you just picked up.

Do your usual homework - is there real talent here? Are you seeing a possible breakout? Is this a temporary thing while the starter is nursing a bruised knee, or is your guy here to stay? Is he getting minutes for the Sixers, in which case most of this is irrelevant and complete assholes like Spencer Hawes can become temporary stars?

Hopefully you’ll get a starter or two this way. But that’s not the fun part. The fun part comes in the second half of the season.

Somewhere in the second half of the season, your league’s settled down a bit. The contenders know who they are, teams have started to separate themselves, and most people have a pretty good sense of where they’ll finish in most categories. Here’s where you can make your move.

Are you pretty locked into a position in one of the categories? Way up in blocks? Stuck in third in points? Excellent. It’s time to find some one-category studs and run people down.

In most leagues, the wire at this point will be full of people who are only good at a couple of things. Think Ed Davis, getting you 8-10 rebounds and 1-2 blocks in 20 minutes a game. Or Anthony Morrow, averaging 3 threes a game in March and April while doing basically nothing else. Normally, you wouldn’t waste a roster spot on these guys - but now’s your chance.

If you’re not in danger of losing ground in a category, you should be able to afford a couple of roster spots that contribute absolutely nothing to it (or even hurt it a little - if your FT% lead is dominant enough, you can run a guy who goes 2 for 4 from the line for a bit). And this allows you to come out of absolute nowhere in some categories, especially threes. I’ve seen a guy make up a deficit of more than 100 threes in less than a month - if you start playing a couple assholes who do nothing but hit three point shots, it’s astonishing how fast they pile up. There are ALWAYS three point assholes on the waiver wire late in the season.

You can also use this to lock in a tight race. Someone is right behind you in rebounds but you’re 300 up in points? Well, how about you start playing Omer Asik - so what if he doesn’t score? The closer to the end of the season you get, the more your fantasy fortunes get narrowed down to a specific few categories and the more aggressive you should get about ignoring everything else. Last season, for example, I actually benched Boogie for a couple of his April games - the ones where he averaged 25/18/9/1.7/3.3.

Why? Well, for some reason he decided to shoot sub-50% from the line despite being around 80% most of the year. Locked in a tight battle there, I simply couldn’t afford the risk, not with my finish in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks all basically assured. Boogie could drop 30/20/10 and it wouldn’t matter to me if he missed five freebies.

Be smart, and pay attention to what the other owners are doing. Is there a guy 120 rebounds up on you who have stopped paying attention to his roster? You might be able to catch up to him even if he looks out of reach on the surface. Similarly, if you notice somebody making countermoves, or you lose a key player, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else - I thought I’d be able to steal the top spot in assists last year, but Rubio went down again and the other guy grabbed some waiver insurance (plus Chris Paul decided to play 82 for him). So I gave up and went for a FG% point instead.

Also, if you need to make up starts, don’t be afraid to churn through players to grab guys on days when there are only a couple of games just because they’re the only ones playing.

If you play the wire right, I guarantee you can steal yourself at least a few roto points that you wouldn’t have sniffed otherwise. And that can make all the difference.

TLDR;

• Build a balanced team
• Don’t be afraid to make 2 for 1 trades
• Dominate the waiver wire
• Feel free to mercilessly mock your friend who ran out of starts three weeks before the end of the season and had nowhere to play Steph Curry while you ran him down in threes (see, there is still trash talk in roto!)

I hope you enjoy the format as much as I do!

Fantasy Basketball -- Winning roto draft strategies

Dec 2, 2020

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Late in the regular season, the lead-up to the NBA playoffs can serve to destabilize the fantasy basketball playoffs in head-to-head (h3H) formats. You've got the best record and top seed in your head-to-head hoops league, and yet you get defeated in the first or second week of the playoffs by the team that barely scraped in, because several of your star players are enjoying some rest as the postseason looms.

The final few weeks of the NBA season -- especially in this rest-conscious era in the face of back-to-backs and arduous road trips -- can feel like one long Week 17 in the NFL.

There is a solution, especially if your intent is for the best overall roster in your league to secure the championship: go old school and play the rotisserie format. The cool kids call it "roto," and a simple explanation of the format is that stats within specific categories are added up throughout the season, as opposed to a weekly slice of statistics like h3H formats.

As for the specific categories your league selects, I often advise going with a traditional eight-category setup (points, rebounds, steals, blocks, assists, 3-pointers and both field goal and free throw percentages) versus including turnovers, which are often a tax on ball-dominant players.

In a 10-team league, the team that has the most steals by the end of the season earns 10 points, while the least larcenous team is left with a single point. Each starting roster spot is afforded an 82-game limit, so maximizing games played isn't an applicable angle in the vein that it fuels success in weekly head-to-head competition.

The team with the highest total of cumulative points across each category takes home the title. There are no playoffs or late-season upsets to consider as in weekly head-to-head leagues, but this doesn't mean the format isn't compelling throughout -- roto merely demands a season-long grind from managers. Finally catching your friend in steals thanks to an awesome surge from Marcus Smart in early April is undeniably rewarding.

Let's delve into some of the key strategies to consider when you are drafting in a roto league.

Balancing act

ESPN Fantasy basketball editor Tom Carpenter -- who likely was all about Rod Strickland's awesome blend of dimes and steals in the mid-90s [editor's note: that's a fact!] -- produced a helpful in-season strategy guide for roto managers. In the article, Carpenter deftly discusses the importance of pacing games played with an aim on statistical balance.

We also want to pursue statistical balance via the draft. In a points league, it's reasonable to chase elite scorers and volume rebounders while disregarding defensive specialists or pure point guards. In roto, however, we covet players who can contribute a consistently diverse collection of statistics, as each category is weighted equally in regards to points. Which is to say, you don't get more points for leading your roto league in points than you do for pacing the competition in steals -- it simply all matters in this format.

Balance is paramount in this fantasy format, thus high-floor players such as Jrue Holiday and Kyle Lowry can consistently drive value in multiple categories. The lure of LaMelo Ball's tantalizing talents is fun to consider, for instance, but give me mid-round shares of the "boring" pure point guards instead when it comes to roto.

Games played is also a substantial factor. This means riskier assets such as Joel Embiid and Blake Griffin, those prone to "load management," take a value hit in this format. This isn't to say we should avoid these star players outright, but rather to price this into your approach. We can't solely build around supposedly safe players throughout the variance presented to us in draft rooms, yet I do find a more conservative approach to roster construction can pay off in the marathon that is the roto campaign.

Don't punt

Like how Twitter users plea to NFL coaches to stop punting so often at midfield, I advise fantasy managers to avoid punting specific positions or categories in a rotisserie basketball draft. In a head-to-head format it's entirely reasonable to, say, punt free throw percentage and focus on elite defenders and rebounders.

It's true that some of the classically elite shot-blockers and rebounders, such as Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan, will tank your free throw rate to unrecoverable depths. The best approach is an appreciation for compromise -- we can instead place a premium on those players who produce blocks and manage respectable free throw rates. We are enjoying a new wave of rim protectors who can sink a respectable clip of their shots from the stripe, as Brook Lopez, Mitchell Robinson and Myles Turner confirm.

There is real risk in systemically avoiding a given player archetype or statistical category, as you need to otherwise prove prolific in other categories to even contend, much less dominate your league. Punting is an extreme investment strategy that requires some extreme fortune in other statistics to pay off.

Specialization

Instead of completely foregoing a specific statistical category or player archetype in your basketball draft this fall, you can instead pursue some specialists to carry you in a given statistic. You don't need to win every category to take down the league, but it helps to stay competitive in each to be within striking distance down the stretch.

Specialists, or players with atypically elite rates at certain statistics, can help fuel success in roto competition.

Mitchell Robinson is a defensive specialist I'm willing to reach for in roto drafts this season. Robinson can build on a strong finish last spring that saw him average an absurd three blocks per game and nearly a steal in just 25.4 minutes per game after the All-Star break. With an emergent and reasonably priced defensive force like Robinson in the fold, you can spend your upside picks in the middle and twilight rounds on more versatile players, as opposed to chasing hollow block commodities.

Dallas' Tim Hardaway Jr. won't cost much in drafts this season, but he was seventh in the league in made 3-pointers last season and remains a catch-and-shoot fixture as a the key shooter for the Mavericks heading into this season.

As you prepare for your draft, work to identify the players who provide atypically strong production rates across each statistic and within each positional group.

Risk of youth

Rookies traditionally post sluggish shooting rates, claim inflated turnover rates and often battle for consistent minutes. There are certainty exceptions who have proved capable of providing immense fantasy value as professional freshmen, such as Chris Paul, Damian Lillard or, more recently, Ben Simmons, Donovan Mitchell and Ja Morant. The issue is that the shiny-new-object factor tends to drive up the draft position of marquee rookies to prices they can rarely live up to in regards to value.

If an exciting prospect like Killian Hayes slides late in your draft, it's fine to take the risk on a player who could assume uniquely valuable workloads from the first tip, but just don't overload on youth. In general, roto is a format that rewards cost certainty and consistency, and this is something rookies rarely offer.

As Embiid might advise, trust your process.

How to win the NBA Daily Fantasy GPP with one entry?

In , unlike daily fantasy football, the variance in NBA daily fantasy is much lower, which means that for those who love basketball and are good at it, the chances of winning a GPP tournament with just one entry are much higher.

And the first thing you need to understand if you want to be successful in NBA Daily Fantasy GPP tournaments is that you need to be sure that you can win with one team. This may seem trivial to some, but it is extremely important. Many players mistakenly believe that they cannot compete with players whose bankroll allows them to register many teams in the same tournaments. However, this is not true.

If that still bothers you, you can play single-entry tournaments (one-entry tournaments) where everyone has the same chance of winning. Otherwise, you must overcome this obstacle. Of course, in terms of mathematics, a person with 50 tournament entries is more likely to win than someone with only 1 team. However, the costs of participating in the tournament, and therefore the possible losses in the first case, will be much higher. Those players who register many times in a single tournament will most often build their lineups around a certain pool of players, thereby limiting the number of unique lineups that a player with one entry will play against.

In any case, you should first of all overcome the psychological barrier , which makes you think that you cannot succeed with only one command, since this statement is false.

Master the lessons in this article and you will be competitive with a single entry in the NBA Daily Fantasy GPP tournaments.

Build a GPP Lineup Based on Cash Game Teams

The good news for daily fantasy NBA players is that you can use your cash game lineups to register and into big tournaments. A good pick is always a good pick because there is no need to stack players in NBA Daily Fantasy. Except in rare cases, which were discussed in the last article about staking in the NBA. Some players simply duplicate their lineups from cash games to GPP tournaments. Although this approach is somewhat simplistic, it works.

The approach that allows single-entry GPP tournaments and is explored in this article is based on a slightly modified cash game lineup. Below you will find a few tricks that are used when adjusting the composition for tournaments with a large field.

If there is an obvious pick, use it.

Strategy advice in daily fantasy sports often talks about avoiding players with high holding percentages in GPP tournaments. And in certain cases, this advice really works. If you don't take a player that 50% of the tournament participants have included in their rosters and he fails that night, you will be able to extract a lot of advantages from this situation.

The only problem is that such players don't usually fail . The percentage when they perform successfully is much higher than the percentage of owning them. This means that you will be in a losing position if you refuse such players every day.

Use obvious top options and then diversify your squad with less popular players in other positions.

If the latest news can help you find a value spade, put him on the team. Yes, we have already written about this several times, but nevertheless, many players do not like to make late substitutions right before the start of matches. This is especially true of the European pool of players, since the start of matches in the NBA for many occurs late at night.

In addition to the late start of the matches, many are hampered by the feeling of concern that the new squad will be worse than the one that was assembled initially, and substitutions made just before the start of the game may not be as well thought out as we would like. This is another psychological obstacle that you need to overcome .

Be sure to stay tuned for the latest news before matches start. If a team has two starting guards out and the coach is forced to play a 40-minute substitute on a low salary, use that to gain an advantage over the field.

Don't expect to win every night

GPPs are fickle. When you play with only one tournament entry, you won't always win. The main goal is to get into the top players and take most of the prize pool, and this cannot be done every day. However, when this happens, you can easily recoup your previous less successful gaming days.

Since you only play with one entry, you won't risk much of your savings every night. Learn to cope with emotions, do not fall into tilt in difficult situations, and do not fall into euphoria in case of victories. Both can play a cruel joke on you. It is better to take a few days off after such an event and restore your mood for the game.

Look for players with a high ceiling

This is one of the best ways to transform your team from a cash game to a GPP tournament. In cash games, players with a high gender bring stable results, the choice of which gives the very security. At the same time, the ceiling for such players is usually quite low precisely because of their stability.

GPP lineups, on the other hand, are great for players with low floors and high ceilings, who can also have the advantage of an affordable price or low ownership percentage. If you take a couple of these players on your team and they show a great game, getting into the top is guaranteed to you .

Don't think about what others are doing

If you're playing in a big tournament with only one entry, it's very easy to overthink yourself. It's easy to convince yourself not to take LeBron James or Kevin Durant because the other members will take them too. Try not to think about it. Try to overcome the psychological barrier that makes you think you can't win the tournament with one entry.

If you follow all these tips when recruiting for GPP tournaments, you will definitely succeed in NBA Daily Fantasy with one entry. This strategy is the safest for your bankroll and is great for beginners.

Want to read more NBA Daily Fantasy Strategy articles? They are available to you by Tag: Basketball.

History and types of fantasy sports

Analytical articles

The gambling industry is a wide variety of forms of entertainment, and mostly thrill and excitement arises when the player relies on the whim of lady luck. The dice are rolled, the cards are dealt, the roulette is spinning, and it is impossible to say exactly what will happen next. But some players are looking for other pleasure, such as using their analytical skills and extensive knowledge of their favorite sport to succeed. Today's article is dedicated to the unique alternative sports betting fantasy sports.

What is fantasy sports?

In simple terms, fantasy sports is a game based on sports statistics. Players assemble virtual teams of athletes and these teams are ranked based on the results of real athletes in real competitions. Players manage these teams like real managers or coaches: they select promising athletes, participate in drafts and monitor results as the season progresses, and make adjustments to the team.

Originally points were calculated by hand, but modern fantasy sports leagues use computers to keep track of scores. In its simplest form, the game can be played with a small group of people and with a scoring system, but other formats allow for large numbers of participants.

The game has grown from a fairly niche hobby to a global multi-billion dollar industry ($18.6 billion in 2019) that is projected to grow by 120% in the coming years.

According to the latest reports from the American Games and Fantasy Sports Association (FSGA), there are 59.3 million gamers in the US who spend an average of $653 annually. The FSGA estimates the market at $7. 22 billion, split between traditional and daily varieties ($3.27 billion and $2.91 billion respectively), with the remaining $1.04 billion coming from additional industry-related services.

History

Fantasy sports originated in the early 1950s. The first version of fantasy baseball was played using one of two baseball-themed board games: American Professional Baseball Association and Strat-o-matic. Players used a combination of dice rolls and statistics from previous seasons to determine the winners.

In the 1960s, Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach, who was a partner in the Oakland Raiders, with the support of sports reporters Scotty Stirling and George Ross, invented the first fantasy American football. Winkenbach had experimented with fantasy golf and baseball earlier in the 1950s and developed a set of rules that launched the first-ever American football fantasy league, the Oakland Professional Football Predictor League (GOPPPL), based at his home in California.

The author collected statistics on his own, and since there were no online sources at that time, everything was done the old fashioned way - Winkenbach called the sports departments of various newspapers, which received statistics by telegraph. Subsequently, the fantasy American football or gridiron grew from a friendly competition on paper into a business venture.

The earliest fantasy baseball leagues were popular at various colleges and universities in the 1960s and were mostly attended by professors. One of the students at the University of Michigan at the time was Daniel Okrent, who later invented roto, a fantasy baseball variation.

Roto or Baseball The Rotisserie, inspired by APBA and Strat-o-matic, was formed by a group of avid baseball fans who chose the Manhattan restaurant Le Rotisserie Francais as their regular meeting place (hence the name). The biggest difference from the version using the board game was that the game was based on recent statistics rather than data from previous seasons. Players earn points based on the number of home runs, successful passes and saves, and other metrics. As the season progresses, numbers fluctuate and managers replace underperforming players in order to succeed.

Fantasy baseball went mainstream during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike when sports magazines covered fantasy leagues in the absence of real competition, and by 1989 fantasy sports had already attracted millions of players.

After the 90s, the industry grew rapidly thanks to the development of the Internet. Not only have more people been able to connect and join leagues, but the sports data required for fantasy sports has become much more accessible.

During the fantasy of the 2000s, the sport became popular enough to serve as the basis for the television show The League, which aired from 2007 to 20191st year on the FX channel.

How the game goes

Normally, the rules of fantasy sports are as follows: a group of players decide to form a league and recruit players to their fantasy teams before the start of the sports season. They then track those players' stats on a weekly basis to determine which team is performing better. The winner takes the pot or the prize.

Infographic

February 3, 2020

Virtual sports, fantasy sports and real sports betting: comparison

Of course, each type of fantasy sports has a unique points system, its own specific selection of players and its own rules of participation.

Players manage their teams by removing or swapping players, and at the end of the season, the teams with the most points win.

In traditional fantasy sports, teams are usually recruited each season, but in a dynastic format, a certain number of selected players can be retained by a team from year to year.

In classic American football (gridiron), each team consists of a certain number of players, limited by roles (only one quarterback, two wide receivers, etc.). The draft takes place in a simple format - each team takes turns choosing one player in the first round, and in the following rounds, the team that selected last becomes the first. After the draft is completed, teams can trade players with each other or take players that no one else has selected.

In classic American football on the grid, each team consists of a certain number of players, limited by roles (only one quarterback, two wide receivers, etc.), while in the draft follows a simple format, where each team takes turns choosing one player from the first round, and in the following rounds, the team that chose the last one becomes the first. After the draft is completed, teams can trade players with each other or claim players that weren't drafted at the time of the draft.

In some formats, drafting is limited by budget, much like a real team manager can only afford a few highly paid premium players on a team roster. For example, in Italy, where fantasy football is extremely popular, such a system exists in tournaments organized by the country's main sports newspaper, Gazzetta dello Sport. Players have a certain number of "millions" which are used as currency to add players to a team.

Athletes score points by scoring goals, earning assists and saves and losing points by conceding goals, as well as for penalty cards and missed penalties.

The tournament also has weekly prizes (from a year's newspaper subscription to a luxury car) and a significant jackpot. For 2020-2021, the amount is €244,929.

The data provided by the newspaper can also be used to run a private league, separate from official competitions.

Modern fantasy sports offered by companies such as Draft Kings and Fanduel in the US are played in shorter periods of time - days rather than weeks or seasons. Daily fantasy sports are usually run as competitions where participants pay an entry fee that makes up the prize pool, with a portion of the amount going to the provider.

The format is extremely popular but was controversial when sports betting was largely banned in the US. The game has been defined as a game of skill in many American states, but due to the shorter time period of the competition, it has been argued that participants are essentially betting on the performance of athletes in a single game - a much less controlled environment.

However, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, most daily competitions are won by a minority of skillful players who understand not only the statistics behind the game, but also know how to choose the right opponent.

In addition to baseball, football, and American football, there are many more fantasy sports: hockey, basketball, cricket, and non-team disciplines such as racing or golf.

Difference from virtual sports

Fantasy sports are often confused with virtual sports, but they are very different in nature. Virtual sports are powered by random number generators (RNGs) and therefore the result of each virtual competition is completely random. The experience is closer to the slot machine: the result of a virtual game or race is available instantly, and the player can place many bets in a short period of time.

Virtual sports are absolutely independent of real events and are positioned as an alternative to traditional sports betting during the off-season, as well as a way to interest players in other more traditional casino games, such as slots or roulette.

The unpredictable nature of virtual sports makes them less attractive to fans of classic sports betting, because deep knowledge of a particular sport and the capabilities of real athletes and experience does not matter.

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November 9, 2022

Subtleties of virtual sports - analysis of the topic by Slotegrator

Different from regular sports betting

Fantasy sports was originally conceived as a way to bet on sports in the US, where betting was mostly illegal. Bets were not placed directly on the outcome of the competition, but still provided an exciting experience for sports fans because they rewarded extensive knowledge and analytical thinking and allowed them to win cash rewards.

The US is still the largest fantasy sports market, but the legality of daily fantasy sports is an issue in many states: Arizona, Hawaii, Alabama, Iowa, Idaho, Montana, Louisiana, Nevada and Washington State. The key issue is that the daily variety of fantasy sports is much less skill-based, and their unpredictability is similar to regular sports betting. In Texas, specifically, daily fantasy sports are banned, unlike traditional fantasy sports that last an entire season.

In the rest of the world, the position of legislation regarding fantasy sports is not very specific. In many countries, the regulations do not mention fantasy sports in any way, in others the legal provisions are embarrassingly ambiguous, leaving the potential operator and its players under constant threat from the law.

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In Estonia, fantasy sports are considered bookmaking if there is a wager or prize for participation, and in Ukraine, where most forms of gambling have recently been legalized, fantasy sports are not regulated in any way. In Japan, where gambling is heavily restricted, fantasy sports are not prohibited by the Penal Code, while in Argentina and Brazil, fantasy sports are completely unregulated, leaving it up to local authorities to decide whether an individual operator is allowed to enter the market.

It is also possible that fantasy sports law differs in different parts of the same country, for example in India where in Sikkim and Nagaland fantasy sports are subject to local licensing, they are not regulated in most other states and in some states expressly prohibited.

Fantastic potential

Fantasy sports are an unusual part of the gambling industry (and in some countries not at all), but the rise in popularity and complexity since its invention is a good indicator that this unique and exciting form of entertainment has a great future.

In many countries, fantasy sports is a completely unknown phenomenon, and the industry is waiting for the next innovators to come up with exciting new forms of fantasy sports and shake up the market.

Slotegrator works with sportsbooks and online casino platforms all over the world and we are always on the lookout for new horizons. If your company offers fantasy sports or you want to expand and reach new regions, or maybe take the industry by storm by offering your own unique business model, get in touch with Slotegrator's partner department.

Contact partner department

I have been working in the gambling industry for more than five years and have experience in managing sales teams in the B2B and B2C sectors. I started my career in the gambling business working in the support service of an online casino, and then became the head of a department that specialized in working with VIP players. Later I joined Slotegrator, and now I pay special attention to working with our company's products, where understanding of the needs of the players came in handy. My passion for the industry motivates me to expand my knowledge every day.

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