How drafting works in Gorilla Draft

A Gorilla Draft league picks whole teams. You might hold the Packers, the Dodgers and Arsenal at the same time, and every game any of them play scores for you.

Setting the league up

A commissioner chooses which sports the league drafts from and how many teams each manager holds in each one. A league can run a single sport or mix as many as it likes. The practical bounds are: 2 to 32 managers, 1 to 25 roster slots per sport, and a pick clock between 5 and 600 seconds.

Every league is invite only. The commissioner shares one link, and anyone holding it can join until the league is full.

Snake order

The default order is a snake. Managers pick in order in the first round, then in reverse for the second, then forwards again. Picking last in round one means picking first in round two, which is what stops the first pick being worth more than the rest of the draft.

A league can choose a straight repeating order instead. Either way the order is fixed once the board goes live: after the first pick lands, the order stops being a setting and becomes the record of what happened.

The clock

Each manager has the league's pick clock to choose. The board shows who is on the clock, what is still available, and how long is left. When the clock runs out the pick is made automatically from the best remaining team, so one manager stepping away does not stall everybody else's evening.

Managers can also turn auto draft on deliberately, queue teams in advance, and let the board take their picks in order when their turn arrives.

Picking across several sports

Roster slots are per sport. A league with two NFL slots and one MLB slot gives every manager exactly that, and the board will not let a manager spend a baseball slot on a football team. The available list can be filtered to one sport or read as a single ranked pool across all of them.

After the draft

Once every slot is filled the draft closes and scoring begins from the league's start date. Teams keep scoring for whoever holds them, every day their sport plays. Leagues can enable trades, with an optional veto: a trade can be held for a set number of hours and cancelled if enough of the league objects.

What a good draft looks like

Because each sport pays on its own published rate, there is no arbitrage in picking the sport with the most games. The edge is in picking teams that will beat their benchmark. A baseball team that wins 105 games against a 97.7 benchmark is worth more than a football team that wins 12 against 11.9, and the rate card is public before the draft so that judgement is the whole game.