Dfs Draftboard
When daily fantasy sports contests lock on Draftboard, the action is just getting started. Our live section features dynamic animations that track your players’ progress in real time. No need to open another browser tab, we’ll show you every touchdown, alley oop, and home run as they happen. What is Draftboard? DraftKings and FanDuel have established themselves as the titans of the daily fantasy sports industry, but that has not stopped others from trying to get in on the action. Draftboard was founded by poker pro Phil Galfond, who said that he wanted to try and level the playing field for the average daily fantasy sports player. The most important aspect of making successful NBA fantasy basketball picks is the process. From top to bottom, members of the Awesemo team all have their own way of going about achieving NBA DFS success while utilizing the tools and projections from the site. Josh Engleman has created a new show to take you through. Draftboard is one of the newcomers to the daily fantasy sports space. The site was launched in the fall of 2017 by business partners Phil Galfond and Dan Quinn. Galfond is a professional poker player and the owner of training site Run It Once. Quinn is the CEO and the primary impetus behind the development of the new product.
[toc]New entrants to the daily fantasy sports space are hard to come by these days.
But that’s not stopping the co-founders of Draftboard — poker pro Phil Galfond and CEO Dan Quinn — from trying with a new offering that went live today.
The site is not likely to eat into the DFS market largely owned by DraftKings and FanDuel immediately. But it is a new and different offering in a space that has been whittled down to increasingly fewer operators.
The new platform is aimed at trying to create a more level playing field for the DFS end user, in how they enter contests.
“When you’re drafting a team and entering contests, the only opponents you should need to think about are the ones on the field,” Galfond said. “Fans have been up
against some pretty steep odds in this industry. We’re giving them another option.”
DraftBoard at a glance
Draftboard, as a DFS platform, doesn’t reinvent the wheel, offering salary-cap style games like you will see at DK, FD, Yahoo and FantasyDraft. But according to Quinn and Galfond, it makes two big improvements on that model:
- A unique entry system — called FairMatch (TM) — that tries to create a level playing field for both single and multi-entry users.
- The Draftboard Live section, which allows users to watch their entire team compete on one field through the use of dynamic player animations.
FairMatch
The mechanics work a bit differently at Draftboard, as you must first simply create a lineup that is eligible to be entered into a contest.
After you’ve done that, then you can start entering contests. You can pick the entry fee level and type of contest you want to enter. But the Draftboard “FairMatch” system also kicks in. It features:
- Separate low and high stakes lobbies that prevent users from playing $50 and $1 contests on the same day in a given sport.
- Contests formed using a random opponent selection process that eliminates the problem of experienced pros targeting new players.
- An innovative multi-entry system that matches first entries in a contest with other first entries, second entries with second entries, and third versus third.
“The way that the current sites in the industry were structured, it wasn’t particularly fair for new users coming in,” Quinn said in an interview with Legal Sports Report before launch. “So we saw potentially there was an opening for us there.”
Draftboard Live
The flashier component comes when contests are actually live. Here’s a look at the visualizations users will see while their contests are in action:
That obviously far outpaces the in-contest experience you’ll find at any other DFS operator. Generally you just get text and point updates. You can even add an opponent’s lineup to follow the players you’re rooting against.
The visualizations look more like what you’ll see in live game update apps
The birth of Draftboard
Quinn and Galfond work in the poker space already and have for some time, with a training site called Run It Once.
Quinn said they originally looked at creating a training site, but decided to get into the operator side instead. When they had a break from heavy-lifting development at Run It Once, Quinn said they decided to take the ideas above and put their energy into creating a DFS platform.
“We had these two ideas (FairMatch and Live) that are pretty different,” Quinn said. “But we think they’re kind of game-changers in terms of making a site that is providing a more level playing field, and one that’s way more engaging from the end user’s perspective.”
The result is a polished of a DFS platform, at least visually. How it works in practice, we’ll learn in the coming weeks.
Starting promotion at Draftboard
The site is handing out free money, quite literally, to start, via its “Dollar and a Dream” promotion. If you sign up for the site you get a dollar to play with; no deposit is required.
Users can then enter any contest they like and they are automatically a part of the Record Breaker promotion, which awards $10,000 anytime the current NFL record score is broken.
“And they might want to experience it sooner than later,” Galfond said of that promo. “The current Draftboard NFL record is zero. Someone’s winning $10,000 on Sunday.”
Week 13 Dfs Stacks
More details on Draftboard
For now, there are only contests for the NFL. NBA contests will go live when its season begins.
The jurisdictions the platform serves are fairly limited; find prohibited states in their terms of use. You can access it in Canada, but it is generally taking a legally conservative approach in the US, according to Quinn.
It is not yet in a number of states that have DFS regulations, as the site is either applying for licensure or waiting for the economics to make sense, Quinn told LSR. It also avoids all the states that almost all DFS operators do not serve.
You can also read our full Draftboard Review.
It’s becoming increasingly less common for new players to get in the game that is the booming daily fantasy sports industry, but Draftboard aims to do just that.
While the industry might be surging in terms of prominence and revenues, the daily fantasy sports (DFS) marketplace itself is not exactly flush with new blood – or more by way of competition – being dominated by the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel. Those two prominent operators, outside of a smattering of smaller DFS providers like Yahoo Sports and FantasyDraft, pretty much are the entire US daily fantasy industry. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, but the main one has to be the comparative lack of innovation: most operators from small to mid-size generally stick to the formula laid out by DraftKings and FanDuel.
Draftboard, founded by pro poker player Phil Galfond and company CEO Dan Quinn, looks to shake up that paradigm by launching their new product with some truly novel ideas, including two unique systems aimed at ensuring more parity for players and providing a more dynamic player experience. That said, Draftboard doesn’t pour out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to industry staples like the salary cap model first pioneered by FanDuel nearly 10 years ago, but there are some wrinkles – Draftboard calls them improvements – that make the new offering work a little bit better than its predecessors.
First up, there is Draftboard’s interesting take on entry into DFS contests, which the company runners have named FairMatch. This system works similarly to the usual process or selecting a lineup of athletes within the parameters of the salary cap, but things start to differ when it comes time to actually enter a contest in that Draftboard separates lobbies into high- and low-stakes varieties. This prevents players from entering $50 contests and $1 contests on the same day, especially when combined with FairMatch’s real ace in the hole, a random opponent selection program and a system that matches first-time entrants with other first-time entrants, second-timers with second-timers and so on.
The end result is that Draftboard DFS contests are as close to even as humanly (or in this case computer-ly) possible, and that’s a huge win for players of all skill levels. Newer players can gain more experience without risking as much money after a blowout loss to a veteran, and more experienced players can now be assured that they’re truly testing their skills against other seasoned DFS-ers.
The second big innovation Draftboard brings to the table is more stylistic than strictly practical, but it’s liable to have a big impact on first-time and casual players, to say nothing of the public perception of the “new kid on the block” in the DFS world. Draftboard Live eschews the established model of simple text and point updates used by practically everybody else in the segment in favor of something much more dynamic – animated visualizations of the on-field feats of your lineup’s chosen athletes updated in real time. These features are more than just nice touches, they may be the key to cracking into a DFS market effectually crowded out, not by a proliferation of competitors but merely by big names.
Dfs Draft Board
Disruption seems to be the idea all along. This emphasis on upsetting the standing order is further indicated by Draftboard’s launch promo: the “Dollar and Dream” promo is one of the boldest to come along in a long time, automatically entering new sign-ups into a Record Breaker promotion that awards players $10,000 anytime somebody breaks the NFL points record. That first payout is coming soon too, as company founder Galfond said in the Draftboard debut release that “the current Draftboard NFL record is zero. Someone is winning $10,000 on Sunday.”
Nba Optimizer
Draftboard isn’t without its disadvantages though. At this time, Draftboard is focusing strictly on the NFL when it comes to DFS contest offering at this point, though showrunners have supposedly got plans in place to bring NBA contests online by the time the pro basketball season starts in about month or so. Perhaps the biggest fault we can point out is that it isn’t as widely available as its competitors at this point, making residents from Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Lousiana, Montana, Nevada, New York, Texas, Vermont Virginia or Washington.
Dfs Draft Board Fantasy
However, these drawbacks aren’t sticking points, and may well turn out to be teething issues no worse than any other new entry into the DFS field. Draftboard has the raw materials and forward-thinking philosophy to make it as the next big thing in the daily fantasy landscape, and may well carve out for itself a sizeable market share in sports betting states, but only time will tell. At any rate, this new development certainly makes the ongoing discussion about legal daily fantasy sites more interesting to follow for sports fans and industry analysts alike.