It has only been a week since my last update, but two more important pieces of The Machine are taking shape: Waiver Analysis and Waiver Recommendations.

As with the pages shown in my last update, these are currently the real user-interface pages running with dummy data. The calculations, live league connections and automation behind them still need to be rebuilt.

Waiver Analysis: What Does This Move Do for My Team?

Fantasy owners make add/drop decisions every week, but The Machine was designed to answer a more useful question than simply:

Which player is projected to score more points?

It asks:

How does this move change my team's probability of winning?

On the rebuilt Waiver Analysis page, you can compare players on your roster with available free agents. The goal is to make this very easy: drag a player from your roster and a potential replacement into the analysis area, and The Machine evaluates the proposed move.

The result isn't just a difference in projected fantasy points. The Machine also shows the estimated change in your probability of winning.

That distinction is important. A waiver move should be evaluated in the context of your entire team, its position in the league and its future matchups — not just by comparing two individual players.

Waiver Recommendations: Let The Machine Do the Searching

Sometimes you don't want to manually test every possible waiver combination.

That is where Waiver Recommendations comes in.

Instead of asking you to find the moves yourself, The Machine searches the available players and identifies the add/drop combinations it believes can most improve your team.

The page considers the players you might drop, the available replacements and the resulting change in projected fantasy points and win probability.

You can also tell The Machine which positions it is allowed to add or drop and what type of waiver system your league uses and you can also set the priority for the current week versus the whole season.

Smarter Blind Bidding

One of the more interesting features is support for blind-bidding waiver systems.

The Machine doesn't simply estimate what a player is worth and recommend that same bid every time.

It can also consider the alternatives available.

Suppose several players of roughly equal value are available at the same position. The Machine may recommend a lower bid on the first player because there are still several good alternatives behind him.

If those alternatives begin to disappear farther down the bid list, The Machine can become more aggressive.

The goal is to conserve your waiver budget while still giving you a strong chance of landing one of the players you want.

The legacy version of The Machine supported a wide range of waiver systems across the major fantasy providers. We are rebuilding that same flexibility into the new version.

Longtime customers who want to see how the original Waiver Recommendations feature worked can also watch our older Waiver Recommendations tutorial video. Watch the original Waiver Recommendations tutorial

Where This Is Going

The plan for The Machine remains the same.

First, rebuild what we had and restore the features that made the original product powerful.

Then expand The Machine beyond NFL fantasy football to MLB, NBA and NHL.

From there, we can begin adding the next-generation mathematics we have been designing — including better probability modeling, player relationships and cross-correlation — and ultimately give the interface a much deeper modernization.

For now, we are still rebuilding the pages customers will eventually use. The trade-related pages are next.

But one week after the last update, two more important parts of The Machine are back on the screen.

The Machine is coming.