TapThatDraft: Easy Starter Guide | Quick Steps to Get Your "Hold-My-BeerSheets"

TapThatDraft is a serious tool to generate “Lite”-appearing cheat sheets..
It’s designed for easy “Grab-’N’-Go” rankings, driven by trustworthy math that’s hidden in the background.

You only need to follow a few basic steps— It should be simple to use and get printable Hold-My-Beer-Sheets.

The Least You Need to Input: (1) Draft Type and (2) Number of teams

Before you click “Save and Enter” to get your rankings, the most critical step is to make sure you’ve chosen:

  1. whether you’re in a Snake draft or Auction draft, and

  2. input the correct number of teams in your league.

For most people, these 2 steps are the bare minimum requirement to get useful sheets.
(That’s IF your roster positions are “normal” and your league settings are “normal”. I’ll come back to these later.)

Basically, you’re done!

Printing

You can use the rankings list on the screen. Or, you can find your sheet for print-out, by scrolling to the bottom of the rankings:

Personally, I like the “Single List” view for Snake drafts, and sometimes I prefer the “By Position” view for auctions.

For colorized or shaded print-outs, make sure you have “Background” enabled in your printer settings.

Adjust Roster Spots (if they’re any different from “Default”).

In the previous step, inputting the #teams in your league actually triggers the tool to calculate ranking adjustments.
That’s because it changes the supply-demand balance.

And— as might be obvious— demand (player positional demand) is also significantly affected by different roster Starting Positions.

For example, some leagues have 2QBs. Some have 3 or 4 WRs. Some have an extra FLEX spot.

Any roster variation is critical for correctly ordering players in your sheet. (And usually it’s way more critical than scoring settings are.)

Simply choose the correct number, and the tool will re-calculated. That’s a big part of what this tool is built to handle.

Optional: Change the “Reference” List (the draft ordering that you’re “drafting against”).

In my opinion, this one should be near the top of your priorities, if you’re in a Snake draft.

The “Reference” list feature was my own invention for TapThatDraft. I created it because I believe there’s a powerful advantage from combining value-based drafting with knowledge of opponent preferences.

The idea is that you tell the computer which player ordering your opponents are likely to follow. Then your outputs rankings list will adapt, to find “deals” for you.

Simply select the reference from the drop-down menu.

ADP (Average Draft Position) is the default option, which should work equally well for most people. So actually, you don’t need to change anything.
But if you’re drafting on ESPN (for example), then I recommend to use the ESPN Draft Room ordering, instead.

When you assign a reference for drafting-against, the algorithms calculate and re-shuffle. This affects the static print-out (Hold-My-BeerSheets) AND even more strongly affects the recommendations given during responsive / dynamic drafts.

Basically, the tool estimates a “look ahead” of player availability (and positional “cliffs”).

This helps you:

  • Prioritize scarce players, before they disappear

  • Wait on positions that are likely to linger a while, till your next turn.

Optional: Different Scoring Settings? Double-check, and adjust them.

My advice is that most people don’t need to fuss with the scoring settings much.

Having said, that, the tool is in fact built with this purpose in mind.

You might as well make sure you put the correct PPR settings (standard 0 PPR or 0.5 PPR or 1.0 PPR). The tool is built for this kind of tailoring.

The settings make a bigger difference for those leagues with more significant deviations to their scoring settings. If you’re one of those people, you probably already know about it, and you aren’t the person needing these instructions.

If you’re doing this, then you might as well save the URL to the rankings page, here:

The copied link will conveniently bring you back to your personalized rankings page— but with the latest updates for ADP and player rankings.

Optional: Give Your “Own Rankings” List

Most people don’t need to bother with this. By default, players are ranked (within their position) according to average Positional ECR.

But TapThatDraft enables some flexibility in tweaking the player ordering. If you want to put Lamar Jackson above Josh Allen, you can generate a custom list. Simply click on “My Rankings” (it’s on the output page, not the entry form page). Re-ordering players will affect their assumed draft VALUE, not just their rank.

The reasons for doing this depend on your draft type:

  • Auction drafts: It will tailor higher auction prices for the players you prefer.

  • Snake drafts: It will work together with the “Reference” (ADP) to find advantages, and give you a better recommendation.

Advanced Settings

Most people should only really need to input the above steps. In fact, as I stated, even the last couple sections can be safely ignored by people wanting a high-quality cheat sheet in a hurry.

But for the fantasy-nerds among us, there are several additional features you can consider:

  1. Positional “Boost” is a way to express that your league overvalues a certain position.

  2. Roster limits (“Max”) is only applicable if your league has a rule against taking too many at one position. This has the effect of devaluing the position.

  3. TE premium: You’ll know if this applies to you.

  4. QB streaming: This is a Subvertadown specialty, to indicate you think streaming QB is possible in your league, and you’re open to it.

  5. Baselines: I’ve written additional articles getting into “Baseline theory”, which underpins Value-Based-Drafting. Most people shouldn’t touch it.

The Basic Concept: Generating Player Rankings

The key function of TapThatDraft is to generate a player ordering (a “ranking list”) that’s most relevant for your league situation.

  • If your settings are close to “default”, you don’t need to do much: You can quickly get a high-quality cheat sheet.

  • If your settings are more complicated, then the tool will assist with doing the thinking for you— packaging all the information, converting it into tailored rankings.

    (This is one reason TapThatDraft can be so lean: Dozens of complicated columns aren’t necessary, because the tool processes all that information into one dimension: player VALUE.)

I hope the above makes everything simple, for the vast majority.

TapThatDraft— and Hold-My-BeerSheets— brings a lot of benefit by being customizable, to give you an edge. While there are many knobs and buttons, most people don’t need to do all that much to obtain that edge!

/Subvertadown