Not sure how Calcutta Auctions work? No worries, you've come to the right spot!
Calcutta auctions differ from normal draft auctions in two ways. First, your hands aren't tied by a fixed amount of money to spend. Instead, you can spend as much money or little as you want. Maybe you want to bid $300 on a favorite. Why would you want to do this? To buy more (or better) teams and have a higher payout. Of course, if the total pot was $310 and you spent $300 on one team then you wouldn't be what we like to call "smart." That is the second difference of a Calcutta auction, the total pot size isn't known prior to the completion of the draft. How do we determine the pot size? It ends up being the sum of all the winning bids from the draft! In other words, the draft proceeds exactly fund the payouts (it is a zero-sum game).
Before the draft starts, the pool admin will choose how many shares are award for different categories (a first round win, second round win, etc.). For example, maybe owning a team that makes the playoffs earns you 1 share. So you will have some expectation about how many shares a team will win, and how many total shares there are. What you will have to intuit as the draft goes on is what 1 share translates to in terms of a dollar payout. If the total number of shares awarded ends up being 150, then every share equals 1/150 of the total pot.
I mean, maybe. But not how you might think. If you buy a team for cheap early on, you should actually hope that later teams go for a lot more. If they do, the overall pot increases, and so does any share of the pot. Of course, if you start out thinking the final pot will be $800 and everyone else thinks it'll be $100, then you'll likely win most of the initial teams (because you think the payout for each team will be higher). But if you do, then you have an incentive to continue to bid up and win later teams.
That is totally up to the people in your league. You decide what metric is used to rank people. Maybe you want final rankings to be by net dollars won/lost. Or you want to use ROI (return on investment). Calcutta Sports runs the draft but also handles the post-draft logistics. We provide both of the previous metric (among other things), updated throughout the regular and post-season.
This doesn't really give you an unfair advantage. You'll win more of the final pot, but pay a lot more too. So regardless of if you rank based on net payout or ROI, doing this won't give you an edge. Where it becomes not fun is in the extreme. You win all the teams, but then the cost of your bids equals your payoff, which makes this all kinda pointless. This is what we call the asshole scenario. Don't be the asshole.
It actually isn't clear this would make things better. Depending on how you determine your winner and the number of people in the pool, this might have its own problems. There are some scenarios where it might be best to bid the max amount for the favorite. But what if two people have the same idea? Who says "dibs" first? Who shouts the loudest? Doesn't seem like an ideal way to decide things. Maybe it is best we just adhear to the "don't be an asshole" tenent.
Setting a max bid allows you to auto re-bid as other people bid against you (up to your pre-set max). What is the downside? A max bid only responds to someone else's bid. So if you set a max bid of $7 and then someone bids $6, if the minimum bid increment is set to $2 then your max bid wouldn't be a valid bid. Also, if Alice has already set a max bid of $8 and Bob attempts the same max bid of $8, we award the bid to Alice. If Bob attempts a normal bid of $8, we award the bid to Bob.
This helps even-out the bidding across teams. Owning a lower-seeded team who ends up outpeforming should be rewarded. As an incentive, the overall pot (which equals all the winning bids) is split into a Main Pot and an Upset Pot. The division (e.g., 75/25) is set by the pool admin before the draft auction. When a team wins against a higher-ranked opponent, they get an "Upset Share" equal to the normal share awarded for winning a particular round (e.g., 1st round playoff victory) multiplied by the difference in seeds. If you end up with 12 Upset Shares, and the total number of Upset Shares is 156, then you'd win 12/156 of the Upset Pot.
Seeds are calculated based on either Vegas odds or ESPN power rankings as of a fixed date prior to the draft auction. To keep things tractable, teams will be grouped into buckets of 4. Meaning, there will be four 8-seeds, four 7-seeds, etc. We work our way up, so for sports with 30 teams (ugh, so dumb) there will only be two 1-seeds. Seeds are known prior to the start of the draft, and do not change as we go through the season. Seeds are fixed at the point when your administrator creates a pool. The table of team seeds, as well as the determination date for each pool can be found on the pre-draft home page.
Okay, this is super unlikely to happen. Not sure there has ever been a chalk run through an entire post-season. But if this occurs, the Upset Pot will be re-allocated to the Main Pot.
This only applies to NFL, where shares are awarded for regular season wins. In the case of a tie, neither team is awarded a share. You know what they say, a tie is like kissing your cousin, and that isn't great for anyone.
In most sports, shares are awarded for making the playoffs. In these sports, there are roughly 32 teams and half make the playoffs. A team will still be awarded Upset Shares for making the playoffs if they are a 5-Seed or worse. In this case, the upset multiplier will be the difference between the team's seed and 4. For example, if making the playoffs earns 3 shares, and a 6-Seed makes it into the post-season, they will be awarded (6-4) × 3 = 6 Upset Shares.
No, that isn't the goal of this little pet project. You're contact info won't be monitized in any way.
Okay, yes. In a way. But not linked to you. Your bidding behavior might be used, most likely for a boring academic study.
We handle all the logistics. This includes the initial draft, all post-draft interaction with pool participants (e.g., continual scoring updates), and the final determination of winners and losers.
We are not a betting site. We do not award or fascilitate the distribution of prizes for the pool's winner, or transfers of any kind between players. Think of our site like you would a traditional fantasy league for the sake of bragging rights, where you bid for players using monopoly money. Or marshmallows. We're big fans of marshmallows over here. We simply keep score and provide a breakdown of how each player is doing.
Calculations will be updated on a daily basis, by 11 AM on the following day.
Well, funny story. We wanted to charge something reasonable, like $5. Then our card processor decided to be fussy and wouldn't let us process payments thru their platform. So for now, we are running on a donation/honor system basis. You can be awesome and donate a few bucks here.
If you want to be really cool, you could either advocate on our behalf with Stripe or help us land a different card processor (we'd be happy to offer a finders fee!)