This article explains how autopick drafts work, and tells you some of their limitations.

When you're unable to draft players for yourself, Yahoo! autopick will make intelligent choices for you. This happens when you sign up for an autopick league and set your draft status to Ready, or if you aren't present for all or part of your live draft.

Here’s how the Autopick draft works

The auto-pick system first selects the highest-rated available player that can fill one of the open starting positions on your roster. It then determines the appropriate bench positions and fills them. All player selections are based first on your pre-rankings and then on Yahoo!’s default rankings. You can participate in an autopick draft just like you did during your mock drafts.

Active and Bench Picks

It's important to remember that all starting positions are filled before any bench players are chosen. The system determines a maximum number of players to draft per position (starters plus bench) so that your roster doesn’t end up with too many players at any single position. That is, the system doesn’t pick five players from the same position for your team in a league that has a single starting player in that position.

Pre-Ranking Players

Regardless of your league type, it's a good idea for all managers to pre-rank players in case they miss any part of the draft.

There are several ways to open the page for pre-ranking players:

• From your team page, click Pre-Draft Player Rankings.
• From the "My Team" section, Roster page, click Pre-Draft Player Rankings.
• From "Draft Central", select Edit My Rankings

Also, if you sign up for a public autopick league, you might end up being placed in a live draft league (including auction draft leagues) in need of players. If this happens, your team is still auto-picked.

Please note: The auction draft format is specifically designed for live drafts. The "autopick" functionality was only added to ensure drafts are completed at their scheduled times. The draft strategy involved in Auction formats is not autopick friendly, as we must include limits on what we allow the system to bid for each player. With this hard limit in place, it is very difficult for an autopick team to obtain top quality players, as managers who are live drafting will typically out bid the hard maximum that is in place.

Even though this video highlights Fantasy Baseball, the concepts still apply to Fantasy Football, Fantasy Basketball, and Fantasy Hockey.