We have opened fantasy league registration for the MLB playoffs!  Get your postseason leagues started today and invite your friends to join.  Drafts will begin on September 30th.

In addition to updating our user interface to be compatible with all devices, we have added a number of new features this summer.  Here's the run down.

• Limiting the # of Players from Each Team -  Commissioners can now limit the number of players from each playoff team. This prevents managers from "loading up" or going all in on one or two particular teams.
• Requiring 1 for 1 Free Agency Transactions - This configuration option requires that free agent player swaps are one for one. This is particularly useful if you are in a Salary Cap league and you want to prevent players from dropping 2 less expensive players to pick up 1 more expensive player.
• Longer Preservation of Previous Year's Leagues - We will now keep league history around for 2 years. You can study the prior year's rosters and player performance to gain a leg up on your competition.
• Improved Usability for Pick One Daily Leagues - We have a special...

The most common draft order format in fantasy leagues is the Snake (or Serpentine) draft order.   The draft 'snakes' through the number of managers. The order for a twelve manager league would be 1-12 in the first round, then 12-1 in the second round, then 1-12 in the third round and so on. In a regular season draft, this approach is reasonable, but one may want to consider other approaches for the postseason. The reason for reconsidering your draft order configuration is that the scoring is highly leveraged towards the players that go multiple rounds. Players on teams that make the NBA and NHL championship games can often play 3x or 4x the number of games as other players. For some sports like the NBA playoffs, this is exacerbated by the fact that superstars dominate the scoring in the postseason. In one particular league I was in last year, Lebron James and Steph Curry (the overall #1 and #2 total fantasy points scorers) scored almost twice as many points as the 6th...

After a few requests to accommodate a format similar to the popular 'Drive to the Finals' NBA Playoffs fantasy game, we've added a new league format named 'Pick One Daily' (currently for NBA, NHL, and MLB leagues only).  Main concepts:

• There is no draft.
• Scoring options are configurable (i.e. points, rebounds, assists).
• Commissioners should activate the league only after all managers have joined. 
• Teams consist of only one player.  Note: Bench slots can be added to allow for lineup setting for days in advance.
• Once the league is activated, managers need to add one player to their team on each game day via free agency.
• Players can only be used once.  Once used, that player must be replaced with another one to generate additional scoring.

We've been running playoff drafts for the NHL postseason for a number of years. There's one constant piece of advice that we can offer and that is to draft a goalie (or team goalie) from a team that has a potential to make a deep run towards the Stanley Cup.  Unlike the plethora of forwards and defensemen, goalies are a limited resource.  There are 16 teams in the NHL playoffs and usually one primary goalie per team. After the first round, the number of goalies is cut in half, and so on, and so on until you reach the two remaining during the Stanley Cup finals round.

Consider the results of a playoff fantasy league with the following scoring settings for Goalies.

This particular league used "Team Goalies" and to no surprise the top two scorers were the goalies from the Chicago Blackhawks (66.00) and the...

The team at Fantasy Postseason has added a new method of creating pre-draft player rankings via the Playoff Projections Tool. Through this tool, you can enter the # of games that you expect a given team to play, and the tool will do the rest. It will generate new projections based upon your input, and give you the option of saving these new rankings.  You can then make further specific adjustments via the Pre-Draft Rankings page.

Although we have tried to make league setup as simple as possible, there are still some common pitfalls that hang up league commissioners as they set up their postseason fantasy leagues. Here are the most common mistakes that we see.

1. Failure to activate Off-line leagues. Commissioners must 'activate' leagues that are using offline drafts (manually loading all the players) before scoring can start to accumulate. Leagues do not 'auto-activate' for offline draft leagues because many commissioners are often still filling out rosters a day or two after the playoffs start. League activation occurs under the league Admin menu, and should occur after rosters have been loaded. Note that this does not apply to Live draft - as they auto-activate and will automatically start to score after the draft completes.


2. Setting Per-Round Multipliers to Zero. A Per-Round multiplier is a feature that is specific to postseason fantasy pools, and consequently sometimes commissioners do...

As you plan for your Fantasy Postseason NFL draft, you should consider the historical advantages for teams that play at home during the playoffs.

Here are the relevant numbers to ponder based on games played over the last 10 years:

Regular Season Home Winning %: 57
Wild card Round Home Winning %: 57
Divisional Round Home Winning %: 60
Conference Championship Round Home Winning %: 70

As you can see, there's nothing special about the first or second round in terms of being different from the regular season. The big difference comes into play during the Conference Championship round where the home team wins 7 out of 10 contests.

Success in postseason fantasy comes with choosing high performing players on teams that advance deep into the playoffs. A key component in determining which teams are going to advance is home field advantage, or is it?  The statistics say that postseason home field advantage varies tremendously from sport to sport.  Per Bleacher Report, NBA playoff home teams win roughly 70% of their series, NFL and NHL playoff teams win about 60% of their series/games, and MLB playoff teams win just 50% of their series.

Keep this in mind as you figure out which players to draft in your upcoming MLB postseason fantasy draft.

References:

Home Field in the World Series Ain't So Great (Fox)

Winning Series home-field advantage is important (MLB)

Is Home-Field Advantage as Important in Baseball as Other Major League Sports? (B/R)

Thanks to Phil Thompson at the Chicago Tribune for showcasing us this morning in two separate articles regarding our NCAA tournament fantasy offering:

A New Game in Town: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-fantasy-ncaa-tournament-03-15-20150314-story.html

Beyond the Brackets: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/ct-beyond-brackets-ncaa-spt-0315-20150314-story.html

One of the key features at Fantasy Postseason, is our Projected Points value for each player. At the end of the regular season, we flag the playoff teams and assign a seed to each:

MLB Playoffs: #1 - #4 (AL/NL)
NFL Playoffs: #1 - #6 (AFC/NFC)
NBA Playoffs: #1 - #8 (Eastern/Western)
NHL Playoffs: #1 - #8 (Eastern/Western)

We then assign a total projected number of games per team (per round and by sport). This value is then applied against each player's regular season statistics to derive a ranking of the projected leading scorers for the playoffs. Projections are customized by league (based on the values assigned to each scoring category).

If you've come to this site and don't know where to begin, then this short introduction to fantasy gaming is just for you.

In Fantasy Sports, you have the opportunity to become a team manager. You call the shots by building a team of players that compete against other teams in a Fantasy League.

Fantasy Leagues are formed by a commissioner, who is often the person in your group of friends that is either the most knowledgeable or passionate about fantasy sports. The commissioner's main tasks are inviting friends to the league, and setting up the league's scoring settings and draft date.

Players are chosen in the Fantasy League through a draft, which is either live, automated, or conducted off-line. In a live draft, team managers can select players in real time. In an automated draft, a computer algorithm makes the selections for you based upon pre-determined player ranking preferences. In an off-line draft, the league's commissioner uploads draft results and...

Fantasy sports are fantastic! The drafting of players is fun, the team management is fun, and the trash talk that results from beating your buddies is fun. For a sports fanatic, it’s almost too good to be true. However, when the regular season ends there’s often a major void in the life of the fantasy owner, as they patiently wait for the next sport season to start.

At Fantasy Postseason, we fill the void that exists between the seasons with more fantasy competition. We run short games that involve selecting players from playoff or postseason teams. The time commitment is low as the postseason for most sports is only a few weeks. As players advance, a manager accumulates more points; the manager with the most points at the end wins.

It’s a very simple concept that a few of us have been doing for years. Draft the best players, and simply root them on throughout the postseason. The winner usually is the one who picked the best players on the teams that advanced...

The main goal of the postseason draft is simple - grab the best players on the teams that advance the furthest in the playoffs. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, so let's break it down a little further.

Identifying the Best Players

Identifying the best players to draft is dependent upon your Fantasy League's settings. Once you have logged onto FantasyPostseason.com, go to your league's home page and select 'View League Settings'. Review this page very carefully, especially the following:

• Will your league be conducting a Live Draft or an Auto-Draft? In a 'Live' draft, each manager selects players in real-time against others. In an 'Auto-Draft', our system automatically selects players for each manager. These selections are vital in many ways, as they will also become your default picks in a 'Live' draft (should you either fail to appear, or fail to make a selection in time).


• Will your league be conducting a Snake Draft or a...

Welcome to Fantasy Postseason - your postseason home for Fantasy Sports!

This site is a labor of love by our members; all of whom are die-hard sports fans. We've been involved in fantasy sports for years, especially during the postseason (our favorite time of year). We started with sticky notes in the 80s, and then progressed to more and more advanced spreadsheets throughout the 90s and 00s.

Unfortunately, no matter how advanced those spreadsheets became, the task was still extremely daunting (manually pulling down all the player stats, normalizing them, conducting drafts, tracking results, etc). The task was made all the more difficult by the short time we all had to act; for the baseball playoffs, this window could be as short as two days!

This year we decided that the time had finally come to automate this entire process step by step. That's right, every player, every team, every stat, every category, every projection! It has all been automated at...