In my experience it is 80% skill. I play in one very competitive league and a handful of casual leagues and it is night and day on draft night.
I have never finished below the top 5 in my competitive league and never below 3rd in a casual league. Even when my teams get hammered with injuries I am able to play around them by picking up suitable replacements for 2 or 3 weeks.
Trading is also a skill. Knowing the people in your league and the type of player an owner likes and the types of players they devalue is helpful as well.
Winning a league any given year is luck, but I do believe over time it works it out. In my competitive league the only person to win the league twice has also finished last twice and does not have much skill. He has Trout on his team and still secured the first draft pick last year when he posted a .300 winning %. Yet if he makes it into the playoffs seems to ride a train of luck to the finals. His first championship was won due to his opponent having so many good players on playoff teams that his players were getting benched to rest for the real playoffs. While his opponent dominated the % categories his players dominated the counting stats. He won 5/8 offensive cats and posted a .245/.313/.455 stat line. The same thing happened with pitching. I doubt I will ever see such absurdity again.
I have 4 teams, 2 have gotten off to epically bad starts. Two are off to poor starts but still hanging in there. The hot guys in April tend to be the cold guys in May though so can't be too worried about it yet.
There's a ton of luck involved in H2H, I don't see how this can be deniable. There's a website tool out there that can take H2H data and convert that info into the standings of a Roto league. Now there are some adjustments that can be made for H2H (Streaming, riding hot players, benching pitchers in Coors, etc) but there are limits.
My teams are doing really bad, so it's 100% luck unless you get lucky then it's 100% skill.
I'd say standings halfway thru April are 95% luck, nothing to see here yet... I have one team in that can't knock in a run to save their life, 5x5 roto, dead last in RBI but I'm somehow 4.5 ahead of second place. Can you punt RBI and still win your league?
Team Izzy C Mauer 1 E5 2 Cano 3 ARam S Rollins CI LaRoche MI Altuve O Melky, Pagan, Morse, Hunter, Ruggiano SP Lee, Fister, Estrada, McCarthy, Lohse RP Chapman, Jansen, Frieri, Fujikawa Bench 1 Hart S Cabrera O Eaton U Ortiz P Marcum P Miller P Fernandez
OBPlover wrote:There's a ton of luck involved in H2H, I don't see how this can be deniable. There's a website tool out there that can take H2H data and convert that info into the standings of a Roto league. Now there are some adjustments that can be made for H2H (Streaming, riding hot players, benching pitchers in Coors, etc) but there are limits.
Yeah, you can't just calculate H2H data to see how you would do in ROTO for the reasons you've stated and others...even drafting is different for H2H...like I tend to make sure I have better SP in ROTO than I do in H2H. That and punting categories in H2H where you don't generally do that in ROTO, etc. But yes, H2H is certainly more luck involved...at the same time there is pros and cons to each format and I like playing both.
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by bayside » Wed Mar 20, 2013 2:05 am 
