Have you ever been in a fantasy draft, on the clock and panicking over whom you should pick for your team, a player you’ll be committed to owning for the rest of the fantasy season? Well DraftSmarts is here to help.
The mission of DraftSmarts is to help fantasy players of all skill levels win their leagues as easily as possible. For 2015 the site will be featuring products to help be smarter during a draft and set the best starting lineup each week. The secret sauce behind these features are the custom algorithms used to optimize your teams, which are largely based on economics, game theory and advanced statistical modeling.
In particular, the draft product tries to ensure managers pick the right players at the right times based on what opponents are going to do. Specifically, the algorithm considers league settings (number of teams, starting positions, scoring settings, etc.), how well the players are projected to perform and where players are projected to be selected to generate dynamic draft recommendations.
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For example, if Rob Gronkowski is projected to outscore tight ends by a larger margin than all other players at their respective positions while usually being selected in the first round, the algorithm will suggest for you to pick Gronk early. Additionally, if there are other players who will outscore their positional peers by significant margins but are generally being taken in later rounds of drafts, the algorithm adjusts to make sure they are selected at the right time so managers don’t draft them earlier than needed.
During Beta in 2014, the draft algorithm consistently picked teams that received A-range grades from the Yahoo! draft ranking system and were projected to win their leagues. Additionally, a significant portion of the site’s Beta users won at least one of their leagues in 2014.
After re-launching Monday on ProductHunt.com, the startup acquired over 1,000 users in less than 24 hours and finished in 4th place in their daily top products across the tech industry.