What is a Snake Draft?
You’ve been asked to join a hockey pool and want to take a serious run at winning and impressing all the other players. You are told that it is a snake draft style hockey pool and the number of players to pick and all the details but you have one question…What is a snake draft?
In a regular fantasy hockey pool, the Snake Draft name is for the way the fantasy draft of players moves along. In most hockey pool drafts, each team has one pick per round in an order that is predetermined by whoever is in charge of the pool. The number of rounds in your pool will depend on how many players you need to draft which is basically – how many roster spots you will need to fill. If you are picking 6 forwards, 4 defensemen and 2 goalies that is 12 roster spots and a total of 12 rounds in your snake draft. Everyone in the pool starts to pick their players in the predetermined order until everyone has picked in the 1st round. When you get to the final pick of the round, the team that chose last will now choose 1st in round 2 and heads back to the player that originally picked 1st in round one to be the last pick of round 2. This then repeats itself until all the players are picked.
In simple terms, a snake draft is a draft in which the order of picks reverses after each round.
Why is this done? It is meant to even out the advantage for fantasy players that get to draft early have in picking the best players available by letting the players picking later in the draft have better picks in the next round, therefore making the pool fair for all the competitors. Snake Drafts are commonly used for Fantasy Hockey Leagues to provide a fair and balanced playing field for each player no matter where they originally get to pick in the draft.
Here's an example of how a Snake Draft works:
Let’s assume that you have a hockey pool with 10 guys in it and you need to pick the 12 players discussed earlier, the 1st round of picks go in order starting from 1-10. When you drew numbers for where to pick in the draft you got lucky #1 and get to pick first overall in the snake draft. You get to pick the best player in the draft but once the picks get to #10, the 11th pick goes again to the 10th player, the 12th pick goes to the 9th player and so on until it gets back to you at #1 at which time will be the 20th pick. Then you get to snake back and pick 21st and then the order continues again until you’ve picked all twelve players continuing up and down like going from the head of the snake to the tail and then back up hence the term Snake Draft.
To get a better sense of how a Snake Draft works, check out the example below.
DAILY FANTASY HOCKEY SNAKE DRAFTS
If you’ve finished your fantasy hockey pool and want to do more snake drafts there is one fantasy hockey site to try and that’s Draft.com. They are a site that launched a few years ago and were bought out by Paddy Power Betfair which is one of the biggest sports betting sites so the promos and free contests do come up quite often for players especially when you first sign up. By joining with our links you get our exclusive promo of a FREE $3 contest using Draft.com promo code - DRAFTCASH
Here are some of the reasons to play at Draft:
- EASY TO DRAFT – Play in a hockey pool snake draft with 2 – 10 players that takes only minutes to complete. Play against your friends in a private league or against other online players.
- DAILY OR WEEKLY POOLS – Don’t want to commit to a full NHL season? Play in a weekly or even daily tournament and collect your winnings sooner – like when the games end, not at the end of the season!.
- EASIER TO WIN – Snake Draft contests are easier to win than salary cap contests
Live Snake Drafts VS. Offline Snake Drafts
There are two versions of hockey pools at Draft - Live Snake Drafts and Offline Snake Drafts. A Live Snake Draft has players picking their teams in real time at a scheduled time of day/night. When the draft starts you sit and watch all the picks until it is your turn to pick just like a hockey pool with your buddies or on large sites like ESPN, CBS or Yahoo.
An Offline Snake Draft is where you can sign up to a pool or league and once the pool is filled with all the required players, a computer determines a draft order and then automatically picks the teams based on a set ranking of fantasy hockey players. Participants in the pool can change the pre-set rankings so that if there are certain NHL players that are preferred or not, they can be bumped up, or removed to allow for a better chance of that player being selected for your team by the computer. When the computer has completed the draft, your team is set for that night’s or that week’s games. This type of offline snake draft is typically what you would see if you signed up to a daily fantasy hockey site like Draft.com with the Draft Promo Code DRAFTCASH.
Being official partners with sites such as DraftKings, FanDuel, Fantasy Draft and Draft, etc... we may receive compensation or other benefits for advertising. Please help us improve our content by using our links which will also earn new players the best bonuses and deals at each site!
