Fantasy University: Course 301 — 4 tips to dominate your fantasy drafts

Entering an online fantasy draft room is an experience not unlike that of walking into a Las Vegas casino.

Distractions are everywhere. A vast number of options immediately appear. Odd noises are popping up. Various bad ideas begin to present themselves — but maybe some of them are less bad than others? Perhaps some are even good ideas that, like you, simply wandered into a weird place.

Everyone in the room is feeling like a winner, but everybody also understands the rules dictate most of us will lose.

The biggest difference between your fantasy draft and a casino is that one of them always keeps a running clock visible, and the other wants you to completely ignore the passage of time. In a draft room, we very much want you to know when the picking will begin. And when you’re on the clock, the clock itself is right there in the upper left corner, ticking down. In Vegas, of course, it’s always ambiguously late at night, yet somehow the night is always just getting started.

Another key difference: what happens in your draft room definitely does not stay in the draft room. Instead, you will have to live with your decisions all year, so you cannot abandon good judgment at any point. With this fact in mind, here are four tips to help you successfully navigate any online fantasy draft:

1) It’s a draft room first and a chat room second

Don’t get so caught up in talking trash that your attention drifts away from building the best possible roster. Your priority on draft day is to assemble an unbeatable team, not to fire off a series of vicious burns in the chat. (When you can effectively manage to do both things at a high level, you will be qualified to serve as an instructor at Fantasy University.)

Learn your way around the draft room ahead of time. Get comfortable. Figure out if you prefer to view players sorted by average draft position, expert rank or some other method. Dig around in the player pool to find where your favorite sleepers are hidden. Decide if you want to see projected stats or last season’s stats. If you’re determined to trash-talk the rest of the league in chat, the best and easiest time to do it is several minutes before anyone is actually picking players.

3) Keep filling and refilling your player queue

Your player queue is an essential tool, not a decoration or distraction. Every draft will be full of minor disappointments, as other managers snipe the players you were targeting. This is why we need to constantly revise and refresh our working list of priority players, reminding ourselves that there are many different ways to solve the fantasy puzzle. It costs nothing to add players to your queue, so wear that thing out. When the draft is over, your queue should smell like a bus station.

4) It’s better to trigger position runs than to chase them

This is particularly true if you find yourself at either end of the draft, near the first or last picks. It’s dangerously easy to slip into a pattern of reacting to the moves made by others. Ideally, you want to be a proactive manager who initiates position runs. If you’re going to ultimately win the league, then you’re going to need to land a premium option at a position or two. Chasing after other people’s scraps isn’t usually the best way to get it done.

Now that we’ve covered some draft tips, let’s dive deeper into strategies you can consider.