Plans for the 2020 Playoff Beta Test

First of all, thank you for checking this site out! If you’ve visited here on more than one occasion, you’ve probably noticed that this site is very much in progress. There are a lot of pieces still to be put in place so expect the site to continue to evolve over the next few months.

Place Order page

The first order of business going forward is creating a user friendly page that lets you buy and sell stock in different players. As you may have noticed, that page doesn’t exist yet! My intention here is to create a drop down menu, and possibly a box to type in player names that will auto-generate matches as you type. Then you can select the player you want to buy or sell from the list below. The more specific your search, the shorter the list becomes until it is easy to find the player you are looking for. We will see how realistic this is to have this in place for the start of the playoffs, but one way or another, there will be a page that you can place orders through to make trades. ( Even if I have to do this manually on the back end! )

The Chart Room

The chart room is the primary source to gather information on players. Right now there are charts for most teams from the 2019 playoffs and the top several teams from the 2018 playoffs also. More teams from 2018 will be added soon. I have placed a priority on posting stock charts for players that actually did some scoring in the playoffs so you can see how that makes their stock price move. I also have a Tutorial on this here if you haven’t seen it already.

What you won’t see a lot of are charts for players that performed poorly, since their price just drops over time. I’ll add a couple of examples of this soon also, just so you have that reference and you can know what to expect if you pick players that don’t score. I’m pretty sure I’m going to use Tampa Bay from 2019, since a lot of people ( myself included ) would have invested in several of their players to start the playoffs that year.

So far I’ve added charts grouped under teams which means that if you are looking to see what any particular player did in either 2018 or 2019, you have to look under their team page to find them. My intention here is to have a much more searchable chart room section in the future so you can pull up charts for any player you are interested in directly. I’m also planning on creating a way to sort through charts based on different criteria like performance, total games played, etc. just like you can do on financial websites like Finviz.

A Practice Room

Its one thing to look at a bunch of charts and try to imagine how you would have managed your portfolio over time. Its quite another to be able to use a simulation that is interactive and lets you make transactions to get a better feel for how this all works. A major motivation for me in creating this is to serve as an education tool as well as a way to run a fantasy pool that’s different from other ones. What I’m still working out is the best way to go about setting this up so that people will get the most out of it, and feel much more comfortable and prepared for the real thing, when the 2020 playoffs finally get started this year. ( Assuming that this happens of course )

So stay tuned for this to be added, hopefully soon but I can’t promise it just yet. ( How’s that for hedging my bets? ) For the time being, if you want to test out different strategies you think might work for this, I would encourage you to do some research into how any given player’s points per game total changed throughout the playoffs, compare that to their benchmark, and see if you notice any patterns or trends that have some predictive value in terms of where their stock price went. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, don’t worry. I’m going to be posting more tutorials soon as well that will go into different ways that you can create strategies to trade player’s stocks more effectively.

Tutorials

Speaking of tutorials, I will continue to create more of them over the coming weeks and months. Once I’ve covered the basics I’m going to get into more in depth topics such as how to do analysis of player statistics, creating a strategy that gives you an edge, and thinking in probabilities to name a few. The idea behind this game, which I hope to talk more about in these tutorials is to give you tools that you can use to help with your investment decisions. That’s a big goal I know, but stick with me on this, and I’ll show you how that can happen as we go along.

So that’s where I’m at and where I’m hoping to go with all of this. I’m sure there will be more changes as well besides what I’ve mentioned here so don’t be surprised if the website keeps changing constantly. Thanks for playing!