Fantasy Basketball Large Field Fridays

Fantasy Sports Live is rolling out new larger field fantasy basketball leagues on Fridays. The size of the fields and guaranteed cash prizes will be based on demand, so if you like 50+ player fantasy basketball leagues, help us fill them and we will keep upping the guarantees and field sizes. For this Friday we are offering three large filed fantasy basketball leagues with two of them the largest offered to date. Keep in mind that our fantasy league prizes are guaranteed even if a league does not fill. You may want to check on Friday before 7PM Eastern to see if they are going to fill, and if there is potential for an overlay (More prizes paid than fees collected)

Large Field Friday Fantasy Basketball Leagues

1) $1 Entry, 50 Player, $50 Guaranteed, Top 5 Paid
2) $5.5 Entry, 50 Player, $250 Guaranteed, Top 5 Paid
3) $11 Entry, 25 Player, $250 Guaranteed, Top 5 Paid

Anatomy of a Glitch

On Sunday, we had one of those million to one events that snuck through all the protections we have in place and led to some scoring total errors in Fantasy Basketball leagues. We strive for perfection, and are very disappointed when we don't achieve it. The events of Sunday were pretty interesting so in the spirit of full disclosure, I thought I would give a behind the scenes look at a glitch (really more of a generic breakdown) in our fantasy scoring system on Sunday.

It all started with an error in our statistical feed game schedule. These are pretty rare, but they have happened before. They probably happen at least once a year, but I can't honestly remember the last time it happened. There was an additional LAC vs. PHI game in the Sunday schedule. Both teams were playing other teams on Sunday. This was the first breakdown. A significant error in the live statistical feed. Many competitive websites have automatic game schedulers that can get into trouble when something like this happens. We manually schedule fantasy leagues for many reasons, but one is to let a human see what is about to be scheduled and catch things that are obviously wrong. We often check the game schedule in our system against an independent source, or at least check for duplication in teams in the existing schedule. This time the extra game slipped through the cracks and was scheduled in to all fantasy basketball leagues on Sunday. This was a human error, and the second error in a stack-up of errors that led to the glitch. We did not notice the problem in the Sunday league schedules and no users reported the schedule problem prior to the start of the leagues. Had this happened, the bad game would have been removed prior to the start of the leagues and the glitch would not have happened. With leagues scheduled the day before, there is a lot of time for an error like this to be spotted prior to the league start time, but it was not spotted (the bad game in every contest lobby, and one extra game in the game count) by anyone. This was the third breakdown.

When the fantasy basketball leagues started on Sunday, there were some issues reported with the scoring of Elton Brand in particular. This was looked into at that time, and his initial score of 27 could not be confirmed in the in-game scoring for the scheduled game. Again, it was not noticed that there was an extra LAC/PHI game on the schedule that should not have been there. It was assumed at the time that this was a live feed issue that would be resolved with the next update, or at least by the final box score. The scoring that appeared immediately at the start of the league was because of another significant failure in the live feed. A completely bogus box score was delivered against this non-existent game, and these bogus scores were displaying for the PHI and LAC players instead of their normally scheduled game scoring. There is no reason for this to have happened, and it pushed the issue on the feed side to a million to one or higher stack-up of errors. This was the fourth and most unusual breakdown in the system. We have never seen a bad game that should not have been on the schedule and was not actually played get scored in our system before Sunday.

More reports of scoring issues with Brand and other PHI and LAC players were reported towards the end of the night. At that point we discovered the problem with the bad game in the system. The bad game had not received a final box, so it was holding up the completion of Sundays leagues. The scoring displayed for all PHI and LAC players was obviously wrong in our fantasy leagues. It was displaying the statistics for the bogus game instead. We found that the in-game scoring could be corrected by adjusting this box to the stats from the actual game that was played by PHI and LAC. This corrected the scores in the contest leader boards. We though we had it. The bad box score had held things up as it is supposed to, and allowed us to correct the bad scoring for PHI and LAC players. The system worked. Well except for one last breakdown. This was another human error. There were ultimately two games on the schedule for the PHI and LAC players in our system. The real game boxes were in, and were we left with the bad box score. The last time something like this had happened before was during baseball in 2007. We had not yet learned how to deal with late scheduled doubleheaders, and had two games for one team on an actual league schedule. It was too long ago to fully remember how the system deals with a case like this, but it does what you logically think that it would do. For in game stats it shows the current game that is running only. Once the second game starts, it shows just the fantasy scores for that game. In the league totals, it includes the scores from both games. So it looks likes it is adding the scores incorrectly, but it is actually getting the overall score correct by including both games. So we really just had the doubleheader situation from 2007 again, but did not catch it. Adjusting the game two scores can make the scores for the players look right in the lobby, but you need to remember it is also totaling in the game 1 scores. Setting the bogus game scores to the actual scores had the effect of double counting each PHI and LAC player's score in the league totals. Had we realized this is what was happening, (we had no reason to think the totals were wrong, as they had never been before), we could have set the scores in the bogus game to zero which seems like the obvious solution in hindsight. This would have made the player scores for all PHI and LAC players zero in the contest lobbies, but would have scored the leagues perfectly correct by just counting the real games. So we had this last final breakdown that let it actually slip through even after the million to one stuff that got us to this point.

Once this happens and the leagues are settled, we have to go through them all by hand and see what leagues had the prize outcome changed. We had 92 daily fantasy basketball leagues on Sunday and about a dozen had the outcome changed by the bad scoring totals. We go through and credit the accounts who should have won prizes, and debit prizes that should not have been won. We are more interested in getting the people who were harmed whole, then clawing back bad prizes, so we often let the smaller bad prizes stick rather than debit accounts and contact the user. If you noticed this error, and we have not contacted you yet, we are done with the credits/debits at this point. If you think you should have won a prize and have not been credited yet let us know. Well that's it. The anatomy of a glitch in a nutshell.

NBA Scoring Error

The Scores for Derrick Rose and Kirk Hinrich were swapped last night in the feed for some reason. Rose should have scored 35 pts and Hinrich should have scored 18 points. We are reviewing last nights results and will adjust prizes as required today. Sorry for the inconvenience.

NBA Progressive Feed for Fantasy Basketball Now Live

Last year we had end of quarter updates for our Daily Fantasy Basketball leagues. This year our in game updates have been less than perfect. Well that is putting it nicely. Our live feed vendor completely dropped end of quarter scoring updates in favor of a new progressive NBA feed, and forgot to mention it to us preseason. So we have struggled with halftime and final box score updates only as we have worked on implementing the new NBA progressive feed. Well we are proud to say it has been up and running correctly for several days now. I need to throw out a disclaimer here, as our stat vendor has done the same. This is a new progressive feed that is not staffed in the same way that the baseball and football feeds are. It is not expected to be as accurate or as fast as our baseball and football in-game scoring is. In watching the live scoring, I would have to agree right now. It works pretty well as a way to see where you are in a league, but there are some scoring issues here and there. As with all of our fantasy leagues, fantasy basketball is settled with the official final NBA box scores, so any in-game scoring errors are corrected at that time. The fast pace of basketball also tends to put things more noticeably behind than with Baseball or Football. There are delays in the system from when the snapshot of scoring was taken and when that data is delivered to our website. For baseball or football even with a 10 minute delay, 90% of fantasy scores showing will be accurate. With fantasy basketball and the same scoring delay, most fantasy scores will be inaccurate. Anyway, enough on boring progressive scoring. Enjoy our faster updating daily fantasy basketball leagues and learn even quicker how much money you will be making tonight as a result of your superior NBA knowledge.

Fantasy Basketball End of Quarter Scoring Update

A quick update on End of Quarter scoring for Fantasy Basketball. Our vendor has actually pulled the plug on this service this year and is moving to progressive scoring only for the NBA. We are currently picking up the first half box and official final box scores only. We are working on implementing the progressive scoring, but were not able to get it finished this week. Until we roll out the progressive scoring upgrade, we will be limited to 2 updates per game. We will supplement that with some in game manual in-game scoring at times. Sorry for the inconvenience while we make this improvement to our in-game fantasy basketball scoring.

NBA In Game Update Issue

I have some good news and some bad news for our fantasy NBA players. Do you want the good or the bad first? Let's just get the bad out of the way. We are having some issues with the end of quarter scoring updates this year. We are currently only getting the end of half and final box scores (2 updates per game). The first half update comes after the second half starts, and the final box is about 45 minutes to 1 hour after the game ends. We have the ability to manually score, and will be providing in-game updates prior to the end of the 1st half until this issue is resolved. After the end of half stats are in however, there will not be an update until the game is over for scoring accuracy reasons.

Now for the good news. A bunch of people have asked for progressive scoring of our Daily Fantasy Basketball leagues like we offer with Daily Fantasy Baseball and Weekly Fantasy Football. This year, for the first time a progressive feed is available through TSN, and we are looking to get that up and running in the next few days. We have no experience with the new NBA feed, and have also been cautioned that it may not be as accurate as our progressive NFL and MLB feeds are. Keep in mind that in-game scoring is informational only. We toss the progressive scoring out and replace it with the final official box scores which resolves any errors in the in-game scoring. Progressive scoring is a nice step up vs. EOQ scoring, so hopefully all will go well, and we will get that rolled out in the next few days.

Daily Fantasy Basketball - Basic Strategy

I got a little tired of just using this space to provide basic updates about FSL, so we will try to get some strategy and other important notes and topics up here more often. To start, I want to cover some very basic strategy concerns for Daily Fantasy Basketball Contests. I will break down the strategy based on the draft method for the contest, and will keep things as generic as possible.

Ranking Cap Contests

These are as tough as they get. The ranking cap for each player is set as the average fantasy points scored per game for that player. If you blindly selected a fantasy team using all of a 200pt cap, your team would on average score 200 fantasy points that day. To win these contests you need to pick a team that will score above average (above 200pts). Now to get above 200pts, the obvious thing to do is pick the biggest fantasy point scorers like Lebron James, and Kobe Bryant who average 40+ fantasy points per game and put them on your team. Not so fast. You want to pick players who you think will score more than their rank cap value in that day's game. You should only take Lebron or Kobe if you think they will put up more points than their cap value. Since there cap value is high, they need to put up a bunch of points just for you to "break even" on them. So the big question is how do you figure out who will out score their fantasy cap value in a given game. There are several things to look for here.

1) The Matchup
What team your player is playing, and how well the opponent defends fantasy points is huge. Also home field advantage is important. You should try to select players who are up against poor defenses, and are playing at home when possible.

2) The Streak
Players who are hot tend to stay hot, and those that are cold tend to stay cold with all else being equal. Try to select players that have been playing well over the last few weeks to a month. Select players that have been consistently beating their rank cap value over the last several games, and plan on them continuing to do so.

3) The Playing Time
Players who were bench warmers for most of the season, but now are starters or have their minutes way-up are solid selections. Their average fantasy points per game will be depressed by the lack of playing time earlier in the season, making it easier for them to exceed their cap value now.

4) The Cap Value
Players who have large cap values are more risky than players with small cap values. The downside is much larger. Let’s say you picked up somebody with a value of 30 pts, and for some reason they do not play, or have a very bad game. You could end up 30 pts below their average score. Now the same situation for a player with a value of 12 pts. If they do not play, you are only 12 pts shy of the average total. Players with small cap values have more upside potential than downside risk. Players with high cap values have more downside risk than upside potential.

5) The Injuries
Make sure your player is in good health prior to drafting. Injuries are noted in the draft screen. Do not draft questionable players, and be careful when selecting probable players. Keep in mind that the average points scored was done when the player was healthy in most cases.

Salary Cap Contests

For this draft version, you pay the actual cash salary for the player for that game. Since the NBA salary structure greatly favors the veterans you end up with a bunch of overpriced veterans and under priced rookies with this cap method. In general, you will want to try to figure out who the top fantasy scorers will be that day regardless of the cap value. Put the top 2-3 scorers on your team. This may cost a bunch, but don’t worry. There will be some obvious under priced players in the pool. Chris Paul, Kevin Martin, and many others young players are way under priced. You will need to put 3-4 of the obviously under priced players on your team. After putting the projected high scorers, and the vastly under priced players on your team, you just find the best value you can get for the last position or two you need to fill. These contest will not be decided by the obviously under priced players that everyone will have. They will be decided by who can better map out the top scorers that day, and by who can plug in the last one or two spots on the roster the best.

No Cap Contests

No Cap contests allow you to draft any team that you want without any cap restrictions. Players are sorted in the pool by their ranking cap values. The players most likely to score the most points on average are listed at the top. In general, you will want to pick your fantasy team from the top of the draft pool. Your edge is found when you can identify players farther down on the list that will outscore the top players. Since most will be picking from near the top of the list, if you can find the one or two players down further who will score more you can get an edge. Also you pretty much have to pick the top fantasy scorers like Lebron or Kobe. Even if they are facing an unfavorable match-up, it is still likely they will outscore the others on the list.