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NOTE: As of Winter 2015, StarsDraft has restricted gameplay in all but four states. We’ll update this review at a later date if the site again becomes a viable place to play for our community members.

StarsDraft was launched in September 2015, roughly a month after gaming giant Amaya reached an agreement to acquire and re-brand Victiv, a year-old daily fantasy sports site. With a clean interface, a number of innovative tools and features, and a growing offering of sports and game formats, StarsDraft is not only a site worth exploring, but one that might be poised for massive growth given its close relationship with the poker community.

Game Offerings and Prize Pools

At the time of this writing, offers daily fantasy NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and PGA. Given PokerStars’ international reach, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this suite of offerings continue to grow, perhaps with the addition of soccer.

Victiv (before it was StarsDraft) originally launched in September 2014. Right out of the gates, the site offered a nice mix of salary cap Guaranteed Prize Pool (GPP) tournaments, double-ups, and head-to-head games. For Week 1 of the 2014 NFL season, they had $16,000 worth of GPP’s posted, including $4,000 in freerolls. For 2015 kickoff? StarsDraft has more than $180,000 in guaranteed cash prizes in its lobby for Week 1. The site’s annual growth has been impressive, to say the least.

During the 2014-15 NBA season, StarsDraft had grown to the point that it was ready to offer a seasonal championship event, posting a $150,000 basketball final. While the event was online-only, it was an impressive feat for a site that had just turned six months old.

Overall, when you think of playing DFS on StarsDraft, also think of the word “momentum.” The 2014 calendar year saw the site grow its game offerings, user base and tournament prize pools over the remainder of 2015 and beyond.

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Roster structure and Scoring

NFL rosters at StarsDraft are made up of a QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, TE, FLX, FLX, and a DEF. There is no roster position for a kicker at StarsDraft, which might delight some daily fantasy diehards.

NBA rosters are fairly standard, with the notable addition of a “SUB” position. After you draft 2 G’s, 3 F’s, 1 C and 2 FLX’s, your final player is a sub. Your sub can be any athlete with a salary of $5000 or less. This player does not count towards your salary cap while building your team. Your sub’s score will only be counted towards your total if it surpasses someone else in your lineup. While this was originally intended as a means to protecting yourself from the pesky late scratches that NBA has made infamous, some savvy DFS plays are able to find creative ways to use the sub as a cog in their roster-building. Essentially, with the sub, you’re picking nine NBA players, but only taking the eight best scores towards your final score.

Anonymous H2H games

Another exciting feature at StarsDraft is the anonymous head-to-head game format. Users can join or create heads-up matches without knowing who their opponent will be until after rosters lock. This helps to eliminate targeting of users and adds a new twist on H2H games.

Quick enter feature

Once you have created a roster, StarsDraft makes it incredibly easy to join other games using the same lineup. Once you see a game you’d like to join, all you need to do is hover your mouse over the game and the quick-enter lighting bolt appears. From here, you can quickly see payouts, entries or submit your lineup.

VICTRON

VICTRON is an incredible and innovative feature you’ll find nowhere else. The VICTRON actually creates a lineup for you based on the statistical categories that you choose. All you have to do is drag the sliders to your desired position and the VICTRON runs algorithms behind the scenes to build an initial roster suggestion from your stat settings. From here, you can adjust the players you want to keep and have a solid base for your lineup creation.

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Player Salaries

The player salaries at StarsDraft are also very unique. Their explanation of the salary structure is as follows:

“Salaries are algorithmically geared towards being as predictive as possible of actual athlete performance. There is no systematic bias across positions. The algorithms are retrained regularly and the methods used are state of the art. We are excited to be offering what we feel are the sharpest salaries in the industry.”

Interactive Dashboard

If you’re a fan of sweating games and watching your lineups perform live this dashboard is for you. It gives you multiple ways of watching how each of your lineups are performing and makes it easy to track your position in each game.

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Rake and Cashier

The rake at StarsDraft also is set up to be different from most other sites. There is no flat rate 10% rake across standard games. Instead, rake varies from 7.5%-9%, and for the anonymous H2H tables rake currently is 5%-6%.

Deposits and Withdrawals

StarsDraft accepts traditional credit cards & PayPal, and also offer Bitcoin payments. They will be adding additional methods in the future. Withdraws can be made via a selection of PayPal, Check or Bitcoin.

Long story, short: Don’t be confused by the re-branding! Victiv was a strong, up-and-coming daily fantasy site, and its momentum should only continue to grow now that it has been acquired and spun into StarsDraft. It’s a DFS platform that certainly is worth checking out.

If you have additional questions about the ins and outs of StarsDraft, feel free to ask them in our Forum and we’ll be happy to help.

Enjoy the games!

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