BallR

Ballr.com is bringing a new energy to daily fantasy sports. Right off the bat they greet you with an impressive intro video, and it’s easy to tell that the team at Ballr are committed to providing a high quality product. Located in Las Vegas, Ballr came into the daily fantasy market in the spring of 2014. As with all daily fantasy sites, remember to use the RotoGrinders links for the best deposit and sign up bonuses.

Sign up for Ballr now through the RotoGrinders Links and get your 200% Deposit Bonus!

Game Offerings

The games offered at Ballr are standard salary cap daily fantasy contests. While the site is relatively new at the time of this Ballr Review, it appears that Ballr will offer mostly cash games with Guaranteed Tournaments sprinkled in. They offer daily fantasy games at buy-in levels between $1.10 and $108, with the number of entrants ranging between 2 and 100.

They also run contests for various start times throughout the day. For example, if there are 5 MLB games that start after 7 PM and 8 that start before 7 PM, they will split the contests up so you can enjoy multiple game sets per day.

Software/Interface

Main Lobby

Unlike most daily fantasy sites, Ballr doesn’t immediately direct you to the tournament lobby. Instead you land on your own personal dashboard with information such as your game history, overall leaderboards and player news updates. From there you can select the play now option at the top of the screen. You’ll then select your team and after you’ve finished making a lineup you can then join different tournaments.

Many top Grinders like to know if they can build a competitive team before entering a contest, so having the roster building page come before the tournaments lobby is an intriguing twist on the current daily fantasy norm.

Draft Rooms

The draft rooms at Ballr could use some work, but at the very least they try to change up the typical DFS draft room model. The roster sprawls across the top of the screen and you can jump from position to position as you fill out your roster. Beyond that, you’re able to filter by game and search for specific players at each spot.

The other positive at Ballr is the ability to use their late swap feature. Late swap is a controversial subject in daily fantasy, but the ability to do it is something many Grinders really appreciate. In essence, you can change out your players until their individual game starts rather than having one lock time set where you can’t account for late injury news, etc.

Last but not least, Ballr includes a projection number for both your team and your opponents team before games lock. This is a feature that has both its pros and cons. It can be beneficial to have a good idea of where your teams are expected to finish, but there is also some downside to seeing an opponents projection. Players may be vulnerable to making unnecessary changes and the idea of opponents knowing even the slightest detail about your roster can scare some users away.

Mobile Offering

Ballr’s most impressive software offering is their responsive design. If you’ve ever played on StarStreet, you know just how useful a responsive design can be for mobile. Essentially the site will adjust to the size of your screen automatically, making the mobile offering as easy to use as your computer.

Ballr Mobile

Whether you’re playing on Ballr from your phone, iPad or laptop you have full capabilities to join games, create lineups and watch your contests.

Live Scoreboards

Live scoring at Ballr is relatively standard, with the option to “Smacktalk” in the bottom area of the scoreboards and the ability to sort by your Ballr friends on the leaderboard. Check out the sample screenshot of their live scoring page below:

Ballr Live Scoring

Play With Friends

One of the best features at Ballr is their play with friends set up that makes it really easy to join games and compete with people you know. Their landing page when you select “Play with Friends” is really easy to navigate, with the available game options being shown at the top of the page. This is shown in the screenshot below:

BallR Play with Friends

After you select your game time, you can set up the rules for the league. You can choose number of entrants (up to 10 max) and buy-in level (up to $100 max). If you’re not quite ready to put real money on the line, you can even set up free games! After that you draft your own personal team and then can send invites via email or through the site to anyone you want to join!

Rosters, Rules and Scoring

MLB Daily Fantasy at BallR

BallR uses an interesting scoring system that really puts a lot of emphasis on avoiding pitchers who give up a lot of walks. There are a number of scoring differences you can attack to gain an edge on your opponents but by deducting a full point for every walk a pitcher allows (the equivalent of an earned run allowed), you should really be mindful of pitchers with high strike percentages.

They also use 2 pitchers on top of the standard number of batters for their roster format:

SP, SP, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF

And the salary cap for MLB is $100,000. The whole scoring system is shown below and in our “Scoring” section of this BallR review:

BATTER SCORING
Single 1
Double 2
Triple 3
Home Run 4
RBI 1
BB 1
HBP 1
SB 1
RUNS 1
PITCHER SCORING
IP 1
K 1
BB -1
HITS -0.5
ER -1
W 5
CG 2

Rake and Deposit Bonus Details

Deposit Bonus Release

BallR releases their deposit bonuses like most sites in the industry, as a percentage of money played. You earn your deposit bonus as you play at a 5% drip out rate. So for example:

Another way of looking at it is to say that you earn $1 in deposit bonus release for every $20 of buy-ins you put into play.

Rake

Ballr has a pretty standard rake model that decreases in rake percentage as you go higher up in buy-in level. All rake percentages for head-to-head games are shown in the table below:

Buy-In Entrants Prizes Rake
$1.10 2 $2 9.1%
$2.20 2 $4 9.1%
$5.50 2 $10 9.1%
$11 2 $20 9.1%
$21.80 2 $40 8.3%
$54.50 2 $100 8.3%
$108 2 $200 7.4%

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