If you’ve ever played Ottoneu, you likely realized that it’s a different fantasy format. The 40-man rosters are deep, and the player universe is much larger than the standard fantasy offering. There are auctions for nearly all acquisitions, and during the season there is no FAAB (just the money you decide to budget for free agents.) However, perhaps the biggest difference between Ottoneu and other formats is the playoff structure. Ottoneu doesn’t have one.

Ottoneu is a season long race, starting the first day of the regular season and ending with the season’s final game. The objective is pretty simple. Score more points over your allotted game and innings caps than your opponents. If you aren’t playing in a money league, or your league has not designed some added incentives of their own, then there likely aren’t incentives to finish in second place relative to twelfth. Read the rest of this entry »

For those following along, Ottoneu is at it’s busiest during these winter months leading up to the start of the next baseball season.  It’s designed that way, and the year-round activity of Ottoneu is one of the features that help set it apart from other fantasy platforms.  As Joe mentioned recently, there are plenty of reasons why you should give Ottoneu a chance this year, but today I want to assume you’ve already seen the light and are ready to sign up.  So, what’s next? Here are a few practical ways to get started once you plug into this great game.

Select Your Game Type

First things first: you’ll need to decide which scoring format suits your interest. Ottoneu offers a nice range of scoring options that include:

Classic: This is rotisserie-style 5 x 5 built into the basic foundation of Ottoneu, which (like all formats) includes 40 man rosters, $400 salary caps, daily lineups, off-season arbitration, and auction-style economics.  If you’ve been playing traditional Roto for years and have interest in Ottoneu, this is a great place to start.

Old School: This is considered the original Ottoneu  (4 x 4) format, and was designed with a sabermetric bent and geared toward power hitters and power pitchers (OBP, SLG, HR, R and ERA, WHIP, HR/9, K).  You can find an example of 4 x 4 standings here.

SABR & FanGraphs Points: Based on linear weights scoring, these two sabermetrically-inclined options are very popular, and it isn’t uncommon to see owners playing in multiple points leagues. Tons of resources and tools are available if you decide to try your hand in one of these advanced scoring leagues.  Standings for a points league look like this.

New: Head to Head is coming to Ottoneu in 2018!

ICYMI, head-to-head will be an option in @ottoneuBaseball in 2018. https://t.co/UsTO21a9kE

— Ottoneu Fantasy Sports (@Ottoneu) December 18, 2017

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With 2016 leagues in the books, I’d like to present some league-wide season-ending stats to see what kind of conclusions we can draw about success in the very data-driven game of Ottoneu.  The focus here is one of the more popular scoring formats, FanGraphs Points (FGPTS), and the numbers you see in each of the first two charts represent the average standings data for all teams/all leagues by final 2016 finish.

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“The trade deadline is fast approaching.” – Hard to believe that time is here.  This season has flown by, hasn’t it? With just one week before rosters solidify for the final stretch, now is as good a time as ever to ensure new Ottoneu owners are fully prepared for the future, which is now fast becoming the off-season.  Joe recently outlined the mindset that’s needed to approach the trade deadline strategically, depending on your place in the standings, but since it’s also my job to cover Ottoneu on these pages, I’ll take a more mechanical look at what happens at this critical point in the season.

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With the Ottoneu trade deadline fast approaching, you are probably trying to determine where your team stands for the rest of 2016. Do you need that extra piece to make a title push this year? Is your league out of reach? Does a team in your league have (what appears to be) and insurmountable lead? These are all factors that need to bear in mind as the August 31^st trade deadline approaches.

The first place to start is to know how your team compares to the rest of the league. As one of the twelve owners in your league, it is important to know where you stand in relation to the other eleven teams. A great place to start is to run your league through the standings dashboard. While this tool gives you a pace at which you are performing (prorated for the whole season), it does not project what will happen based on a projection system (like ZIPS or Steamer). It can still be very useful to get a general idea of where you stand relative to the rest of the league. While this standard is different among many owners, I typically try to shoot for being within 350 to 400 points of 1^st (innings adjusted) if I am going to make any moves to buy. Read the rest of this entry »

I have made a lot of trades in my fantasy baseball “career”.  It’s one of the parts of the game I enjoy most, but I’ve learned over the years that there is a wide range of comfort among owners when it comes to shaking up their rosters via trade.  For some fantasy owners, the process and preparation required to put together a good trade is a burden, and for others the uncertainty of the resulting impact (“will this really help my team?”) and/or the feedback from their league (“did I win or lose this trade?”) is enough to cause anxiety.

Part of the reason I enjoy fantasy trades is because I’ve had the benefit of corporate negotiation training throughout my professional career.  While it’s certainly true that my fantasy baseball experience has had a positive impact on my professional bargaining skills, there is no doubt my vocational training has made me more confident (and successful) in the fantasy “trade room”, too.  Today I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned throughout my own trade history in hopes of offering something you can use as well.

How to Talk Trade

All too often it’s not necessarily what you say but how you say it that makes the difference.  What follows are some alternative ways to phrase common trade responses that might make the difference between closing a deal or stopping one early in it’s tracks.

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Successfully “rebuilding” your fantasy team into a contender is an epic challenge that requires vision, skill, patience, and a little bit of luck.  Since there is no perfect blueprint that ensures success (some people say never rebuild), it’s not surprising that owners take a lot of different routes to the same ultimate goal.

I recently polled a group of savvy, successful fantasy owners to get their advice for rebuilding in Ottoneu, asking five key questions that are related to the idea of effective rebuilding.  Regardless of whether you play Ottoneu, much of the (anonymous) feedback below should be relevant to a wide variety of fantasy baseball leagues and may be helpful if you find yourself in a rebuild this season.

What is the best advice you would offer an Ottoneu owner who is rebuilding their roster for the future?

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You’ve just signed up to play Ottoneu – now what?

Ottoneu is growing, and while you’re going to see a lot of ink spilled here on RotoGraphs about this premier fantasy game, the learning curve for rookies can be a little steep.  Below are ten critical tips you should consider when embarking on your first Ottoneu fantasy baseball season.  What follows is based on the assumption that you’ve either joined an existing Ottoneu league or are creating a new league and are now preparing to draft in your first spring auction.

1) Join the Ottoneu Community

One of the best aspects of Ottoneu is the massive contingent of game players discussing all things baseball (and football) 24/7/365.  You can find the most active Ottoneu gamers on the official community site and on Slack. Complementing the already feature-rich platform, the Ottoneu community brings all owners together in one place to crowdsource player information, trade feedback, auction tips, keep/cut decisions, enhanced league communications, and a forum for recruiting new league owners.  Even if you don’t play Ottoneu (yet), the community is a goldmine of daily baseball dialogue, strategy, and advice, and it also the perfect place to dip your toe in if you have any interest in learning more about playing and joining Ottoneu.  When you do play Ottoneu, you’ll want to get acquainted with the community as soon as possible, as it is an excellent resource for new Ottoneu players.

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(This is part one of the “Ottoneu 101” series)

Spring is almost here, which means pitchers and catchers (and fantasy drafts) are just around the corner.  Today I’ll walk you through an Ottoneu player auction (thanks to the guys in League 100) so you can be fully prepared before your own league draft gets underway in the coming weeks.

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So, what is Ottoneu?

Ottoneu is a smarter, better brand of fantasy baseball.  By design, it’s a fantasy platform engineered for the hardcore baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy the term “off season”.  Ottoneu is the perfect fit for FanGraphs readers looking to join a competitive fantasy baseball league with a lot of cool features, a sabermetric-economy, and a massive community of raving fans.

You can read first-year feedback from Ottoneu players here.  You can also learn a lot more about the game from the FAQ, but here are the top 10 reasons you should consider joining or moving your fantasy baseball league to Ottoneu this year:

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