If you haven’t yet, it’s a good idea to go back and read the first five parts of this series before you dive into how to read your league.

Part 1, Basic Concepts
Part 2, Building Your Skill Set
Part 3, Preparation
Part 4, Nomination Strategies
Part 5, Bidding Strategies

At this stage, you are no longer learning concrete things you can do to get better in your salary cap draft. Instead, you are learning how to layer subjective analysis over top of your concrete skills to push your edge just a little bit more. Keep in mind that not much of what you are learning now is an exact science, but the longer you get repetitions in a salary cap draft, the more these things will stand out if you are looking for them, and the more reliable your interpretation of them will become. Even if that only helps you at one or two critical moments in your salary cap draft, it will have been worth it. Stacking small advantages is how you win your salary cap draft and reading your opponents is one of those advantages.

The Psychology of Tells

A lot of people believe that observing tells is something you’re born with or something you have an instinct for. That isn’t necessarily the case. Learning to pick up tells is about nothing more than studying human behavior. Anyone can do it with enough practice and a few lessons from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

The great Mike Caro of poker fame wrote a whole book on poker tells detailing the things to look for that give away the strength of an opponent’s hand. Many of these lessons are directly relatable to a salary cap draft room. As he noted, there are thousands of little tells that you can pick out to give you a clue as to what is in a person’s head but they are too numerous to list. Instead, he boiled everything down to one simple idea: “Players are either acting or they aren’t. If they are acting, then decide what they want you to do and disappoint them.”

Caro’s second great law is also applicable to your salary cap draft. His second law was called the Law of Loose Wiring. Essentially, he posited that if choices are not clearly connected to benefits, then people will usually act unpredictably. Further, he said that even when the choices are clearly connected to the benefits, people will still sometimes act unpredictably. This is the entire heart of auction draft theory.

If you put 12 managers in a room and told them to do a salary cap draft and then placed the same 12 players in the room to do it all over again, the results would be quite different! That’s because the different stimuli in a salary cap draft are unique to each draft. The compounding factor is that not only are those stimuli unique, but sometimes they are unique by only a small difference. What’s worse is that each of these unique stimuli will present themselves in a different order every time. This leads to a different result in a salary cap draft room despite the same people doing the draft with the same players they are allowed to draft. All of this can lead to coming up with false conclusions from time to time. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless to try to figure these things out, but rather, it’s important to watch for repeatable things to observe that can give the right answer to someone who is paying attention in their salary cap draft.

For example, you are in a salary cap draft with a long-time friend and know their tendencies fairly well. Last year, your friend drafted three wide receivers from the Top 12 and now has already landed two receivers from the Top 12 in your current draft. Another Top 12 receiver is currently up for bid, and your friend is bidding again. Looks familiar, right? It’s easy to assume that he is about to repeat his strategy from last year. But think about the stimuli mentioned above. Perhaps your friend has had a few drinks while this draft has taken place but he didn’t drink at all last year. Perhaps your friend planned the same strategy again this year but told himself that if the third wide receiver went over $40, he would instead try to get a running back.

If you assume he’s planning the exact same strategy and A.J. Brown is up for bid, you may be tempted to bid up over $40, thinking Brown is worth that much, and you should enforce a strong market floor for an elite player. The problem is you forgot you can’t afford Brown, and you’ve been counting on your friend to bail you out and bid up into the low-to-mid-$40s for him. You’ve also missed that after the bidding got near $40, your opponent started wildly clicking his pen and becoming visibly anxious.

What you’ve done is assume a rational act from your opponent, bringing us back around to Caro’s Law of Loose Wiring. People won’t act as you think they’re likely to act or are supposed to. In fact, plenty of time, they’re acting almost randomly! By now, you’re into the sixth article in this series, and it may be hard for you to comprehend that someone is acting irrationally if you’ve spent so much time trying to perfect your craft. But the way we do something about it is by finding things about their actions, emotions, behaviors, and traits that paint a picture of what’s going on in their heads.

The things you can pick up from watching people are endless. You’ll never stop learning, but the art of reading human behavior is accessible to anyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s a live draft or an online one; all it takes is paying attention to start to learn to predict the tendencies of people’s actions.

However, there are two things to remember about tells before you proceed to learn about how to look for them in your salary cap draft. The first is that some tells can cut both ways. Without proper context, you won’t always know how to interpret the tell, so the context clues are critical for your read. The second is that you must look at what a person does after you put a read on them to determine if you were right or not. If you don’t remember this critical step, you will never know if you are reading people correctly, and you will never get any better.

Common Salary Cap Draft Tells

As Caro says in his book about tells, there are too many to list because human behavior is a complex tapestry of actions and reactions to the surrounding environment. So never forget that any tell is subject to whatever is happening around that person at that moment. However, there are some basic tells that are fairly common and are good for you to start with.

Change in Behavior

When a drafter is loud and talkative but suddenly quiets down when you nominate Jaylen Waddle, that should tip you off that something is going on. It is the responsibility of the person in the room to determine how to use this tell, what it may mean, and if it matters. But the change in behavior tell is one of the more reliable ones out there. When a drafter is quiet and not bidding but suddenly says “$35” as the bidding slows down on Kyren Williams, your radar should be blaring in your head. The problem is that most drafters aren’t paying attention to who is doing what in the room. You have to get in the habit of watching what people are doing to sense the change. Once you start doing it then it becomes second nature, but it takes a little time to learn.

Watch the Eyes

Your opponent’s gaze is something you should always note in your rubric of what is happening. Aggressive players will try to intimidate you by staring at you while bidding because they want a player. Even-tempered, calculated players will oftentimes stare at the wall or in the other direction when they’re in a bidding war with you. That doesn’t mean they are meek or submissive, it means they are confident in what they’re doing and you are just part of the equation they’re using to determine whether to bid or not. Again, this tell can cut both ways, so make sure you know the context. But rest assured, it is an important part of knowing your opponent when you know if the look in their eyes or the direction of their gaze is typical or unusual.

Bid Timing

This one isn’t a physical tell involving behavior, but it is every bit as important and is one of the more critical tells when doing an online salary cap draft. Pay attention to the bid patterns of the other managers. Do they always bid quickly? Do they wait until there are two seconds on the bid clock, no matter what? Do they bid right away when they want the player but take longer when they are price-enforcing? The speed at which someone registers a bid is important, and you have to decide how it is important. You’ll want to combine this tell with watching for a Change in Behavior (see above) to get a read that is even more dialed in. Does someone always bid quickly but then slow down when they are about to hit their limit? That information is incredibly valuable to have, so make a few notes about manager tendencies as your salary cap draft evolves and it will pay dividends when cap dollars get small.

Past Behavior

Reading people doesn’t always have to be about picking up a physical tell in the moment. The best way to predict future behavior is by tracking past behavior. That can apply year to year if you are in a league with the same people, but it can also apply to what people do as the salary cap draft goes on. If you notice Manager X stares you down when they want a player, well then you can use that on a future player to squeeze more dollars from them. Or maybe you notice Manager Y intently staring at their computer screen, scrolling their mouse when involved in a bid for a player they eventually buy for over the market price. Once you see that, you can start to dial in the reliability of bidding that manager up when they stare a hole through their monitor. You could list endless examples of this, but the concept is simple: Pay attention to past actions and use them as the best indicator of what they will do in the future.

Types of Drafters in a Salary Cap Draft Room

One of the easiest ways to read your league is by learning the types of drafters you’ll typically see in a salary cap draft. Judging a book by its cover is a bad thing in real life, but in a salary cap draft, you can gain useful information from judging people based on appearance or an archetype of typical drafters. Just like any tell, you aren’t always going to be correct, but this is a strong starting point to learning people’s tendencies if you can put your opponents in different categories before you even start.

The ABC Drafter

This drafter is always going to do things predictably. Their plays are right up the middle, they use a set of values that gives them a hard point telling them when to bid and when to stop, and typically, you can tell exactly what they’re doing in any salary cap draft environment. They’ll nominate players they want, they’ll bid on players they want, and conversely, they won’t nominate or bid on players they don’t want. This is the best opponent to go up against in a salary cap draft.

The One Who Waits

Waiting is generally a good trait in a salary cap drafter but waiting too long is the hallmark of this type of drafter. They always have too much money and sometimes they’ll even complain about other managers getting good deals even though they have plenty of money to bid with. Aiming nominations at this person may not work, and attempting to outbid them when they finally decide they want a player can be fruitless.

The Sloppy Drafter

This person often shows up late, has a two-month-old magazine for reference, or forgets key things they need for the draft. (“Hey, what’s the cap again for this league?”) As the draft goes on, this player is unpredictable and lacks a plan. Be cautious trying to pull any moves on this drafter, as it can easily backfire. They won’t act rationally or how you think they should, so it’s better to stay away.

The Expert

This drafter walks into the room with a laptop bag and has planned for all eventualities, down to the drinks they’ll need during the draft. They are prepared, every pen and power cord is in place in their bag, and they have computer programs and cheat sheets all over the place. This person isn’t the one you want to tangle with.

The One Who Can’t Pass Up a Deal

Some drafters get into a salary cap draft, and while they are prepared and generally know player values, they sometimes lack a coherent attack vector for the draft. These drafters drift a bit aimlessly through the draft and snatch up deals when they see them because they don’t know what else to do. Often, these drafters will end up with extremely deep teams, but their teams will lack elite talent and upside. You should watch these players and let them fill their rosters with mediocre talent.

There are plenty of other types of drafters in a salary cap draft room but these are a few of the main ones. Don’t lean into incomplete information with these drafter archetypes. Take a few rounds and dial in your reads but use these starting points to give you a solid spot from which to begin.

Conclusion

The main thing to remember when trying to read people is that it is the total picture that matters, not each individual thing. The experience of a drafter, their roster, their personality, their past actions, and their observable behavior all come together to help you read someone and predict what they will do in your salary cap draft. You must always juxtapose any read against the context of the situation and what other information you have about them. Reading people isn’t easy, but it is a skill you can learn and a skill that pays off in a salary cap draft room.

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