Issue #4, June 2013


** PureStrat Skype Tournament - My Experiences -Part I  **
      (article by Wolfman Shapiro about his participation in the Pure Strat June Draft Tournament,
       in this part he describes everything he did to prepare and the team he drafted.)

(Notes from the Wolfman: It is my hope in this article to help those of our members who wish to join us in September for the on-line convention, how to prepare for either or both of the tournaments we will offer utilizing the software program called Skype. There were a number of steps I performed which I believe made it easier for me to prepare for the draft and to have a competitive team.  My goal with this article is to offer insights to others so their experience in our September tournaments or some future Pure Strat skype tournament will be enjoyable as well.)
 

As some of our early members of the newsletter will remember, since the early days of this newsletter I spoke about the idea of doing some type of on-line tournaments.  I wasn't sure if anyone had done such a thing yet, but I knew I had to contact the folks at Star Tournaments to find out. (So in a future article, I will share what happened to me in a live tournament I participated in Chicago through Star which took place a few years back.)  Thus, there were a few people I knew within Star, that I could contact to see if they might want to work with us on doing a special tournament weekend. However, as I started to explore this option, people kept telling me about a group called Pure Strat.  I wasn't sure what this was all about, but eventually was told to contact Bryan Albin (read his interview), the coordinator.  I was told that Bryan was doing an on-line tournament and instead of using the computer's game netplay, he was using skype. To make a long story short, I had several dialogues with Bryan about our tournament idea which he was 100% for. But also I knew I had to experience the Skype tournament for myself.

So in May of this year, I asked Bryan if he would allow me to participate in the June Skype tournament, so I could write about my experiences for the newsletter and he agreed.  He also told me that the other veteran players would be very friendly and help me along the way, but they expected that I wouldn't offer much of a challenge (little do they know what happens to an SOM Wolfman :-)).  So this article is to discuss everything I did to prepare for the Skype tournament as I did not have any parts of the physical game, I just have the computer game and the SOM baseball cards.

What Card Set was Used for the Draft and Tournament: The most recent set based on the 2012 MLB season. But for Star, for a player to be eligible to be drafted, they have to have a certain amount of plate appearances (PAs) for the hitters and innings pitched for the pitchers (starters different than relievers).

So here is a quick overview of how to prepare your card set for the draft:

1) Hitters must have 300+ plate appearances; only catchers can qualify with 250+ plate appearances
(all hitters are eligible to be used as much as you wish during the tournament except when the hitter is injured he is out for the remainder of the current game)

2) Starting Pitchers - they must have 125 innings pitched and require 3 days of rest before they can start again (since we would play our opponents a 4 game series, alternating between your park and their park) - thus you need at least a four man rotation although some managers will select five starting pitchers including a pitcher who can start and relief.

3) Relief Pitchers - must have at least 40 innings pitched so many of the starters who have less then 125 innings but are a starter/reliever could be used in relief.

On the Purestrat website was a list you could download of all the eligible players.

4) A player can only play the position listed on his card. If you run out of a position, due to pinch hitting with a combination of an injury, any remaining hitter can play that position with the worst fielding rating and error rating. If you run out of pitchers (for an extra inning game), there is a chart you use for a hitter to be used as a pitcher.

I am only discussing the usage rules, so you can understand what players can be drafted.

What is Skype and how does it work: Skype has become the defacto free software program for any type of computer and operating system, that changes your computer literally into a video telephone. If you have linked to your computer, speakers or headphones; a microphone and a webcam with a fast internet connection, you can see and hear the person you are speaking to. And the sound is so good, it sounds like the person is in the room with you. And usually the microphone can pick up people talking in the room with the computer.

To get your copy of skype go to:  www.skype.com -- download this free program on your computer, run the program to set it up on your computer and decide what your skype nickname will be. For example my skype nickname is joshaushapiro17.  If you know another person's skype nickname you can invite them to be friends and when confirmation to your invite is given, you can call each other. Also when you are on-line and have skype running, you can see when other people are on-line. You can either give them an audio or video call or just text them.  Skype makes it very easy, for example, to work with a person on a project, anywhere in the world.

For the Skype Draft Tournament, generally the video capability is not used, only the audio. So for our draft, where we had one call with everyone connected, we spoke out loud our draft pick for each round when it was our turn and everyone could hear.  We only had one minute to decide however, so we wouldn't be up all night - the draft took about 3 hours to complete with 8 teams.

So to use Skype for the draft and to play your game in this tournament you need speakers or headphones, a microphone and a fast internet.

Other Accessories needed to Play the Tournament Games: 

1) Pitchers Hitting Cards (A Pure Strat member scanned the 8 pitcher's hitting cards for me and sent me the scan via email - I printed it out) -- this is needed since there is no DH

2) Super Advanced Fielding and Strategy Charts - Once again, since I only had the computer game I didn't have the charts and Star Tournament had created a two page document that features all the charts and table together - this was scanned for me and I was able to print it out.

3) 3 Dice and 20 Sided Die - since you are not playing your opponent live nor using Netplay of the computer game, how can both you and your opponent see these die at the same time. Pure Strat uses an online dice rolling system which is provided by www.strat-o-matic.net .  If you would like to review this system, go the website mentioned (it changes it to: http://beta.strat-o-matic.net/forums/ ) and at the top of the webpage you will see Baseball Dice Roller. Click on this, and following these instructions:

a) Signup as a new user (type in your login and password)

b) then after you sign in, click on create game - once a game is created you get a game number, your opponent enters this game number for an existing game so you both see the screen with the die

c) once you are in the game, on the screen you will see i) 3 dice; ii) a twenty sided; iii) 2 die -- when you click on any of these three die combos, they will spend and give a result which you can see visualize and which is written.

4) Scoresheets - I find it is easier to view the progress of the game by keeping it on a scoresheet - also in case there is some rule infracture you can report it later. Again Bryan scanned for me a scoresheet which I was able to print out as many copies as I needed.

Ok, so these are the basic tools which allow the games to be played ... now lets look at how to prepare for the draft. Star Tournaments has a number of special tools and spreadsheets which can help you do your draft easier, especially if you have never drafted with the card set used before.

How I prepared for the Draft and to build my Team for the Tournament: 

First I am going to discuss the tools before I make any recommendations about what type of team to build.

1) If you can purchase from the game company what is called Ratings Files or Book which comes either as Excel Spreadsheets or is a book format that is printed. I only purchase the data files so I can sort all of the players rating in excel.

I sorted the players as follows:

HITTERS: I sorted separately by how they performed against LH and RH pitching --
Onbase Percentage & HRs with Diamonds and then sorted by Stealing and Speed
plus I also sorted the positions by defense.

(by doing it separately for LH and RH, I could look when I needed a certain player vs a specific type of pitching, to see who was available and the highest rated very quickly)

PITCHERs: I sorted separately by how they performed against LH and RH hitters plus I sorted them into right handed and left handed pitchers. Then I sorted by lowest on-base and home runs allowed
and by starters and relievers. Again by having these excel spreadsheets in these sorts I could look
quickly at whatever type of pitcher I wanted and who was left.

For the Hitters, I noticed people created players who were good only against one type of pitcher
and the same for pitchers, every team seem to want to have reverse relief pitchers.

Another item people would watch for on the pitchers, is which pitchers had little or no home runs
given up off their card or a team with a low chance of diamond homeruns will take pitchers who had many diamonds on their card.

2) Sort the Cards -- I also went through all the actual cards, took out the players who didn't have enough PA or innings pitched, and then I sorted all the cards into their positions - the challenge in this sort were players who had multiple positions, such as many outfields who play then one outfield position and the same for players who play multiple infield positions or an infield and outfield position.
Purestrat has some other tables as spreadsheets you can use which rank the players which help and I will explain this in a moment.  Anyway once I had all my piles of players by position, I further sorted them by:

-- right or left handed hitter or pitcher; the best players in each pile on top

(since we had 8 teams drafting, I figured out for each position which were the 8 top players I would accept and if there were any positions which didn't have at least 8 players I liked that I might have to pick higher in the draft).

I had the cards in their piles, ready for when we did the draft so I could look at the players cards. One disadvantage I had verse the other veteran players is that they all had played in tournaments before so they knew the players cards quite well.

3) Special Tables from Purestrat which Rank the Players and Give You the Drafts from Other Tournaments (Very Important)

On the Star Tournaments website (www.startournaments.com) are the following tables and charts which are available on the link shown on the left side of the main page entitled: APS, Drafts and Eligible Players:

Average Pick Sheet - this table shows the average pick in the draft when each player was taken.
For example for the 2012 Card Set, the Average Ten Picks of players are:
Trout, Cano, Votto, McCutchen, Medlen, M. Cabrera, Stanton, Y. Molina, D. Ortiz

-- a supplemental or different version of this sheet is the Average Pick by Position which shows you the players rated by when they are picked by position played. This version gives you an idea of which are the top players for each position as sometimes a player will be picked out of their normal position like a great hitter.

Eligible Players - a list of all the players that can be used in the tournament.

Draft Summaries - a summary from prior tournaments what each participant drafted. This is very helpful as it gives you an idea what type of teams have been drafted and you can see which teams had the most success.  You may notice a pattern amongst how the winning teams were constructed.

Player Winning Percentage - this table shows by player, which players were part of the most successful winning teams (percentage of winning).

You can download all of these documents and print them out and have them handy during the draft. Again besides studying them before our draft, I did consult them along with the cards organized by position and the excel Rating Files sorted.  But there is one other tool you may want to use that I did as the draft went on, put I had trouble getting it to work, in the next section.

4) DSIM Tool - What is It? (Draft Simulator)

Stan Suderman, another Star Board Member, has created a software program that has programmed inside all the players and when they are picked. This tool is able to show you what are the best players available in the draft coming up for your pick plus it can keep track for each team who has been picked.

The challenge I had with this program is that it was created for earlier versions of MS Windows and it did not run on my Windows 7 64 Bit computer. So after trying to find a DOS based program that worked on my computer and none of them worked, I went the route of getting a free Virtual Machine program offered by VMWARE called Vmare Player.  What this program did is create a computer within my computer (or Viritual Space) where I could setup Windows XP.  So my computer was running Windows 7 but in this virtual space I was running Windows XP which could run DSIM.

So if this situation happens to you to get DSIM to work then download vmware player from www.vmware.com. I used a 2 Gig space on my hard drive to setup the virtual space. Then I found via the internet a Bit Torrent for Windows XP, Release 3, it was in an ISO form, I pointed VMWARE to the ISO file and it started to install in the virtual space, Windows XP. In order to download Windows XP via a Bittorrent file, I needed BitComet which reads these files and then located the file to be downloaded. It took about 30 minutes to install Windows XP and then via this operating system, which I setup with internet connectivity I was able to download DSIM from the Star Tournaments website. To setup DSIM you just unzip it and run the program file, dsim.exe.

Here is an example of the screen of what the DSIM program looks like, we will assume a draft of 10 teams:

( A brief description of the screen - you can define whether a human or computer makes
a pick and the formulea used is for a team with balanced diamonds or ball park homers.
Each player has a number associated with them that you type in.  So for example above,
the DSIM program is asking for team 1 (out of 10) to make their pick. Also you will notice
the program is presenting the top 16 players available at this pick and you see how the
players are ranked with Trout first, followed by Cano and McCutchen and so on..)

The DSIM program may appear a little hard to understand but there is a guide that explains how each function works and what the numbers represent. I not only used DSIM during the draft, I also used it before to simulate a draft and practice what players I would draft. If anyone has any question about DSIM or the other reports given by Star Tournaments, feel free to email us and we are happy to help you. All of these reports and a few others will be available to the SOM Convention participants for the two draft tournaments we will hold.

Ok, this brings you up to speed with all the tools I worked with to prepare for the draft. If you want to see an example of the reports I mentioned, just go to the Star Tournaments website which is where you can also download DSIM (version 16) and play with that. I didn't find the instruction file for DSIM on the Star site, so email me and I can send it to you as an attachment with an email or we should be able to offer this via the convention website.

Yes I know I spent a long time prepare for my first Purestrat Skype Draft Tournament, and when we were drafting with only a minute to go, there was a bit of pressure but the Tables and DSIM gave me quick information to read. So now lets discuss the actual draft and what team I was able to create.

DRAFT FOR THE JUNE PURESTRAT SKYPE TOURNAMENT

The first thing we had to determine, is who would get which pick in the draft. For the June tournament we had 14 contestants, which was broken down into two divisions of 8, with DSIM picking for a dummy team that wouldn't play. This was to dilute the players as 8 teams is the best to play with.

So Bryan Albin, the Tournament Director, had us go to the Dice Roller site I mentioned before, and we each rolled a twenty sided dice twice - with the highest rolls getting the first pick in the draft and so on. Then the division were divided by those who picked on Monday, June 3rd were in division A and those who picked Wednesday, June 5th were in division B. I chose to pick on June 5th so I had more time to prepare and my twenty sided dice rolls earned me 3rd pick out of 8.

Now for the draft we would pick 25 players and a stadium. We needed to have at least two players who could play all field positions and at least four starting pitchers with as many relievers as we wished. Then as I mentioned for my draft, I and the other six managers got together on skype via voice and we would announce our draft picks. The draft started from first to last pick and then reversed and came back which in the second round was last to first. This mean the teams in the first and last position (for the most part) got two picks in a row.

Now I am going to reveal my strategy about the type of team I wanted to play with. Since my experience participating in the playoffs of my computer league (the CBA) is that I do better when I have a team with good power, defense, speed and good relief pitching, this is what I set out to do.

Now at the end of this section, I will share how the draft for Division B went, so when I share my report next month about how I actually did in this tournament you will be able to see what team I drafted and what type of teams I had to play against.  I want to discuss a bit more about my strategy for my first picks and overall.

At 3rd pick, I had a chance to get McCutchen, a dynamic one outfielder who could do everything or Votto, who has the best on base card of the set but has a high injury. As I suspected, Trout and Cano would be picked before me and they were.  I choose to go with Votto as I felt there were many other good CFs (I like to have a CF-1) and only one Joey Votto.  As you will see from the table of picks in our draft I took Beltre, who I used to have in the CBA, as there weren't very many good power third basemens like Beltre. Obviously, from these two picks I was going to wait to get my starting pitchers not choosing to go with the obsolute aces.  Thus my strategy would be to pick up good 2nd level starting pitchers with low HR chances on their cards.

Since in the first two rounds, few (only one) closer was taken, I waited to take my closer Kimbrel in my 3rd pick as Rodney (the best reliever) was gone. Then the top SS, 2B and Cs I would have selected were gone by the 4th round so I went with Carlos Gonzalez a LF-1 with speed and power and took the reverse lefty reliever McGee in the 5th round, to give me at the back end of the game two great relievers and what I hoped would be an awesome defense.

As in the CBA my strategy would be to be able to outscore my opponent in the beginning of the game and come in with great relief and defense at the end.

I finished filling out my 1 outfield with Heyward in RF (6th round), A. Jones in CF (7th round). So only with Beltre so far did I have a true power hitter at this point but all five hitters I had could of course hit home runs too.  In the 8th I felt Scutaro was the best all around 2nd basemen (rated a "2" fielder) left and Reyes was the best SS left but also because I like speed too, so he was my 9th pick. So not until the 10th round did I get my first starter, I went with Darvish, again a good starter with low homers and then in the 11th I picked S. Perez for my catcher, who was a good hitter with good defense.

To finish the draft I added as starters (the round in parenthesis): Vogelsong (14), Miley (16, starter-reliever), J. Parker (20) and Cobb (22);

For Relievers: R. Ross (12, lefty reverse); J. Smith (13, righty reverse); Pestano (19, righty ace); Valverde(25)

Backup Infield (Scutario covered 3B): B. Phillips (15, 2B-1); B. Butler(18, 1B); B. Crawford (24, SS-1)

Backup OF: Victorino (17, CF/LF-2), C. Ross (23, OF-3)  Backup C: Pierzynski (21)

My Stadium was Chicago AL which has a ballpark rating of 1-7 Single (L&R) and 1-19 HR (L&R)

So basically I had a one fielder at every position but Catcher, 2 AA's stealers, 2 A stealers & 2 B's
plus 7 hitters who hit 20 or more home runs.

At the time of writing this report, after four series my team is 14-6, three of our opponents we took three out of four in our series, one series we swept and one series we couldn't get any hitting and the one game we won was in 14 innings, 2-1, winning run scoring on a HBP.

I tried my best to create a balanced team as I had in the CBA last year, that had power, speed, defense, good relief pitcher and starters with a low HR on their cards, it seems it was working. I strongly recommend that if you decide to participate in one of the two draft tournaments (or both) in our convention in September, that you take advanatage of my e-book, "Secrets of the Wolfman" (only asking for any donation) to help you prepare as well.

Anyway, here is the draft from my division

 

	Peter Waterstreet	Dave Hegg	Wolfman Shapiro	Mike B / Ben S	DSIM	Dave Bengert	Willie Dominguez	Wayne Cannon
1	Trout,M	Cano,R	Votto,J	MEDLEN,K	Molina,Y	McCutchen,A	Ortiz,D	Cabrera,Miguel
2	Ruiz,C	Fielder,P	Beltre,A	VERLANDER,J	RODNEY,F	Headley,C	Posey,B	Stanton,G
3	CHAPMAN,A	KERSHAW,C	KIMBREL,C	Cabrera,Mel	Hill,A	Hamilton,J	Jackson,A	Desmond,I
4	BALFOUR,G	Montero,M	Gonzalez,C	Wright,D	Braun,RyanJ	DICKEY,R	Longoria,E	Mauer,J
5	Pedroia,D	Ethier,A	MCGEE,J	LOHSE,K	Andrus,E	Choo,S	FISTER,D	Zobrist,B
6	Rollins,J	HERNANDEZ,FELI	Heyward,J	Jaso,J	Encarnacion,E	Utley,C	PEAVY,J	ROMO,S
7	Craig,A	Gordon,A	Jones,Adam	JANSEN,K	COOK,R	TAZAWA,J	JOHNSON,JIM	Ruggiano,J
8	Hunter,Torii	Fowler,D	Scutaro,M	Escobar,A	Kemp,M	STRASBURG,S	Walker,N	ATCHISON,S
9	Ramirez,Aram	PUTZ,J	Reyes,Jose	JANSSEN,C	Bautista,J	MORROW,B	Cespedes,Y	OLIVER,D
10	WEAVER,JERED	LOPEZ,W	DARVISH,Y	Carpenter,M	Dirks,A	Gonzalez,Adria	GREINKE,Z	HERNANDEZ,DAVI
11	GONZALEZ,G	Aybar,E	Perez,S	Werth,J	FURBUSH,C	PRICE,D	BELISARIO,R	Bourn,M
12	Pujols,A	Holliday,M	ROSS,R	Jay,J	NATHAN,J	MOTTE,J	O'FLAHERTY,E	BURTON,J
13	CUETO,J	PERKINS,G	SMITH,JOE	Lucroy,J	GALLARDO,Y	Rosario,W	DAVIS,W	Rizzo,A
14	BOGGS,M	Forsythe,L	VOGELSONG,R	Prado,M	WILHELMSEN,T	Jeter,D	KURODA,H	CAIN,M
15	Jones,C	Goldschmidt,P	Phillips,B	SALE,C	ZIMMERMANN,J	DOTEL,O	SORIANO,R	WAINWRIGHT,A
16	Bloomquist,W	Cabrera,A	MILEY,W	KONTOS,G	HUDSON,T	DOOLITTLE,S	Harper,B	MARSHALL,S
17	Murphy,David	Chavez,Eric	Victorino,S	PATTON,T	Granderson,C	Freeman,F	Cabrera,E	Laroche,A
18	OGANDO,A	Reddick,J	Butler,B	H0S20	SHIELDS,J	Ellis,A	Hardy,J	Keppinger,J
19	Doumit,R	Wieters,M	PESTANO,V	Aoki,N	Freese,D	PEREZ,L	Denorfia,C	Dejesus,D
20	BRESLOW,C	DEMPSTER,R	PARKER,J	PAPELBON,J	Gomes,J	Rodriguez,Alex	Espinosa,D	ESTRADA,M
21	Colvin,T	CLEVELAND	Pierzynski,A	Hanigan,R	Trumbo,M	Viciedo,D	Crisp,C	Santana,C
22	Gomez,C	FRIERI,E	COBB,A	Venable,W	Solano,D	Ellis,M	Morneau,J	BILLINGSLEY,C
23	Pacheco,J	BETANCOURT,R	Ross,C	Belt,B	Napoli,M	Wells,C	Castro,J	O'DAY,D
24	Kinsler,I	THORNTON,M	Crawford,B	NORBERTO,J	MORALES,F	Drew,S	Nelson,C	Maxwell,J
25	HARRELL,L	Quentin,C	VALVERDE,J	Carroll,J	BLEVINS,J	DETWILER,R	COLORADO	STULTS,E
26	CINCINNATI	FIERS,M	CHIAL	Swisher,N	BOSTON	PHILADELPHIA	GRILLI,J	TORONTO

Final Notes from the Wolfman:  Well I hope this detailed overview helped you to prepare for a Skype Draft Tournament. It really is like playing a person live as you are constantly talking to your opponent via skype and both see all the same results. One of thing which I didn't fully do, which you must to prepare is going through the Purestrat rules.  The area I was weak at was knowing how all the super advance rules worked - but the other participants helped me out when I had a question. And by the time I finish playing this tournament I should be pretty much up to speed. There are a few rules Purestrat does different then the ones in the game, either they don't use it or they have an enhanced version. But I found the actual playing of the games went very smoothly and I think those of you who join us in September might decide to use Skype over Netplay, to bring your games on-line.

For part II next month, I will discuss how my team did - we will be playing 28 games, six - 4 game series verse our opponents in our division and an extra series of 4 games vs. a team with a near record. The top three teams in each of the two division by total record qualify for the playoffs. The first place team in each division gets a bye in the first round. During the playoffs all the series are done with best of seven. So we still have 12 games to play to see if we can make the playoffs, at the time of writing this report, by early July we will now.
 

(Reminder: As you have read on our main page, working with very good friends and fellow SOM fanatics at Star Tournaments like Bryan and Gene, and Peter {who you met in our April issue}, we are creating a special weekend in September where three baseball tournaments will be offered via the internet.  If you want to sign up now for the free newsletter for the September SOM On-line Baseball Convention or even go ahead and officially register for the small entrance fee, head over to: http://www.stratalliance.info -- sometime in early July we will update this current page to a full website that will have all the information you will need to prepare for September, but also we are available via email to answer any questions. We thank Bryan Albin of Pure Strat for their help to make the new website for the convention possible.)