Draftpot is a new daily fantasy sports site that approaches the games with a slightly different feel to it. Instead of the salary cap format that is so popular on many other sites, they have two different options for you to choose from. These include Fan Mode and GM Mode, both of which give you a lot more freedom when you draft your teams.
What is DraftPot
Draftpot is a new site with a new way to play daily fantasy sports. They have a huge selection of sports to choose from including NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, PGA, NASCAR, and League of Legends. It is a different way of playing fantasy sports, and that means that the strategies and methods for drafting your teams will need to be different here if you are going to be successful. Variety is a good thing, though, and if you are able to master the strategies needed at this site, you will find that you can win a lot of money quickly.
The site is very new, launched at the beginning of September, 2015. They’ve already received a lot of press, and were even featured in a Forbes article. They are still much smaller than the bigger daily fantasy sites, but they’re catching up. The good news is that they are bringing competition and diversity into the daily fantasy sports world, and this is always a good thing because it gives players more choices and a better ability to customize their experience to their strengths.
How to Play
Fan Mode gives you the most amount of freedom as you draft your team. With this, you are given a roster with a list of positions to fill and you fill them. There are no salaries associated with the athletes, so you could conceivably choose a team of all All Stars if you want. In fact, that’s the big appeal of this site. You have zero restrictions other than a need to fill up all of the vacant slots on your team. If you are drafting a fantasy football team, you can choose the top ranking players for each slot, regardless of how good they are or how expensive they might be at a traditional daily fantasy football site.
In GM Mode, you will find that things operate a lot more closely to a salary cap league. Instead of a dollar amount though, players are given a DPPG number (Draftpot Points Per Game) and you will be asked to stay within a certain limit. This is actually much closer to how a salary cap league should theoretically work as it takes out factors like what the crowds are doing and evaluates players based solely upon what they’ve done over the past several games instead. If a top player has had a bad start to their season, for example, you can grab that player for a very low DPPG number because they will not have accumulated many fantasy points this year. Many leagues will inflate the numbers of top players because they know that they will still be drafted even if they’ve played poorly. This method accounts for that and evaluates players based solely upon what they’ve done on the field. It ends up being that you will need to have a similar strategy as in a salary cap league, only the players will have more accurate value reflections
Some of the Strengths
This site has a ton of potential, especially if you dislike the variance that you will inevitably find at the bigger sites. You have no restrictions here if you choose to go with Fan Mode, which is a perfect opportunity for you to draft a dream team and not worry about a salary cap. The flip side of this is that many of the people that will be using this site will not know how to correctly draft a team within this style and if you form a superior strategy, the newness of the site presents a great opportunity to clean up against the competition.
Also, they do have a very similar scoring structure when it comes to points as FanDuel does for the major sports. If you are able to use that site with success, the transition to Draftpot will be very simple. They also currently have a larger selection of sports to choose from than FanDuel currently does, which gives them a big advantage for the fan that enjoys more than just a couple sports.
Draftpot has a few nice perks that you won’t find at other fantasy sites. For example, most sites will cap their bonuses at $250. At Draftpot, the max bonus you can earn is 100 percent, up to $1,000. That’s four times what you will find in other places.
There are some Weaknesses
The biggest weakness of the site is the fact that the site is still pretty new. At the time of this review, Draftpot had only been up and running for just over a month. The site is legitimate and has a decent user base right now, but it is still far too early to tell if they will be around five years from now. The site has a decent base, but they do not have the same numbers yet that the giants like FanDuel and DraftKings have. Jumping onto the site early does have benefits that outweigh this negative, though.
Another weakness is the fact that they do not cater to the high rollers as much as some other sites do. The biggest contest entry fee that they have is $110, as opposed to the multi-thousand dollar events that bigger sites have. For most people, this shouldn’t be a problem.
What we really think
And don’t worry about having a smaller selection of games from this site just because it has fewer users. There are tons of games and a lot of variety in what you can choose from. For a site that might not yet be able to compete with the biggest sites, Draftpot is already set to be one of the best daily fantasy sports sites despite this.
