A Public Service Announcement on: Streaming

We interrupt this regularly scheduled series on league setup and commissioning to bring you this special announcement: Have you ever heard the term Streaming? Are you familiar with what it means? Allow me to explain:

When you play in a H2H league, unfortunately, most sites do not yet have the capability to offer a maximum amount of games played per position per week. I've written Yahoo many times asking for such capability, but they don't seem too interested in making their system better. This lack of functionality leaves a gaping hole in H2H play to be exploited.

I'm sure by now, if you play in a Head to Head format, you've realized that those teams with more games in a week offer a manager a huge advantage. Sure you have LeBron James, but if he only has one game this week, and I have Tyreke Evans playing 3 games this week, Tyreke's stats will dominate LBJ's. At least for every category that is not a % category.



Taking it one step further, there is nothing more frustrating than taking a loss in Head to Head because the manager you are playing against is doing a bunch of add/drops during the last few days of your match, dropping players with low value, picking up players with low value, but accumulating stats nonetheless.

There are a few ways to combat this, such as limiting the add/drops a manager can make each week, limiting player lineup changes to weekly, or adding a transaction cost (a nominal fee to add/drop). All of these take away from the fun of playing fantasy sports.

In baseball it's worse, and I'm sure any avid Fantasy Baseball fans out there will sound off on this. In baseball, people will often only draft hitters, then just add/drop pitchers all week accumulating strikeouts, saves, wins, etc. This strategy is called streaming, and make no mistake, it takes away from the game. It's just not fair if you had to go to some event for the weekend and the guy you play against was add/dropping 14 different players to beat you in your match.

The most effective way to combat against this is by having categories that negatively affect streamers. Generally, any % category will do the trick, though to a certain extent Turnovers in basketball or Losses in baseball will help too.

In reality, the best fix would be for one of these major Fantasy Sports providers to implement max games played in a week, much like the max games played in a season feature for Roto (If you play Roto, streaming is not an issue). This way, each position would be allotted say 4 games per week max, and there would be no incentive to try to stream. The effectiveness of streaming increases throughout the season, having the biggest impact during the playoffs.

Every year in baseball, as a commissioner, I've had to deal with owners streaming. It gets under my skin and every year I battle to find more and more ways to disincentivize people from doing it.

Calling for an 'Honor System' and an all out ban never works. In fact, as a commissioner, never ever try to implement a rule that the platform you play on doesn't have a backup for. In other words, to avoid collusion you can veto a trade. But there is no real fix to streaming (you could try locking players, but that will surely backfire) so don't try to do it by declaring people shouldn't stream. A co-worker of mine played in a football league this year where the commissioner told people they were only allotted a maximum amount of players at each position during the draft. He had no system tools to implement this. Some people ignored him and went ahead drafting however they wanted to. About a month into the season he announced the rule no longer effective. This was disastrous as those who followed the rule felt cheated.

Don't implement rules you can't enforce properly. Don't change rules mid season. Stay tuned for the next post where I go over those rules you can enforce, and how to deal with troublemaker owners and trouble trades. Until then, let's hear from you! What's your opinion on streaming and how do you deal with it?