Who is Draftstars?
Owned by Fantasy Studio, Draftstars India is a daily fantasy sports platform offering fantasy games for users in India. They offer fantasy games for cricket, football, NBA and Kabaddi. With a vision to deliver the best fantasy sports experience, Draftstars aims at offering engaging games to their users. They understand the need of fantasy sports audience and look to build their platform around the excitement, grit and glory of the sports. Draftstars offer Android app support for Indian users to compete in their daily fantasy contests on the go.
Effective Design
Their website is well designed allowing users to navigate easily and introduce themselves to all the features. As with every other fantasy sports site, playing is simple and users can get started in 3 steps. Choosing a contest from the lobby, selecting players in the team, and watching the leaderboard for live point updates. The leaderboard that displays all the points earned by each player in the team drafted by the users is one of the best and possibly the unique selling point for Draftstars.
● The leaderboard showcases all the entries allowing users to track competitors in real time. Along with the entries, the entrants’ lineup performance is also displayed which is quite well designed.
● Labels like BAT, BOW, O are used to indicate the status like “currently batting”, “currently bowling” and out. When a user clicks on a player in the team, the points break up is displayed in a drop down fashion.
● For example, for a batsman, number of runs, ball faced, sixes, strike rate, along with points next to these parameters are displayed. While for a bowler number of overs, catches, wickets, economy rate and the respective points are shown next to them.
● All the points of individual players in the team are updated in real time along with the standings of all the entrants in the contest.
Types of Games
Guaranteed Games
A guaranteed game is a featured contest in which the prize pool is guaranteed by Draftstars if there are a minimum of 2 entries from 2 different entrants. For instance a contest with a prize pool of INR2000 and 176+ spots pays out op 35 winners, has only 50 spots filled. Draftstars will continue the contest with the same prize pool of INR2000 and payout the top 35 winners without reducing the winnings.
Users can identify these guaranteed games by looking for the G+ symbol in red color on the contest. Most of the featured contests in the major sports leagues like IPL or World Cup are guaranteed.
Multi Entry Games
In a multi entry contest, users are allowed to enter with multiple teams. They will have to pay an entry fee for every team they enter in that contest. The M symbol in a blue circle on the contest description indicates that contest is a Multi Entry contest.
These multiple entries will be scored individually. For example a user enters with 3 teams in a contest and they will rank depending on their individual scores. The Multi Entry contests offered by Draftstars are also one of the unique features of the site as the allow 30 entries per user. This is by far the highest number of multiple entries allowed per user on any sports fantasy site.
Multiplier Games
Games like Double up and Triple up that multiply users’ entry fee 2 or 3 times are the Draftstars Multiplier games. In a double up game, prize pool is split among top 45% of the entrants, who win 2 times of their entry fee. While in a triple up contest, the top 30% winners get 3 times of their entry fee.
The minimum number of players a user can choose from a single team while drafting their fantasy lineup is 8 on this platform. The minimum number of batsmen and bowlers in a team is 4, while the maximum number allowed is 6 along with one wicket-keeper.
The player board offers all the important information users needs before drafting players in their team.
● A salary cap of $100,00 (virtual currency) is set to utilize for drafting players into the lineup. Each player has a salary that is updated with his/her past performances and hence a top performing player may have a higher salary than others.
● There are two more parameters set for each player other than the salary – Average and Form.
● Along with the limit of $100,000 that a user is allowed to spend on purchasing players, a limit is also set on the Average.
● For example, in a contest of India vs Sri Lanka ODI match, the limit set on the average is $9,091. A user should then draft players in his/her lineup so that the total average would not exceed $9,091.
Customer Service
Users can visit their Contact Us page and enter personal information like Name and Email along with their message and hit the Submit button. After logging in to the site, users can find a chat widget on the bottom right of the screen which serves as a forum for all its users to discuss and debate among themselves. The Draftstars representative has, at times, responded to queries and questions from users in this chat box, it is not an official communication channel. The best way to communicate questions, issues or queries to Draftstars sending an email to support@draftstars.in.
Payment Options
When a user clicks on the red deposit button, a pop up box asks for the Amount and Promotion Code with a ‘DEPOSIT WITH RAZORPAY’ button right under it. This may seem confusing, but a user should just go ahead and enter the details and proceed with clicking the aforementioned button.
● This opens up a smaller pop up box which asks the user to enter his/her mobile number to be able to use one of the three payment options available viz., Card, Netbanking and UPI.
● Users can choose any of the major banks available to make a deposit using Netbanking.
● Some of the UPI options available are BHIM, Google Pay, WhatsApp, Paytm and PhonePe. Users can also scan the QR code to pay using UPI.
● The above mentioned apps are not the only options for UPI. A user having UPI registered with his/her bank can simply click on the Other Apps options and enter the UPI address to proceed with making the payment.
Sign up Bonus
Draftstars India offers a one-time deposit bonus when the users make their first deposit. The bonus is equivalent to the deposit made by the user upto INR200. The minimum requirement to be eligible for this bonus is INR50. The user will receive the bonus after the initial deposit has been turned over, i.e after the user has used the initial deposit to enter contests on Draftstars India. Once the initial deposit is turned over, user needs to contact Draftstars by sending an email on the address mentioned above to claim their bonus.