Summary / TL;DR

• For snake drafts, typical “Value-over-baseline” metrics alone are deficient for addressing the effect that positional scarcity has on maximizing points.

• To address the risks of missed opportunity in snake drafts, I employ “Snake Draft Value”: an improved single metric for fantasy draft cheat sheets.

• This Snake Value helps to address Positional Scarcity, by combining VBD Value-over-baseline with a variation of VONA.

Why do we need to calculate a Snake Draft Value?

A useful “cheat sheet” is a static list that guides you how to prioritize players, before the draft begins. Even though situations will change as the draft progresses, a well-prepared sheet can still ease your strategy execution.

However, for snake drafts, this advanced planning is trickier than most people realize. Typical cheat sheets assume that the draft has certain freedoms of choice— freedoms which are actually only applicable to auction formats (See my Auction VBD article):

In other words, the price of your pick is the cost of giving up your other options.

Snake Draft Prioritization: Examining Tradeoffs

In a snake draft, you get a limited number chances, and they’re spaced out in sequence. That means, at each round, you need to consider your tradeoff of selecting a certain position now versus getting a weaker player at that position later. This dilemma arises from an immediate, near-term tradeoff positional scarcity, which effectively distorts your optimal valuation of players.

The following example shows how you could be guided to the least optimal decision by using Value-over-baseline alone:

The upshot: It’s possible that you can still end up with a below-average team, even when you use your pick on the player with best value-over-baseline. So unlike the case of auction drafts, the VBD metrics (VORP, BEER, or VOLS) don’t endow snake drafts with a “minimax” solution— which is an optimum that guarantees at least an average roster or better.

Applying VONA (Value Over Next Available)

To address the risk of losing positional value in a snake draft, we need additional math. The most important consideration is the Opportunity Cost at each turn. This is the essence of “VONA” (Value Over Next Available), a decades-old idea advising you to select whichever position has the biggest drop-off in value.

For our Snake Draft Value, we want to apply a variation of VONA:

If done ideally, then even if your opponents are looking at your cheat sheet, they won’t find any obvious way to maliciously weaken your team below average.

More Details (for the Curious)

1. At each pick, we examine 1 round ahead for each position. Approximation: 1 round = N turns ahead = # teams in league.

2. To better estimate “value remaining” at the next turn, the points of remaining players is smoothened for each position.

   • Smoothening is needed to account for uncertainty in league draft behavior— and to help the ordering converge.

   • We assume the range of smoothening starts from ±2 turns early in the draft list, and the range grows up to ±12 turns.

3. To avoid jumpiness, a fraction of the opportunity cost gets added to the player’s original Value-over-baseline.

4. Note that the usual VBD Value-over-baseline is essentially “cumulative future VONA” of all remaining valued players. In this sense, we can be sure that we’re not disregarding all future rounds.

5. The final displayed Snake Value gets scaled down to the original Value-over-baseline. So you can compare which players got upgraded / downgraded.

Bonus Section — What happened to Positional Scarcity as a “%”?

Those of you familiar with other cheat sheets might wonder what happened to the percentage metric, labeled “PS%”. It appears in my Auction draft sheets, so why not for Snake drafts?

Actually, the Snake Value concept emerged from my attempts to make PS% more actionable. As a result, Snake Value addresses positional scarcity (or “positional availability”) in a much more effective way than PS%:

1. We are directly addressing the near-term tradeoffs of scarcity for each position,

2. Compared to PS%, we are more explicitly making use of the point “drop-offs”— the slope of PS loss at each turn.

3. We are using PS in fantasy point units, which improves our points optimization.

If you’re still wondering how PS% is factored in, then (in a hand-wavy way) it now looks something like this:

It’s necessary to multiply by total positional value, to ensure we’re optimizing for points.

Keep in mind: as I stated for auction drafts, PS% is more for a goal of roster balancing— and not for points-optimizing. With the above procedure, we’re actually tackling both problems at once.

How to use Snake Draft Value

The result of the above procedure is a single metric that’s better for guaranteeing a minimum value in Snake Drafts. Here’s how you should use it:

• It’s easy: Just refer to the Snake Draft Value (and the state of your growing roster). The list is always ordered by this value because it’s superior.

• You can compare it easily to the “Val” column, which shows the original value-over-baseline. You can easily tell whether the Snake Draft gives the player a boost in priority or a downgrade.

• The Snake Value ordering will remain valid even as your league-mates select different positions appearing lower in the sheet. Exception: when players are taken out of order within a given position, then you need to navigate by your own judgement.

I hope you all will find this new calculation useful. It’s not perfect, but it should enhance your strategy and process of tackling snake drafts. And it provides some explanation for why some players deserve a boost in consideration, if you’re not using auction drafting.

Good luck!

/Subvertadown