Daily Site Review: Draftster

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our new Daily Content section in DLF. Daily leagues are growing in the fantasy community and we’ll cover them throughout the regular season. Remember, we have our own special private game for opening week on FanDuel. You can also get a DLF Premium account free for year (or your current subscription extended for a year) just by signing up with FanDuel and making an initial deposit. For more information on that special offer, click here.

Each edition of this series will highlight a different daily fantasy football site. Towards the end of the season, we will do more of a comparative analysis between the sites, giving a comprehensive overview of the daily fantasy football landscape.   For starters, though, we will focus on each highlighted site individually and give general impressions in order to give the reader an idea of exactly what the site has to offer.

Website and URL: Draftster, www.draftster.com

First Impressions: The site gave me a favorable first impression based on its overall clean design and lack of obnoxious ads. The registration and login functions are easy to locate and operate. While logged in, the top banner displays three shortcuts: “Contests” takes the user to all active and available competitions; “Lineups” takes the user to their custom created teams for the week; “Entries” takes the user to a list of pending, in-progress, and past competitions.

The top banner also displays account information, including personal balance, with an easy-to-use dropdown menu.   Deposit options are credit card and PayPal at varying levels. It doesn’t appear as if there are any sign-up bonuses available at this time, something I find a little peculiar given the seemingly nascent existence of the site.

Mobile Options: I couldn’t find a mobile application in the Google Play store or in the iTunes app store.   However, the mobile site is just as clean and easy to navigate as the desktop site, a very important characteristic in my book. 

Types of Contests: Draftster offers guaranteed prize contests and free rolls, both industry standards. Guaranteed prize contests have a set payout amount which gets awarded regardless of whether or not the competition fills up. In general, the more guaranteed contests a site has, the better. Free rolls are free contests to enter and the winner(s) is usually rewarded with tickets into future contests, site specific prizes, cash, or some combination thereof.

Draftster currently offers three main types of competitions:

1. 50/50 – These contests have a set buy-in ($1 – $100 in this case) and a cap of participants (between six and 40 in this case).   In this scenario, the contestants finishing in the top half of their competition split the pot, thereby nearly doubling their entry fee.
2. Top 3 – This type of contest also has a set buy-in ($1 – $50) and set number of participants (10). The top three finishers of each group get paid out: 45% of the pot for first place, 30% for second and 15% for third.
3. Winner Takes All (WTA) – This format is pretty self explanatory, as the winner takes the pot. The participants are limited (between two and six) and the buy-ins vary ($1 – $200).

[inlinead]Overall, these are three very good competitions to give the player a variety of ways in which to test their skill. There is also a practice competition (“NFL Practice League”) I would recommend to anyone new to daily fantasy football in order to become accustomed to both the site and the hobby in general. The site fees (aka “the juice”) for each contest is no more than 10%, not steep enough to prevent me from playing altogether. I prefer to see as close to 100% of the buy-in get paid out to the winner(s) as possible but given the lack of obnoxious advertisements, Draftster’s current ratio is palatable.

Lineup Format: QB-RB-RB-WR-WR-FLEX-TE-K-DEF

This is a standard fantasy football format, one with which everyone should be familiar.   It’s a solid format for daily contests but possibly starting to become a bit antiquated as some sites are moving to a format which excludes the kicker, something I personally prefer.   The flex spot allows the players express a bit of creativity in their lineup composition, thereby increasing scoring variation and introducing additional strategy to the contest. As I always say, “more strategy equals more better.”

Scoring Format: Standard PPR, no positional premiums. Quarterbacks earn a point per 25 passing yards, four points per touchdown pass, one negative point per interception, and a bonus three points for eclipsing the 300 passing yard threshold.   This is generally a well-balanced format for scoring but it basically makes the flex spot a RB3/WR3 as you would very rarely want to insert a tight end there.

Creating Lineups: Every team has a $50,000 budget (standard) in order to create a nine-player lineup.   I found the player prices to be on the lean side as creating a lineup with several studs was easy to do. The positive side is all daily teams will be high scoring because there is no real reason to insert a deep sleeper into a lineup. It’s also beginner friendly and allows everyone to have a good shot at success in their weekly contests. There were some lesser-known players missing from the player pool when I was creating my own lineups but that’s not abnormal for a Week 1 contest which usually is created before NFL rosters are finalized.

Have you used Draftster yet? If so, what were your impressions? What other sites would you like to see featured in this series? Let us know below in the comments or on Twitter @jefeberan.

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