Overview

Auction drafts are the purist way to conduct a fantasy draft. Instead of picking players based on a preset draft order, fantasy managers nominate players and place bids giving every manager access to every player. This freedom in auction drafts versus snake drafts requires managers to utilize slightly different strategies to maximize success. Auction drafts are objectively more complex than snake drafts, which is driven by the number of decisions an auction draft requires relative to snake drafts. In a snake draft, a drafter is simply required to make about 15 decisions in total as one selection in each round is made until your entire roster is completed. Auction drafts on the other hand require thousands of decisions as a drafter must not only determine the players they aim to select, but they must also consider the price they are willing to pay for each of those players and subsequent opportunity cost each selection enacts on their ability to acquire future players throughout the draft. By bidding on 150+ players through the draft at various price points a drafter is making thousands of decisions equaling the total budget allocated across the league, typically between 2000-2400 dollars/decisions. Due to the complex nature of auction drafts, there are several additional factors and strategies that must be considered and deployed to dominate one’s league mates. I will first discuss some of the main reasons that auctions drafts provide additional opportunities for drafters, then I will give details on the strategies that were most effective in 2023. I then provide some strategies that will work well this year based on the suggested auction prices I’ve been seeing across platforms and will conclude with some “Rules of thumb” to give you a leg up on your league mates as you head into drafts.

Key Differences between Auction and Snake Drafts

Roster Construction: In an auction league the general structure of your team can vary drastically and it is extremely important to be cognizant of this. In snake drafts, the talent distributions across teams will always be balanced as every drafter receives a pick in each round. In auction drafts, these drafting constraints are completely lifted, and roster constructions can differ significantly. It would not be uncommon for one drafter to have three top-10 Players at the expense of depth (Commonly known as Studs and Duds) and another drafter to have no players in the Top-20, but 8-10 players in the Top-60 (Commonly referred to as a depth/flexibility approach). Different people prefer different strategies, but it is important to consider each within reason and note that some strategies are historically dominant to other strategies when it comes to winning your leagues.

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