Draft Kings Final Results, Recap and Thoughts Moving Forward

JerryDamage puts a bow on our first ever THL Draft Kings experience.

With the start of the playoffs, Season 1 of THL Draft Kings is over. It was a pretty exciting season that saw it come down to the final week to determine our Season 10 champion and runner up. Here are the final standings.

Congratulations to our Season 10 champion, Aviously and our runner up, Aeo. For their first and second place finishes, Aviously has won 20.00 in packs from the set of his choice and Aeo has won 10.00 in packs from the set of his choice. For anyone who would like to see the lineups chosen for each week, here’s a link to the THL Draft Kings google doc where I kept track of it for this season.

This was a very close race with Aeo having big weeks in Weeks 8 and 9 to finish where he did. Aviously had strong Weeks 6 and 7, then finished it up with two 40 point weeks in order to take the title.

So now a little reflection time. This all started back in Week 5 when Darkseid said it’d be cool to have a Draft Kings version of THL for fantasy. I took his idea and bounced some ideas off of Donde to help get the format down for it and then ran with it. We had a very good turnout for the first running of it, especially since it literally went from concept to reality in just a handful of days.

A few things I noticed over the course of it was that no one really ever got close to the 1800 salary cap. Why was this? For this season, I didn’t restrict how many players you could pick per seed. As such, a lot of people chose players from the 4 and 5 seeds where they saw a pretty big PR advantage as that’s usually an indicator of a gap in skill at those seeds. It was a wise strategy that paid off as those were usually victories if not a sweep. Some 1 seeds were picked but I noticed that a lot of 2 and 3 seeds were not chosen very much if at all. In fact I’d say that most of the rosters submitted did not have a 2 or 3 seed on them and instead doubled up on 4 and 5 seeds.
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That is one change, and maybe the biggest change, that I’ll make going into THL Draft Kings for Ragnaros Season 11. Going forward, when you submit a lineup, you’ll need to have one person from each seed not going over the 1800 PR cap. When you do NFL Draft Kings, you can’t pick multiple Quarterbacks. You get Tom Brady and then you pick the rest of the team to go around him. To keep with that spirit and also the spirit of building a true fantasy lineup, I like the change of having to have 1 player from each seed.

Also beginning with Ragnaros Season 11, Draft Kings will run in 3 week mini-seasons. I wanted to do it that way so that no one is ever really out of it. Even if you miss one week there, you can still come back and have two good weeks to possibly win it. Also, with mini-seasons like this, after the third week, we start over so if you did miss the first one, you can join the next one shortly after. If we did one long Draft Kings that went all 9 weeks, after Week 4 or 5, it’d be down to just a handful of people who had participated from the beginning and by Week 9, I’d likely only be getting submissions from 4 people. I like the idea of keeping it short and in turn, keeping it open to everyone to come in and compete in it.

And finally, one addendum that didn’t come up until Week 9 and luckily had no impact on deciding our champion and runner up, but it’s the issue of DQs. What should happen if you pick a player and they win via DQ for the week? It’s scored 3-0 so is that a sweep? Is that victory? On one hand, they never played the games. On the other hand, their opponent either didn’t submit classes or was unable to play them in their scheduled match time while the chosen player was there and at least did both of those things. I’ve got the off season to consider both sides of this one, but as of this article I am leaning towards counting that as a victory for the week but without the sweep bonus. If anyone has other thoughts on how that should be scored, please let me know in the THL Draft Kings Discord channel or via DM on Discord.
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With that, I want to thank everyone for playing and for making this first Draft Kings a success. I look forward to continuing with it for Ragnaros Season 11.