Photo: USA Today Sports

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.