Introduction

Out of all the fantasy game formats that exist, the Head-To-Head (H2H) format is my least favorite.  I get the premise behind trying to make a more interesting fantasy game that reflects how professional sports leagues decide who is best, but I believe this system is usually not implemented in a manner as to make weekly matchups a fair contest.

H2H leagues have more luck involved than other types of fantasy games.  For example, certain weeks may favor a team simply because all of the team’s starting pitchers will be getting two starts that week, while its competition will not be able to log as many innings.  Then, there is the case where your team has a phenomenal week that would beat everyone else in the league that week, except for the team you happen to be playing.  These things are beyond your control once the season starts!

So, if you decide to play in a head to head league, most of your time should be spent before the draft developing your strategy to dominate scoring categories.  Once the season starts, it’s usually hard to get into a position where you can dominate multiple categories, but if you carefully plan your draft strategy, you can target some key categories that you plan to win every week, then let fate take care of the rest of weekly matchups.

Head-To-Head Scoring

Scoring is simple in most H2H leagues, because you are assigned a list of categories that your fantasy team will compete in on a weekly basis, and the team with the better stats in each category get a point.  In categories where both teams have the same stats, some leagues split the point and some leagues just ignore it. 

To illustrate the H2H scoring system, look at the following example:

Weekly Statistics Example

Corresponding Points Example

Like any other Rotisserie Based Game, it doesn’t matter how big the margin is within each category, because the categories are ranked individually, so no matter how many extra Wins team 1 has over Team 2, the points he earns for the weekly matchup is still the same, one point for having the better Wins total.

H2H Leagues are almost designed to penalize teams that draft perfectly balanced teams, unless your H2H league uses the total of all fantasy points earned within your league’s categories to determine weekly standings.  

In any event, you can easily see how chance occurrence could cause the better team to lose the weekly matchup.  In our example, Team 1 is definitely more balanced, but the league categories favor Team 2 much better, and an oddball category like Errors happened to give Team 2 the point in this weekly matchup.

Strategy

If you identify which categories you can win by drafting properly, you can put a customized draft list together that focuses on winning specific categories and letting chance decide the rest of the categories on a weekly basis. 

Let us assume Team 2 took the approach to draft all leadoff hitters and closers for his team.  Most leagues have minimum at-bats and innings pitched requirements to force players to start healthy lineups, so assume his draft strategy covers those League Rules.

Team 2 is planning on his hitters winning Hits and Runs every week, and he is banking on his closers to win the Saves and ERA categories each week.  So, if he drafts his team properly, he will lock up 4 categories each week, so worst-case scenario, he ties his opponent in any given week.  But, if chance is on his side in a given week, he’ll likely have a chance to win the Batting Average and Errors categories.  His strategy assumes he will always lose RBI and Wins.  Wouldn’t you always like to start a game where the worst you could do is tie, but you always have a good chance to win?  A good draft strategy can get you to that point, which is usually good enough to get a chance to play in your league’s post season, and we all know, once the post season starts, everyone has a chance to win!

Building Your Draft List

Once you decide on a particular draft strategy, you need to customize your draft list so that you will achieve your goals.  But remember, other experience owners are also devising similar strategies to dominate certain categories; so when building your list, you can’t completely ignore players who do well in the categories you are planning on forfeiting. 

There are three steps to building your draft list:

1.      Identify categories that are completely based on chance, or that are unpredictable on a week-to-week basis.  These categories are the ones where the difference between the top players and the averages players are only one or two units.  Categories like Complete Games, Shutouts, Errors, Caught Stealing, Passed Balls, Balks, Sacrifice Flys, Sacrifice Hits, etc.  These categories should not be used as part of your ranking calculation, unless there is a way to assign a weight to their value.

2.      Generate your draft list on the remaining categories, in the case of our sample league above, the following categories should be used to develop your ranking order: BA, H, R, RBI, W, SV, ERA.  Since there are only a few players that have awful errors counts and the rest of the players are so close in overall count, you can identify the players to avoid after you build your draft list.

3.      Once you list is built, identify the players that fit your draft strategy in each round of your draft list.  So, if you have 12 teams in you league, each round is a group of 12 players on your list.  Identify the 3 or 4 players that fit your strategy in each round and plan on taking them, if they are available when it is your turn to pick.  However, if none of the players you targeted are available, then take the best available player on your overall list. 

By using this approach, you prevent other owners from getting good overall players, just because you wanted to dominate stolen bases.  If no stolen base threats are worthy of a 3^rd round pick, that doesn’t mean you should grab a player like Dave Roberts who is rated as a 17^th round pick in the third round just because he may steal 50 bases in 2004.  No matter what your strategy is before the draft, you should never reach into players from a much lower group of rated players or else you’ll inadvertently help all of the other owners in your league combat your plans on making it to the playoffs by giving them the edge in other categories you thought you’d be able to win by chance.  Now, if there is a player like Juan Pierre or Carl Crawford who are rated as 5^th and 6^th round picks respectively, then it is a little less risky to take a gamble and grab one of them in the 4^th round as a preemptive strike to others who may have devised a similar draft strategy to you.

The RotoRank Solution

The main reason I wrote this article was to answer a question that I have been getting a lot in the last few weeks.  Fantasy Players were creating leagues using my demo software using all 20 categories in their head to head league, and then they were asking me why someone middle relievers were ranked higher than Randy Johnson, or why Johnny Damon ranked higher than a top slugger like Todd Helton.

RotoRank currently treats all categories as equals, but we all know that some categories just don’t have enough of a variance to make an impact in rotisserie scoring or any other type of scoring league.  How many pitchers throw no hitters each year, two or three?  So, why reward two ore three pitchers with a 100% rank in that oddball category, and all other players get 0%.  Of course you are going to get weird results. 

Believe me, I fell into that same trap when I was first designing RotoRank, so make sure you understand the dynamics of the category before you decide to use it as a ranking factor.  When you think about it, it does make sense, but the first time you see it in action, it does look very odd.  I think this ranking problem is one of the main reasons fantasy point scoring developed as the fantasy sports industry has grown.  It is a lot easier to include new categories into your fantasy league when using fantasy points, because you can assign different weights to different categories so that they better reflect their importance in the actual games.

Conclusion

Although H2H Leagues are not my favorite fantasy game format, I do find myself playing in those leagues against small groups of friends.  It’s actually a format that ever so slightly helps to handicap veteran fantasy players when competing against people new to the fantasy league experience. 

If you are interested in trying out an H2H League, Yahoo has one of the most popular H2H leagues on the Internet, because they are free to use by league members, and their user interface is very simple to use…