Thinking About Auctions, Fast and Slow: Logistics and Details

It’s Ottoneu auction season, and while most auctions won’t happen for a few weeks, there are plenty of leagues auctioning right now. I have already finished one auction and I am in the middle of a second as I sit here writing. How am I writing while mid-auction? Am I the world’s best multi-tasker?

No. I am in the middle of a slow auction. And this has me thinking about something that is important in Ottoneu but not specific to Ottoneu: the differences between slow and fast auctions.

We’ll get into strategy in another article. Today, let’s talk basics, like “what is a slow auction?” or “why would you do a slow auction?”

What I call a “fast” or “live” auction is what you are probably used to if you play Ottoneu or other auction leagues. Managers get 30 seconds to nominate a player, a 15-second timer starts, and re-sets with each new bid, until no one bids, the player is won, and the next manager nominates another player. One-by-one, you go through as many players as you need to fill up rosters.

A slow auction has two major differences: First, the clock moves slower. In my slow auctions, there is no time limit for managers to nominate – they nominate when they get around to it – and once a player is nominated there is a minimum of 12 hours for bidding. That’s a setting you can select, but it essentially dictates how often managers need to check-in. Look at the auction at least once every 12 hours and you’ll never miss a player.

Second, the players aren’t auctioned one-by-one, in a series, but multiple players can be bid on at the same time. For example, in my current slow auction, Amed Rosario was nominated right when we started today, Cal Raleigh 10 minutes later, Triston McKenzie 43 minutes after that, and another five players in the next 90 minutes. For the next nine hours, all eight of those players are being bid on and there are still four managers who can make their first nomination when they are ready.

I typically start my auctions with one nomination per team, or 12 total, but increase it to two or even three per team to keep the auction moving as we get to lower-priced players. This obviously impacts strategy and we’ll come back to that later.

There are a few other differences. Slow auctions allow you to set a “max bid” for a player, so you don’t have to come back and hit +1 every hour or anything. For example, I can big $75 on Juan Soto and my bid will show up as $1. If someone else comes in and bids $50, they don’t outbid me – the system automatically updates my bid to $50 (since it is below my max) and I am still leading. If that person bids $80, they have outbid my max and they now lead the bidding at $76, but have an $80 max set.

Also, the clock doesn’t reset with every bid but it does reset if a new high bid is made. In that Soto example, the clock would not reset with the $50 bid (I was leading and I am still leading), but it would reset with the $80 bid (a new high bid has been made). Those are the most important differences.

There are also multiple reasons to do a slow auction. The first league I joined that used a slow auction did so because multiple managers (including me) didn’t want to set aside another day or night for an auction, especially a start-up auction with 480 players needing to be picked up. We’ve stuck with the slow auction because we enjoy it and it’s a change of pace from other leagues.

I also like to use slow auctions as part of starting up a new league. Doing a full auction for 480 players for a new league can take 6+ hours, which either means you give up a huge chunk of time or you have to get 12 people together over multiple occasions. For both the Keep or Kut Listener League last year and the Podcasters League this year, we started with 3 hours of fast auction to get through the biggest name players and then switched to a slow auction to finish things up.

I have also done slow auctions because scheduling the 12 managers to be available was just too hard.

Setting up a slow auction, particularly for Ottoneu, is pretty simple. I run my slow auctions through Couch Managers which makes it easy to set up a draft with most of your league’s settings. You can set roster size, budget, and positions. You can import keepers from a spreadsheet. You can’t set rules on position eligibility (which means you need to make sure managers are aware that a player may show up as eligible for a position on Couch Managers that they are not eligible for on Ottoneu, and vice versa). Once the draft is over, you can export a spreadsheet to import rosters back to Ottoneu, as well.

The table below is a quick summary of the differences between fast and slow auctions. I’ll have another article on this topic, focused on strategic differences.