Winning Online Fantasy Leagues
by David Luciani
Published March 24, 2001

In our previous issue, we looked at how to approach auction and draft leagues. Here, we'll pick up where we left off and look at the online league. Online leagues vary in size, shape and quality. Obviously, it's not possible to offer strategy specific to each exact league but we can briefly examine the most popular type of online league and offer a few draft day pointers.

One common characteristic of online leagues is that most, but not all, allow you to pick your players regardless of what the other fantasy GMs in your league do. For example, ten teams might pick Mike Piazza as their catcher and that would be acceptable under the rules.  Most such leagues provide a salary cap and require you to build a team within that cap, choosing players from a list with their salaries pre-determined by the contest organizers.

For leagues that draft online but allow a player to be owned by only one team, please refer to the previous column about drafts and online leagues. In this case, we're talking about leagues that force you to build a roster in the privacy of your home, completely unaware of what the other owners in your league are considering.

In this case, let's say you're given a $260 salary cap, since it is one of the most common that you'll see you used. In some cases, the salary cap is listed as $26 million or some other strange number but regardless, you've been given a maximum amount of money and you have to pick players to fit into that salary limit.  One technique I often use in these online competitions has proven to be so effective that it almost eliminated the fun from the contest. It requires some work but it's certainly worth doing and subscribers to our members' section can use our interactive forms to help them do the work. If you're getting your forecasts and dollar values from other published sources, you can do it too.

Basically, it requires either creating a spreadsheet or paper version of the potential gain you can get from having a player on your roster. You're trying to maximize the quality you put on your roster and I strongly recommend against trying to initially balance categories such as wins, saves or steals. Try to get maximum value plugged in and then later in the season, you'll be in a good position to trade or replace players who benefit you only in categories where you are unnecessarily strong.

Here's the simple process and it works well in most of the popular online contests, especially those offered by CDM Sports and The Sporting News:

(a) You need to first come up with forecasted values for each players in the context of your league's rules. For example, if you are in a points league (i.e. a home run might be worth "4 points"), you must be able to estimate how many points you expect each player to precisely produce, even if it's just a ballpark based on rough estimates of ability.

(b) You need to know exactly what it will cost you to acquire that player. Most online leagues establish a salary for each available player and so that's the cost. For example, an online league might say that it costs you $45 to "buy" Pedro Martinez.

Armed with these two pieces of information, you must begin what we will call "the work." The work means that for each player, you must find out how much value you gain by drafting a player at his listed salary. In some cases, it will be relatively easy because you'll have dollar values that adapt to the salary. For example, you might forecast Alex Rodriguez to have a $45 season and his listed salary is $40 and so that would mean that A-Rod is a "+5" player. If you have dollar values that adapt to the listed salaries, you're already halfway home. Simply calculate the difference between the forecasted value and the listed value and attempt to draft a team within the roster requirements that gets you the highest total of positive values. For example, if there was a player that was a "+20" and no one else was higher, then here's a guy you want to cram into your roster somewhere.

Where many of the online competitors have problems is that especially in the case of point leagues, they don't know how to adjust the forecasted value to be compared to the salary level. For example, you might forecast that Manny Ramirez would be worth 150 points but you don't know how to adapt that to your $35 million salary cap. Let me give you an excellent way of adapting these that helped me win me two separate leagues in 1998. Since you're not actually drafting or bidding, the adjustment doesn't have to be perfect but it does need to be relative.

Add up the number of points you forecast players to be worth (e.g. you might forecast a total of 50,000 points to be the total earned by all forecasted players) and add up all the salaries (i.e. you might find that the available players are listed as having $700 million in salaries). Once you've got a good comparison, you divide the larger number ($700 million) by the smaller number (50,000) and you discover that each forecasted point is worth 14,000 dollars. So, if these two groups of numbers were our total, our Manny Ramirez 150 points would be worth $2,100,000. It may seem complicated but it's worth doing the work.

Even if all this is too much work, the key to winning online leagues is to maximize value within the constraints of your rules. You would rather get a $30 player for $10 than a $40 player for $35.  If there is no salary cap in your online league, then you will simply draft players in the descending order that you forecast them to have value, within the roster limitations. Since most online leagues don't allow you this luxury, you must look for players whose net value relative to their salary gets you the most bang for your buck. I can tell you that if you think in this fashion and your forecasts are good and your projected values properly adapted to your league rules, you'll be in a strong position to run away with things early.