Auction Drafts

Part III - Texas Draft’em

You know what I like about restaurants? You can learn a lot, watching things eat.

Costello - The Departed

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The American Dream

There’s nothing more American than an Auction Draft. In an auction, you can draft whoever you want and construct however you want. You want your favorite player? Great, you can have him. You don’t feel like drafting for a while? Fuck it, go get sauced at the pub. That’s the problem with Snake Drafts. In a traditional draft, everything is given to you in an orderly fashion. In an Auction, no one gives it to you. You have to take it. This style of drafting rewards preparation, experience, and strategy in a way Snake Drafts never come close to. Similar to poker, the main focus of the Auction is reading and manipulating your opponent, making it the World Series of Drafting. The only downside is managing a budget, which can be problematic for someone who never looks at price tags. But don’t worry, you don’t need an Accounting degree from Cambridge to draft a team. By the end of this article, you’ll understand the Cardinal Rules of drafting and hopefully wake up to see what you’ve been missing with Auctions.

The First Cardinal Rule

The first cardinal rule of auction drafts is preparation. Having your rankings, plans for roster construction, and budgets ahead of time will inform you if the player up for bid is worth chasing or folding on. It begins with setting a budget. 

How To Set A Budget

Set your budget based on WoRP. With WoRP, you’ll know the hierarchy of different positions to target. With this in mind, set a budget of 23-21% for the highest tier of players at the most valuable position, 19-17% for the top players at the 2nd most valuable position, 16-14% for the best tier at the 3rd best position, and 13-11% for the best players at the least consequential position. From there, set a lower budget for the subsequent tiers at each position.

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I hate to break it to ya, but you can’t afford multiple Tier 1 players. Don’t be a freakin’ idiot and spend 23% for Lamar Jackson, 19% for Ja’Marr Chase, and have 42% of your funds allocated to only two players. The rest of your roster will be trash.

The First Chip To Fall

After you set your tiers and budgets, the most important thing to pay attention to is the Market Defining Players. Once a player like Josh Allen, Justin Jefferson, Bijan Robinson, Brock Bowers, or any of the other elite players in their tiers is claimed, their price has set the market. Once this happens, you have to decide if you’re comfortable with the market price, or if you would rather wait to operate at a possible cheaper price in a lower tier. 

Going Over Budget

If the price exceeds your Max Bid allocation, Stay Away! Any time you decide to bid on a player that is ABOVE your budget, you HAVE to lower your budget for another position accordingly. So if you bid 3% more than what you had budgeted at QB to land Jayden Daniels, you have to subtract 3% from another position. Any time you go over budget, you are sacrificing one tier of players for every 2-3% you go over budget.

The inverse is true as well. Claiming a player at a cheaper price gives you the flexibility to outbid other managers on critical players or claim multiple players in higher tiers. 

The Second Cardinal Rule

The second cardinal rule is tracking the other managers. With most of your hard work completed before the auction begins, you are freed up to focus on managing your opponents.

Reading Your Opponents

You can read another manager’s cards with their bids, how much funds they have left, the player pool available, and what they have left to fill on their roster. It’s for this reason I advocate for slow auctions. You only have time to focus on sticking to your budget in fast auctions. Anticipating the other managers’ next move and disrupting their plans is why Auction is 10 times more satisfying than a standard draft.

The Third Cardinal Rule

The overall goal of an auction draft is to deplete your opponent's funds on players that you DON’T want so that you can outspend the other managers on the players you DO want. That is why the third cardinal rule, and the most fun, is sabotage. 

The First Moves

To get the ball rolling, the elite players are often the first ones up for bid for two reasons: A) They define the market price for their position. B) They also exhaust the most significant chunk of funds from managers. The less money a manager has, the less influence and power they have on the draft. If you love Puka Nacua and BTJ, nominate players like Chase, Jefferson, Lamb, ARSB, and Nabers first.  This forces the hands of the other managers to deplete large sums of auction dollars for players you care less about. 

The Biggest Tell

If a manager is constantly the highest bidder on a player, chances are they want that player. Armed with this assumption, it’s critical not to allow other managers to get away with winning a key player below market price. This is known as a “steal.” If Josh Allen is up for bid, and he’s going for less than a previous won bid of Lamar Jackson, it's pivotal that you drive up the price to be level with Lamar’s if you're confident the other manager will continue to call your bid. If they call your bluff, your consolation is Josh Allen at market price. The best advantage is knowing the other manager LOVES the player up for bid and depleting their piggy bank further by pushing them past their comfort zone. 

The Fourth Cardinal Rule

My fourth cardinal rule is to remain in the top two of funds throughout the draft. With this spending power, you can be involved and influence the entire Auction. If you’re active throughout the draft and bid on most players, including players you don’t want, other managers will have difficulty reading your intentions. To help mask your plans, I recommend waiting until the initial flurry of bids on a particular player dies down before casting your first bid. Force it to become a 2-3 horse race between you and the other manager(s), driving the price up to the market for that tier and perhaps even past it if you’re bold. 

With spending power, you can force the hands of others, land the players you want, and achieve the critical depth for your roster. Speaking from experience, you do not want to be the team with 3 studs and 27 duds.

The Fifth Cardinal Rule

The final cardinal rule is patience. In the typical auction draft, four to six of the top players at each position go off the board, along with 75% of the funds from half of the managers. With so many managers now having to watch the Auction from the sideline, there’s less competition for the players still left. With less competition, there’s a higher likelihood for “steals” the longer a draft goes on. There’s nothing more gut-wrenching than seeing a top player sneak their way to the end of the auction and be won by another manager at a fraction of the market cost. 

But keep in mind, the longer a draft goes on, the more scarce certain positions become. This is especially important in SuperFlex leagues. You don’t want to be the manager who was too stingy to bid on any Tier 1 or 2 QB, and instead you pay Tier 1 prices for a Tier 4 or 5 QB out of desperation before the position dried up. You can avoid this by staying involved in as many bids throughout the draft. It’s better to be stuck with a higher tier player at market price that you don’t love than stuck with a bottom tiered player you hate. Auctions are won by being frugal and selective, not cheap and hesitant.

No More Pencils, No More Books

In life, there are always the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots have been told “draft him,” “sell him,” “buy this,” or “subscribe to that.” If you go for that sort of thing, I don't know what to do for you. The haves make their own way. No one gives it to you. You have to take it. Non Serviam. When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you. You don’t have to be a product of your environment. Make your environment a product of you.

The Dossier

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