NFL PLayoff Fantasy Football Update

We will be running daily fantasy football contests throughout the NFL Playoffs. There are two games scheduled on Saturday and Sunday each playoff weekend up until the Superbowl. We are currently waiting for the playoff schedule to be delivered by the feed so we can start scheduling contests for this weekend. They should come through at anytime now, but the contests will be up by early Wednesday at the latest.

Fantasy Hockey Improvements

Now that we have much of the new development complete we took some time to improve Fantasy Hockey. The ranking cap values were scrubbed top to bottom eliminating a ton of sleepers whose cap values were too low or had never been updated. We also adjusted the cap rounding to the nearest 5 pts vs. 10 pts for more granularity between players. Now that we have the ability to manually control player positions, we were also able to correct a bunch of bad player positions from the feed. Let us know what you think, and also if you find players in the wrong position or with ranking cap values that don't seem correct.

We are very happy with the Fantasy Hockey structure and have had a ton of great feedback, but we still do not have enough regular players. Spread the word if you can, so we can offer a wider variety of multi player Fantasy Hockey contests going forward.

Fantasy Basketball Improvements

We made a couple of recent improvements to Fantasy Basketball. First, we updated the ranking cap values, and now round to the nearest point vs. the nearest 5 points. With the rank cap values pretty low, this should give a bunch more granularity to player cap values. We may do the same thing for Baseball next season, but will probably continue to round Hockey and Football cap values to some extent.

We also have frozen basketball player positions. Up to this point player positions were updated on a game by game basis by the real time feed. For some players who play two positions (G/F or F/C), their position could be updated at any point in time from the position they played the previous game at to a new position for the next game. These types of updates do not work well in our draft pool system, so we turned them off. We now manually maintain player positions, and have set them to where we feel they belong. If you think we have any of the basketball player positions wrong, please leave a comment and we will look into updating them.

New Draft GUI Launches Today

We launched the new draft interface today that we have been working on for the last month. It addresses a few minor issues that a handful of users have encountered since we launched the site. It is also a bit more intuitive and makes it a bit easier to adjust your roster to fit within the cap. Let us know what you think, or if you have any ideas to further improve the interface.

Now that we have that out of the way, I wanted to give a quick update on some of the things that we are continuing to work on. NASCAR is in the works for launch at the start of the season next year. We also have several new draft methods defined and will roll them out over time. A live draft has always been in the plans for FantasySportsLive.com, but we feel that we still do not have the critical mass for that to work properly. Unless you can form up a new Sit & Go live draft contests in about an hour max, live drafts just do not work well. We have a few competitors that only have live drafts, and we don't see them having any success with them yet. If the draft can happen at anytime when the contest fills, the contest need to fill very fast or you end up with one guy live drafting against a bunch of other players preselected draft order, and that is hardly fair to the people who registered first. That's why our cap based drafts work so well, as you can draft your team 24/7 on your own schedule.

Lastly, we have some new fantasy contest ideas, that we should be able to lock down the intellectual property on. We were not able to patent protect the basic idea of daily fantasy contests for cash, but these new ideas are so far ahead of the curve, that it should not be a problem getting the patent protection. Once we lock this stuff down, we will get these new contests developed. One of the advantages of playing on FSL is that we came up with the idea for these types of contests. We compressed the time frame to create something completely different than standard fantasy sports, and not just a compressed version of regular fantasy sports. Our competition is just copying our ideas, but have no clue about what our intentions are or what direction the site is heading. They seem to miss the entire point of our fantasy sports product, but that is fine with us. So I guess what I am saying, and I have said it before, is that we are still just scratching the surface of what this site will become. Our hand is so far from being played out. What we have coming is some pretty exciting stuff so stay tuned.

Edit: If you are linking over from Matt Maroon's blog, click this link for $10/$20/$30 free cash with your initial $50/$100/$200 deposit, and try out a fantasy site that actually runs multi player contests everyday, without the hassles of a live draft. We also offer free live scoring, as well as Fantasy Hockey, and Fantasy Basketball for your enjoyment.