Sorare NBA is a free-to-play platform where you enter your cards to win prizes at fantasy tournaments. You can either play with no deposit at their common level or accumulate cards through their marketplace and tournaments to enter tiered tournaments. Their contests right now run from Monday through Thursday and Friday through Sunday, and the results from each of these games will be considered for your players’ fantasy scores. For each of the five players in your lineup, their highest fantasy score from the week will be counted as their contribution to your lineup, so if their team has multiple games over this time period, it raises both their ceiling and their floor.
Most Sorare contests follow a salary-cap format where a player’s last 10 games are averaged to create their salary cap hit. The salary cap varies based on the tournament you enter – in some, your highest-salary player isn’t counted towards the cap, giving superstars a ton of value, but in others you have a relatively tight budget to spend. Their standard scoring resembles DraftKings and FanDuel, but they also run tournaments where only certain stats are counted – for instance, only defensive or offensive stats, giving certain players more or less utility.
Just like in DFS, the best plays for a Sorare tournament are usually players benefiting from a bigger role due to team injuries. These players typically have higher projections than their last 10 fantasy average, so they allow you to build a five-player lineup with more projected fantasy points. The standard deviation of a five-person lineup can be as low as about 10% of the projection, so if you put in a lineup with the best plays that game week, you’re much more likely to win than if you enter a random lineup. That’s why it’s important to work the marketplace to manage your collection to maximize the potential of your lineups. If you hear about an injury to a star, you might be able to get a huge edge by scooping up the benefiting players immediately.
Just like DFS, the prizes at Sorare are much higher at the top of their tournaments. Each basketball player is put into a different tier from 1 to 5, and based on where you finish in a tournament, you can receive a card of that quality.
There are two different marketplaces on Sorare: Primary and secondary. The primary marketplace is where Sorare itself auctions off cards, and the Manager Sales market is peer to peer with listings and offers. The supply on player cards for each rarity is predetermined by Sorare, so you know exactly how many of each are going to be available.
You can continue to use cards from the current season in future seasons – however, cards from the current season receive a 5% bonus for their points. This is counteracted by the fact that you can get up to a 5% bonus for each card based on how many tournaments you enter and finish high in – so new cards start at the maximum level of older cards but gain a higher advantage over the course of the season.
The Stokastic Sorare projections are built off the same model that wins you all the money at DFS. For Sorare, we factor in the number of games that a player is scheduled for and what their projection is likely to be to create their projection for the best game during the game week.
The last thing you want is to put all your valuable cards into a lineup and then one of the players is subsequently ruled out. To account for this risk, we discount the projection of questionable players. Sorare has no late swap, so if you play someone who doesn’t play, you might get a prize but you’re unlikely to bring home the win.
The best strategy is to maximize your projection by getting a combination of high-projected players and high-value players. The value column represents the difference between their projection and salary cap hit, and if you pick players that rank highly in value while using all of your salary, you’re going to put yourself in a great position to win.
