This article describes how TapThatDraft’s player ordering helps with timing your draft picks.

At first glance, the ordering might seem jumbled sometimes — and this is because of anchoring to the opponent list by Referencing.

Learning 2 basic steps to use it can bring you a real edge in your draft.

Contents

• The first part explains how opponent draft order is factored in. (This also applies to the static Hold-My-BeerSheets.)

• The second part explains how roster-awareness gets integrated— to make TapThatDraft a responsive tool.

Background

When I first designed TapThatDraft, I focused on improving the calculations for player Value.

I made these corrections to typical VBD, because I knew it had weak spots:

• Not making positional ordering aligned with consensus, instead of the unintentional biases of projection-creators.

• Not accounting for varying risk levels of the 4 different fantasy positions.

• Not applying a more practical baseline— so it doesn’t undervalue starters, and so it doesn’t overvalue bench spots.

Making these fixes was the origin of TapThatDraft phase 1.

And it was really good for Auction prices!

The remaining problem?

There are bigger forces involved with Snake drafts.

So if you ignore these additional forces, then using the VBD output for Snake might actually mislead you:

• You might unknowingly reach too soon for your favorite players, before there’s a danger of losing them.

• You might fall behind on a positional “run” and miss a player you wanted.

This is why I designed:

ADP Referencing.

Instead of blindly falling to the whims of your opponents, ADP Referencing helps you to time your picks relative to your opponents.

• You get a “hybrid” list of players, meaning their vertical order tells you “When you should pick that player IF he became your best remaining player at that position”. This blended ordering is going to help you master the timing of picks.

• The positional columns show the ranks of your personal favorites. So you simply search for your best one in the column (e.g. “R5, R6, R7”).

This read-out may take some getting used to.

But it’s worth using it to find steals— and to avoid misses.

How the Set-up Works

The feature requires you to pick an opponents’ draft order.

Ask yourself, “what player list ordering best represents the order that my opponents will draft in?”

Your selected Reference list serves as the “anchor”.

From this “opponent ordering”, the list gets modified by adapting it to your preferences:

• Players get moved up or down according to your own rankings.

• Players are tweaked upward if there's forecasted risk in positional scarcity (upcoming value drop-offs).

The resulting player sequence can give you an intuitive feel for when to time your picks.

• Maybe the best way to describe the vertical order of each player is: “If all my other favorite players at the position are already taken, then THIS is the time in the draft when I should pick this remaining player”. This will maximize points during roster building.

Since this hybrid view partly represents your opponents’ priorities (not just yours), the key is to scan the positional column, to find your personal favorite players.

Simply look down the list, about 1 round ahead, and note which positional favorites are closer to the top of the list.

TapThatDraft Responsiveness: Priority %

During the live draft, you can get even more advantage by designing the timing of your picks to match roster needs.

This is what the Responsive features are for!

We want to capture factors like these:

1. If you already drafted a certain roster position— of filled the slots— then it’s less of a priority to get more players at that position.

2. If you know that teams already reached for upcoming players, then you can prioritize players with near-term positional depletion.

3. If you know that the next few teams to pick don’t need a QB anymore, then you can safely hold off at QB until your next pick.

4. If you know that the next few teams to pick all badly need a TE, then you can jump ahead for your TE before depletion.

All these considerations get factored into TapThatDraft— giving you a tailored positional recommendation, each time it becomes your turn.

The visual of player ordering (when it’s your turn) works like the above chapter “ADP Referencing”. Refer to the image at the very top, for an example.
The only difference is that, in the dynamic-responsive tool, now the players can be adjusted with more specific knowledge, as the draft progresses.
In particular, it knows in detail: (a) who’s remaining and (b) who’s likely to be taken, based on knowledge of the other rosters.

TL;DR You should used the “mixed” arrangement of player ordering to take advantage of timing your picks during the draft. And you should always find your best remaining players by their rank label, in the Position columns.

Improving the timing of picks brings a huge potential benefits.

I really hope you’ll all be able to take advantage of it!

/Subvertadown