Playing a Bad Hand in Best Ball Mania

The 1.12 sucks... so draft like it

One of the most consistent themes in my writing is a focus on situations in which optimal decision-making diverges from linear preference. In other words, when is the option that performs worse most of the time, still the optimal choice?

Generally, this happens in one of two circumstances. First is when the outputs of the given environment are not distributed in a linear or binary fashion. Best Ball tournaments of course fits into this category as we’ve discussed in almost every column I write: Being 3rd in your pod is no different than 12th in your pod, and are results are largely driven by how many teams (if any) advance to the finals and how those teams perform.

The other circumstance is when your odds of success begin to diverge meaningfully from the default odds of your given environment. For example, if you are playing in a winner take all poker game between six people, your default odds to win are 1 in 6 (or 16.7%). Those are the odds you walk to the table with if you all start with the same number of chips and are all of equal or unknowable skill. Naturally, one hour into the poker game those odds will shift. You may find yourself with a short stack, or begin to realize you’re out-matched in skill. Alternatively, you may find yourself with a dominant stack and/or a notable skill advantage.

Generally speaking, the worse your odds you get, the more variance you want to invite. In particular if you are at a skill disadvantage, you might be more inclined to take a major risk with cards you’re unsure will win the hand because you’re better off placing a larger portion of the deciding impact of the poker game on good fortune within a single event than on skill over a long series of hands.

[One example of the application of this type of analysis in the real world might be if you are a party with an estimated 34-percent chance of winning the presidency, and deciding whether or not to work toward a brokered convention… alas.]

Fortunately for all of you, this is not a post about the 2024 Presidential Election. It’s about drafting at the 1.12, in a year where it feels especially punitive to do so.

Why the 1.12 Is Uniquely Bad in 2024

First off, let’s just be clear that the 1.12 is *always* a bad draft slot. In Best Ball tournaments where we’re trying to prioritize not just the players we select, but the specific combinations of those players in consideration of team and game correlation, all while facing strict structural guide posts, you’re at an immediate disadvantage by waiting on 22 picks between each set of selections. It leaves you less able to adapt to or predict positional runs, and forces you to either reach far ahead of ADP or risk getting sniped in order to fill out certain stacks.

And in addition to all that, you’re not offset for these challenges with the chance to pick Christian McCaffrey or your favourite WR.

In a ‘default’ draft, each draft position projects marginally better than the next, a margin which shrinks gradually as you move through the draft. This is largely borne out in a draft capital adjustment by pick google sheet made by Michael Leone.

I would argue this is *not* a default draft, and I don’t think this is on vibes alone either.

Each of the first 11 players taken currently posses an underdog ADP below 11. The delta between Garrett Wilson’s 10.8 ADP and Jahmyr Gibbs’ 12.8 (who carries the 12th highest ADP) is at this moment tied for the widest gap in ADP between two adjacent players until Isiah Pacheco and Terry McLaiurin at 46.4 and 48.8 respectively. The gap between Gibbs and Drake London - who have Marvin Harrison Jr. sandwiched between them - is only 1.5. In fact, the nine players starting at Gibbs until Nico Collins (the 20th-highest ADP) carry a spread of just 6.7.

All this is to say that the 11 highest drafted players are very likely to be drafted in the first 11 picks, and after that drafters are far less certain of their preferences. When you consider that this ADP data includes auto-drafters whose pick is entirely determined by the ADP itself, and countless #SophisticatedAutoDrafters who are breaking ties heavily toward the higher ADP player in order to spread out their exposures, it’s likely that the degree to which drafters select Gibbs, Harrison and London ahead of options like Olave, Aiyuk and Adams probably overstates the degree to which they actually prefer them as players.

Compounding this issue is the fact the flatness of this tier - both in terms of how I evaluate the players and how the market drafts them - generally extends from the 1-2 turn into the early-third. Therefore, you’re drafting a demonstrably worse player in round 1 compared to the 1.01 / 1.02 drafters, and not drafting a meaningfully different player in the second, while (at least in my opinion) also drafting a meaningfully worse projecting player in the 3rd. I do think the turn drafters finally get an edge in the 4th round where players like Tee Higgins, Tank Dell and Zay Flowers represent the end of a tier at WR (again, at least they do for me) ahead of players such as George Pickens, Christian Kirk, and Amari Cooper.

A final significant challenge facing late-Round 1 drafters is the end of the “WR window.” As I’ve mentioned before, the WR window is somewhat of a nebulous concept, but the market is generally effective at pricing it and the market has spoken. Nine WRs have ADPs between 68.2 and 77.4 at the time of writing. Only Jameson Williams (whom I personally consider to be the single worst pick in the entire draft pool) is priced between an ADP of 77.5 and 91.5. This is the area of the draft in which the market has decided it’s one last call for impact WRs, and it happens in the middle of Round 7 such that a 1.12 drafter hoping to secure four WRs in the first seven rounds (as is optimal - see below) essentially must draft four in six.

So to recap…. sitting at the 1.12 you have reduced flexibility throughout your draft due to the gap between your selections and one fewer round of WR-window profiles, while taking on a massive projection hit in round 1 (and arguably round 3) with little corresponding benefit until at earliest round 4.

It’s fair to say that in the 8.3% of drafts you roll the 1.12 you are indeed drawing the short stack at the poker table, and thus are incentivized to think outside the box.

Before getting into the actionable portion of this column in which I lay out my favourite strategies for drafting from this slot I want to point out that much of this column is spiritually applicable to the 1.9-1.11 as well, as I think many of the same issues persist, save for the fact that A.J. Brown, Puka Nacua, and Garrett Wilson are in my view (and the market’s) materially superior enough picks vs. the options available after them, that you’re ceding too much in terms of projection to begin seeking out unique openings at least in Round 1.

The Benefits of Drafting at 1.12

So we’ve covered the drawbacks of this draft slot fairly extensively… but fortunately there are a few legitimate opportunities unique to this position that we have the chance to leverage if we’re trying to build out an exploitative draft strategy from this otherwise sub-optimal draft slot.

The first major benefit is that you have the chance to predict your subsequent pick every time you make a selection. There is no hoping and praying someone makes it back to you in the next round, or trying to take a WR in one round to set up his QB in the next. You’re certainly not immune from ‘snipes,’ but at the very least you get to draft with complete information of your following pick at every opportunity. In an ideal world, this should lead to more intentional drafting, more correlation, and fewer instances of picks you’d reverse with the benefit of hindsight.

The other major benefit is that it’s far easier to build predictably unique combinations from the turn than any other draft slot for the same reason it’s such a sub optimal place to draft at from an ADP-efficiency perspective.

If you’re drafting in the middle of the board, and largely draft at or near ADP, you are picking players in the middle of their ADP standard deviation in the middle of the draft board. Rome Odunze carries an ADP of 65.6, and thus is most commonly drafted in the middle of the board, but his range extends to each turn, and thus the spread of players combined with Rome Odunze on a given team is relatively wide and flat.

If you’re drafting at the turn however, that’s much less the case (especially for players with relatively stable ADPs). Marvin Harrison Jr. has been drafted at the 1-2 turn since the open of Best Ball Mania. As a result, he’s most commonly paired with other players on his side of the draft board, and far less likely to be combined with players on the opposite side of the draft board since the delta between a player’s ADP and actual draft slot is necessarily higher to swing from one side of the board to the other than from either side of the board to the middle.

However, this effect works both ways. Combinations of players drafted on the turn *at* ADP are going to be more common than such combinations drafted in the middle of the board, and combinations of players drafted on the turn *not at* ADP are less common.

If you’re drafting at the turn, select one player at ADP and another player on the opposite turn from his ADP, and that combination proves to be a successful one, you will face meaningfully fewer opponents with that same combination than any other combination of players. The impact of this is highest in the early rounds of the draft when ADP is more static.

So to recap, the benefits to picking at the 1.12 are information and uniqueness. Luckily, those two edges compliment each other quite well! Unfortunately, these benefits are for the most part equally available to your opponents picking at the 1.1, but they have Christian McCaffrey and you have Jahmyr Gibbs.

So what do we do about this?