A Quick Peak at the New Ranking Cap Player Values

Probably the most confusing thing about our site is how the salary cap values are computed. It is based on the actual daily salary of the player. It is an interesting system, but obviously has it's weaknesses. We have been working on a new system based on ranking points that corrects a lot of the issues with the current salary cap system. Don't worry, we are not going to completely do away with the salary cap draft method. It will just be one of the many draft methods that we will offer. We have several other new draft methods in the works right now!

Development has been slower than we would like. I would like to give you a preview of the new rank cap values for baseball, as we put in place the final touches before roll out. It will work just like the Salary Cap method, but you will get 300-400 pts instead of $300-$400k. You get the picture. Let us know what you think.

Pitchers as of today

Position Players as of today

No Yankee Games Today

In case you were wondering, we left the Yankee games out of the contests today. There is a very rare completion of a suspended game, and the regularly scheduled game. Both start after the 7PM start time of our contests today. Since we don't list start times of the games in the contest window, it would have been unclear which game was scheduled in. I know we would have scheduled in the regular game and not the suspended game, but we like clarity here.

This leaves you guys with a small problem. How do you use up your cap without a couple of overpriced Yankees on your team? Easy. Shop around. There are one or two overpriced veterans on a handful of teams out there. Spend away!

$100 Bonus For First 100pt Fantasy Baseball Score

Enough with all the downer stuff here. How about a new bonus? Be the first one starting today to put up a 100pt or better Fantasy Baseball score in any of our fantasy baseball contests, and you win $100. Just draft a team that's capable, score 100pts or more, and drop an email to support requesting your prize within 24 hours of contest completion. First verified request wins. The top scores so far have been in the high 80s, so it is just a matter of time. Good luck everyone.

Tuesday Scoring Error

Sorry guys, but we may have another one. Wang from yesterday appears to have been scored incorrectly. Give us some time to research this, and we will resolve as required.

New Contests on FSL

As we get more user's on board, and get a feel for what you guys want we will be rolling out more contests. We recently rolled out a new $5 10-Player contest with a steeper payout structure. We also are running our first $20 10-player contest today. As long as you guys keep filling up the contests we offer, we will continue to expand the types of contests we will be running daily. Let us know if we are missing the mark somewhere, and we will see what we can do.

We had a couple glitches in the last 24 hours. Our SSL cert was down for a few hours this morning, and is now back-up. The website was never "un-secure", but you had to click through a warning to get on. Another glitch was an error in the scoring of pitcher Lilly yesterday. This was the first error for a player that we have scored that we are aware of since launch. He was scored 20pts, but deserved 16pts. We are still reviewing why this happened. and will take the required steps to prevent this in the future if possible. Considering that we have scored close to 10,000 positions since launch, this is not so bad, but we seek perfection here. Per our rules, when a valid, material scoring error is reported by a user with-in 24 hours of contest closure, we are able to review contests, and can adjust results as required. In this case, we reviewed all contests from yesterday that included Lilly's game, and found a couple of user's who deserved a higher prize. We awarded them the higher prize and credited their accounts. If you have not been contacted yet, and believe this error cost you a prize, please send an email to support.

Starting Pitchers?

For some reason we did not pick up the starting pitchers yet for today's (Wednesday) contests from our feed. It looks like they are not going to come through, so we are working now to manually set them. Until this is resolved, we will not schedule any additional contests for today. If you are already in one of the (3) contests that was already scheduled for today, please return to the contest page and verify that the pitcher you selected is actually starting today. We normally indicate the probable starting pitchers with an asterisk next to their name, and sort the probable starting pitchers to the top of the list. Without the starting pitchers indicated, we just have a huge list of all starting pitchers on all teams playing today which makes things pretty difficult when drafting your team. We think we will have this resolved shortly, so please hang in there if you are waiting to register for today's contests.

The next time we are out drinking with the Sports Network Guys they are definitely buying the rounds because of this.

Edit: It turns out the issue was that the Sports Network sent out the Thursday starting pitchers instead of Wednesday's on Tuesday afternoon, so they owe us several rounds. We put into place this morning a way to manually set or update the starting pitchers to resolve this instance, and any future issues with starting pitcher indication. We even now have the ability to update the list of pitchers if there is a last minute scratch, something the feed has never done automatically. So we got this resolved and put our normal offering of contests up for today. I guess better late than never.

Issues With The Fantasy Draft Pool

We have got lots of feedback on issues with players missing from the baseball draft pool, or classified in the wrong position. It is probably worth taking the time to explain how things work on our site, to clarify a few things. Also this issue is very unique to Baseball, and should not be an issue at all with Football, Basketball, Hockey, Nascar...

The website is fully automated using a live statistic and data feed from the Sports Network. If we had to manually determine everything daily the website would not really be manageable. The feed identifies the roster for each real team and the position for each player. Many baseball players are classified with multiple positions. They may be classified as 1B/OF, DH/OF, 2B/SS or any other combination. For players who are classified with multiple positions, we can't put them in the draft pool because we do not know what position they will play in a given day. Also the DH position is not included in our structure (because of the difference between AL/NL) Unfortunately, there are a handful of popular players that are classified this way.

The draft pool is actually very accurate even with the multiple position issue, but most of the inaccuracies stem from this. There are also a small handful of players who are classified for the wrong single position. Ichiro is one of them. These players are draftable in a position that they do not normally play this year. This is an error in the feed that we have no ability to correct.

We took a quick look at manually correcting the positions of several players, but it is not that simple. When a new player gets called up, we want their position from the feed. Also, we don't want the feed to overwrite our manual corrections. All this complicates things. We also have a ton of development in progress, and we do not want to pull our software team off of what we feel is currently more important.

So I guess what I am saying here, is we are aware of the issues, but it is not a simple or easy fix. We may get to it this year, but it will be based on software resources becoming available in the near future. By next year's baseball season we will do something to clean the positions up and correct errors in the feed. These types of errors do not really exist for the other sports as all players tend to have defined single positions. The draft pool is the same for all competitors in a contest, so there is no advantage given by an error in the draft pool. Unfortunately, for now at least, some user's favorite players may not be available in the fantasy baseball draft pool.

Baseball Is Back With A Small Scoring Change

Welcome back everyone. We are waiting for the starting pitchers to come through on the feed, and will schedule a full slate of contests shortly for Thursday's games. We got lots of feedback on the pitcher scoring system, and we decided to make one small change. We are eliminating the scoring for a pitcher loss (L). You used to lose 5 points for this, but now you will not be penalized. Many of our user's felt that the pitcher already receives enough of a penalty by not getting the 10pts for a win. We don't really think this will change the results of our contests very much, but if your pitcher has a good game, but does not get support, and your position players do very well, you will still have a shot in our fantasy contests with this change.

We are also addressing an issue with the current salary cap where pitchers and rookies are under weighted in salaries. Keep in mind that the current salary cap values that we use are based on actual player salaries per game and not on any performance criteria. We will be adding a "ranked cap" draft version where the salaries are based on average fantasy points/game for the season. This will have a huge effect on hot rookie pitchers (and all pitchers in general) where you may see their salaries go up 20x over what they are now. We feel this will make our contests even more challenging than they are now. We should be able to roll this draft method out in a few weeks, and it will be available for FB as well. When we add the live draft method we are working on, you will have (4) unique draft methods to chose from when picking a contest.

I also wanted to make a quick comment on Football. We came up with an amazing scoring system that we feel is the best Fantasy Football scoring system ever. It is not a huge change from what is traditionally used, but corrects the main flaw in the standard scoring system, and adds a few tweaks here and there that are huge improvements in our opinion. We realize that we are saying a lot here, but the feedback we have so far would lead us to believe that what we are saying is true. We are going to keep it a bit of a secret for a few weeks, as we don't want anyone (especially the majors) copying it this year for traditional Fantasy Football. We expect a ton of scoring system copycats next year.

We are still shooting for an August 10th launch of our FB product. The software team is asking for more testing time with the live FB stat feed, so this could possibly slip to the following week. If for some reason we don't start on the 10th, we will invite any user who wants to participate in Beta testing on Football to have access to a play money version (on our development site) starting on August 10th.

Three Days Off

For you guys, not us. There will be no contests for the next three days as we observe the All-Star break. Contests will resume on Thursday and will begin registering Wednesday evening. In the mean time, we will be working on some additional features and functionality for the site. You really have not seen anything yet. What we have now is just a shell of what the site will become by FB Season. Stay tuned, and see you back Thursday.

Undiscovered Canada

With Canada's vast expanses of land and small population most of it remains undiscovered. I will use that as a way to transition to some bad news. We will not be accepting Discover Cards on FSL. We tried, but could not work things out with those guys. We will be removing the Discover logo from our home page shortly. Sorry about that.

Also, we had a software bug on July 4th that prevented credit transactions on our website. This is resolved know. We love money here, so you can believe that when we track down the programmer responsible he will be appropriately publicly humiliated for his big mistake. Seriously though, we are taking huge strides to make sure this does not happen again. We are offering a $1 credit to your FSL account for each rejected transaction on your account on the 4th of July. Drop a comment here or email support@fantasysportslive.com to claim your credit.

On a positive note, we are smashing records almost daily on this site, with over $1250 in guaranteed prizes paid out on July 3rd alone. Thanks everyone for spreading the word, and participating daily in our contests. We will be rolling out tons of additional functionality and features in the very near future that will make the site even better, so keep playing.

Discover Canada

I hope it was worth the wait guys. We are all set up to accept Canadian customers as of today. Also, for those third-tier credit card holders out there we now accept Discover as well. Sorry, for the delays in these two offerings that we had promised when we launched.

Next year we plan to run some specials on July 3rd around what will be known as "Discover Canada Day" at FSL.

Starting Pitcher Scoring

We have had a few complaints that our Fantasy Baseball scoring is too heavily weighted towards starting pitching. We think that this is a valid complaint, and we will be addressing this over the all-star break (while no contests are running). What we had in mind is listed below, but we would love your input on pitcher scoring.

1) Win = 5pts vs. 10pts
2) Loss = 0pts vs. -5pts
3) Earned Run = -2pts vs. -1pt

This is not a huge change, but will slightly deemphasize the pitchers score, allowing the position player scores to count more. It also takes away the importance of getting the win, which is not always in the pitchers control if they get no support. Let us know what you think. If you like the scoring the way it is now, let us know as well.

Cottonmouth Wins Biggest Prize Ever On FSL

It did not take long. We just paid out our first 3 digit prize to cottonmouth. He took down a cool $100 prize in a $54 Heads-Up Contest. Congrats, and way to step up to the higher levels. The more you guys fill the higher fee contests, the more we will be able to offer. Who will win the first 4 digit prize? Will it be you?

Freerolls on Fantasy Sports Live

We currently do not offer pure freerolls on FSL. We do this for a couple of reasons. First, we use the funding method from an initial deposit to verify account information. Since there are a handful of jurisdictions in the US and Canada where we should not be accepting customers (due to local laws), we feel that we must do some level of checking of the accuracy of the account information, prior to allowing participation in our Fantasy Sports Contests. If we did no verification of account information, it would be too easy to open accounts from jurisdictions where local laws prohibited these types of contests, and we may expose ourselves to potential legal issues. Secondly, we offer an Instant Deposit Bonus of $10 for a $100 deposit for all new customers, and higher amounts are available if you use a valid bonus code or click through an FSL ad offering a bonus (Maximum bonus amounts require a $200 minimum initial deposit when using a bonus code). With the instant deposit bonus, you can freeroll our contests before ever using your own money.

Freeroll Strategy on FSL
So now I will give you a huge tip on how to freeroll our contests, even though we currently do not offer pure freerolls. First make a $100 initial deposit, and get the $10 in promo cash (or more with a bonus code). Use the $10 in promo money to enter (10) of out $1 launch special contests. These contests pay 1/2 of the field, and return at least 100% of the entry fees in prizes. After you enter the (10) $1 contests, you will have cleared your promo balance and can cash out your initial deposit in full (sounds free so far right?). After you have run the (10) launch special contests, on average you will be left with $10 or more in your account (depending on the number and size of overlays in those contests). Use those funds to continue to enter the launch special contests. Statistically, you should be able to do this for several months without going broke, and you may even build up some funds to try the larger fee contests.

We may not currently offer freerolls, but it is hard to tell the difference if you use the strategy outlined above, so give it a try if you would like to "freeroll" our contests. In the future we may offer pure freerolls, but you would need an account that had been funded with an initial deposit to qualify, even though the entry would be free.