Draft Buddy Enhanced with IBM Watson

Wednesday, Jul 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm ET

We're proud to announce the beta release of our popular Fantasy Football Draft Buddy with IBM Watson integration!

IBM Watson is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform that we are utilizing within the Draft Buddy application to help determine the next best pick in your draft. By analyzing draft picks, remaining players, ADP, roster needs, byes, handcuffs, and many more signals and datasets including previous drafts, Watson can help recommend your next draft pick.

As with any of our products in beta state, the Watson integration remains a work in progress and we anticipate it getting better over the course of time. Machine learning is a technique where a system tries to get better day by day by learning new things, just like we humans do. When you're staring at the draft clock and wondering who should be on your championship team, Watson will make 5 suggestions for you with a primary suggestion highlighted like below.

IBM Watson Fantasy Football

Watson is essentially predicting the next best pick based upon the given situation.

The Draft Buddy is one of the tools available to our Premium Members, and it's designed to aid you during your fantasy football draft. Think of it as an interactive cheat sheet. It's an independent tool for those who want to use the Nerd's draft rankings during their draft instead of or in addition to the default rankings provided by your league management program. You can choose to either enable or disable Watson for each Draft Buddy that you create. There's no additional cost to enable it.

Once inside the Draft Buddy application, the key is to keep up on who drafted which players during your draft. As players are taken off the board during your draft, check them off in the Draft Buddy. The Draft Buddy will keep track of your bye week coverage and show you the most valuable picks remaining on the board including how many players are left at each tier.

The integration of IBM Watson will very likely remain in a beta state for 2019 as development and data aggregation are ongoing.

Join the Discussion

Dlobyes CommentedJul 17, 2019 11:00 am

This is awesome! I already love the Draft Buddy app, so this addition is just going to put it over the top. Can't wait to use it.

stubish CommentedAug 13, 2019 11:00 am

I mean the only thing that would improve this now is auto integration with the draft so it automatically removes picked players... but other than that it's got everything. I love the tier view. Watson seems to makes some choices I wouldn't but that's a good think, more considerations!