Introducing the Ottoneu Prestige League

ottoneu-logos_opl-full-color

Today Ottoneu is announcing its third game, the Ottoneu Prestige League. OPL is a contest in which the best teams across all Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball leagues will finally get to compete against each other. OPL is a season-long best-ball tournament of 120 of the best teams in Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball.

Ottoneu Prestige League is a game that is played on top of Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball. If you enter, your team is shared between both games. All roster management and transactions that happen in your Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball leagues will eventually be reflected in OPL. Your OPL team will require no direct management, but will be indirectly managed by your decisions in your Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball league.

Qualify, compete and win unique prizes. Interested? Read on.

Qualify

Ottoneu Prestige League will be the first Ottoneu contest that teams will need to qualify for in order to compete. In order to qualify, a team must:

  • Play in an active 12-team Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball league in which every team is paid for and managed. The scoring format and other settings of this league do not matter, but it must be an active 12-team league
  • Play in a league that has completed a full season of Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball; teams in first-year leagues are not eligible to participate in OPL
  • Finish top-6 in the season prior to the OPL season

If a team qualifies for OPL, one of their managers will need to pay the entry fee to reserve one of the 120 OPL spots for the upcoming season. The entry fee will be $50 and is separate from any Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball fees. With the limited number of spots in the contest, be sure to enter as soon as possible.

For this season only, we are lifting the top-6 qualification requirement and making the OPL contest available to any team in an active 12-team second-year-or-older league that pays the entry fee.

If fewer than 75 teams enter in this season’s OPL, it will be canceled and all entry fees will be refunded.

Compete

OPL will be the first Ottoneu game to utilize best-ball FanGraphs points scoring. This means the platform will determine a team’s best possible lineup on a given day given its roster and will give FanGraphs points accordingly. These points will be aggregated and displayed on the OPL-wide leaderboard.

Scoring Lineups
FanGraphs Points H2H Points, 2 SP slots per day

However, a team’s OPL roster will not exactly mirror its Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball roster. There are key dates through the OPL season in which rosters are updated and teams are eliminated from the contest.

  • Opening Day (1st round)
    • OPL rosters updated to match Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball rosters as of Opening Day at 4am ET
  • May 1 (2nd round)
    • Bottom 30 teams eliminated
    • Remaining 90 teams scores reduced by 75%
    • OPL rosters updated to match Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball rosters as of May 1 at 4am ET
  • June 1 (3rd round)
    • Bottom 30 teams eliminated
    • Remaining 60 teams scores reduced by 75%
    • OPL rosters updated to match Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball rosters as of June 1 at 4am ET
  • MLB All-star break (4th round)
    • Bottom 28 teams eliminated
    • OPL rosters updated to match Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball rosters as of start of ASB, 4am ET
    • OPL rosters are frozen

Starting with the 4th round, team rosters no longer update. At this point, OPL switches to tournament mode from an overall leaderboard contest. In 2021, the OPL knockout tournament will start on July 14 and have the following key dates:

  • July 14 - August 1 (round of 32)
  • August 2 - August 15 (round of 16)
  • August 16 - August 29 (quarterfinals)
  • August 30 - September 12 (semifinals)
  • September 13 - September 26 (finals)

The H2H tournament is a 2-week best-ball matchup and has no carryover in points from round to round. Winners move on and losers are eliminated. Matchups are generated randomly at 4am at the start of each round. The OPL champion is crowned at the end of the final H2H game.

Win

Ottoneu Prestige League will give cash prizes for the top 16 teams in the contest.

Place Cash Prize
First $800
Second $600
Third and Fourth $300
Fifth through Eighth $200
Ninth through 16th $100

Additionally, the 32 teams that qualify for the H2H tournament will receive a unique Ottoneu Prestige League t-shirt, and the OPL champion will receive a custom wooden bat engraved with that season’s OPL logo, as well as automatic entry into next season’s OPL.

Roster Updates

At each roster update date, the OPL system will take a snapshot of a team’s Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball roster at 4am ET and update the OPL roster accordingly. If an Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball roster is an illegal state at that moment, the OPL system will discard the team’s latest transactions until they are in a legal state, so make sure your team is in a legal state at 4am ET of each key date. Any pending trades or outstanding auctions that are not completed in time for this snapshot will not be reflected in the updated OPL roster.

What Do I Have To Do?

Interested and want to play? For this season, all you have to do is enter your teams that are in 12-team leagues. Starting in 2022, there will be a top-6 qualification requirement, but that has been waived for this season. Once the OPL and Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball seasons start, you’ll have to be clever with roster moves to keep your team competitive in both contests through the 2021 season.


Thanks so much to the folks who helped me vet and review both this contest and this forum post. And of course, thanks to all of you for continuing to support Ottoneu Fantasy Sports 10 years in. This thread is open to any questions or comments you may have.

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This is going to be awesome!

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Big thanks to all of you who have signed up already. The response has been outstanding and I really appreciate it.

Here is the announcement as part of our larger live OttobotPod today: OttobotPod Live: Ottoneu Turns 10 Birthday Spectacular! - YouTube

Some random questions from Slack:

Is this Daily best ball?
Yes, daily, not weekly. The system should be tracking best ball scoring about 30 minutes behind reality (in theory).

Are lineup settings the same throughout?
Yes, H2H (1 C, 2 SP) for the entire tournament, both the leaderboard phase and the H2H phase.

Would this best ball code allow us to see theoretically who managed most “optimally” in their home leagues?
Kind of, transactions won’t match 1:1 but in broad strokes… The best ball code is not going to be used for Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball or Ottoneu Fantasy Football yet.

Will we know if other teams in our league are in OPL?
Not today, but by Opening Day, yes.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

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Yes. Take my money.

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Looks like we don’t need to worry about 75 teams signing up. Congrats on 10 years, Niv!

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Thank you Niv for giving me an additional opportunity to assert my dominance over Chad.

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120 spots have been sold out in 18 hours. I’m going to look over it and see if it makes sense to add more spots and increase prizes.

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The 2021 Ottoneu Prestige League has been expanded to 240 spots.

The bottom 70 teams will be eliminated on May 1 and June 1. The bottom 68 teams will be eliminated at the All-Star Break.

Updated prize info:

Place Cash Prize
First $1600
Second $1200
Third and Fourth $600
Fifth through Eighth $400
Ninth through 16th $200

These changes are reflected on the OPL rules page.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

5 Likes

I signed up. However now I may regret this. Reason being: I know of one league that uses opposite scoring. Meaning the higher your score the worse you finish in the league. These teams usually finish at the top of global year to year.

I know you eliminated year one leagues which helps but what assurances would we have that one team isn’t shipping studs off to his buddy in major sell off deals so they can split the pot in this format?

@nivshah @vibbot

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One more question. $7200 out of 12K. Seems like a rather large rake, no?

We are not a casino and this is not gambling. It’s a service and the money the company makes from it is used to continue running Ottoneu Fantasy Sports.

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What Niv said, but also, that delta equals $20/entry, which is the standard team fee for all ottoneu entries.

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Yea I understand that. Seemed high. Figured I’d ask. Anyway I’m more concerned about question one…

Leagues that are obviously doing that will be banned without refund. Transactions in any league can be viewed by anyone and I imagine the top of the leaderboard will be closely scrutinized by everyone playing OPL.

Gotcha. No one would really be able to prove that and I doubt 120 members are going to self police an overall.

This is a very exciting addition to the platform. I’ll probably scrutinize the top of the leaderboard even if I’m out of it by May 1st!

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The scenario you described, in which an Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball league allows a bunch of collusion-y unbalanced trades to happen without questioning them or vetoing them and none of the OPL participants or I don’t notice while this team rockets to the top of the standings and beats everyone else handily seems, to put it mildly, unlikely.

The instances of collusion are extremely low in Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball, and I’ll be active in monitoring the transactions of the teams at the very top for trades that seem game-breakingly unbalanced.

At the end of the day, any trade that can’t be obviously and easily proven as collusion is probably not veto-able by a league and thus isn’t actually a concern for OPL. Leagues will always be the front line and this front and for them nothing has really changed.

I should add that I do take this seriously and I will be closely watching for all kinds of attempts to abuse the OPL rules. I will be considering if stricter qualification or other rule changes to future iterations of OPL are necessary based on how this initial season goes.

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I’m not a fan of loan limits in normal leagues, but one might make sense for OPL contestants so there is a clear line to not cross.

I can see both sides as good for you if you have a great team and a cheap Franco, Gore, etc. to ship out to a struggling team for an expensive stud. Just think a clear line of what collusion looks like before the season will make your life easier.

I do not think a lot of incoming loans is at all a sign of collusion so I’m not sure that makes sense. I have some ideas mostly hugely lopsided trades salary-wise that don’t return any amount of future value. In most of these egregious cases, leagues will veto these trades, so when a trade like that gets through, it’ll be noticeable (teams adding stars will presumably score more points) and will be investigate-able (which maybe isn’t a word).

Since bad trades happen and collusion is more of a specter people like to blame for things rather than an actual thing that happens, I feel pretty confident that if you try to cheat the OPL mechanics, you’ll be caught. When collusion happens, its not subtle and its hard to hide.

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