Entrants select players through a snake draft. In a snake draft, the pick order is reversed each round. In other words, the entrant with the first pick in round 1, will have the last pick in round 2 and the first pick in round 3.

For each paid entry contest, the entry fees, the prize pool, roster size, number of entrants, number of entries per user, and scoring are described on the information page for that contest.

Entrants draft a team of players who accumulate points throughout the duration of the contest period.

Once entrants draft, their rosters are set - there are no waivers, substitutions, or trades during the contest period.

At the end of each sport's week, Underdog automatically selects the entrant's highest scoring players at the designated positions to be "starters" and only those players' statistics over that week are counted towards the entrant's accumulated score. This means entrants do not need to set their lineups.

Slow drafts clock will become shorter as the season approaches to ensure they complete. Two weeks prior to Week 1 the clock will change to 4 hours per pick. One week prior to Week 1 the clock will shorten to 1 hour per pick. The day the season begins the pick clock will change to 10 minutes per pick and will accelerate to 60 seconds 2 hours before the first game of the season starts. Clocks are subject to change earlier at Underdog's discretion for events with non-traditional start times.

Slow drafts have an overnight pause of 3 hr between 2am and 5am ET, during which time you can still draft and make picks. The overnight pause is there to give you additional time on the clock so that you're less likely to miss a pick. However, as the season approaches the overnight pause will change as the pick clock changes. Two weeks out, there will be an overnight pause of 6 hr between 2am and 8am ET. One week out, there will be an overnight pause of 10 hr between midnight and 10am ET.

When Slow drafts become shorter (as the season approaches), the overnight pause will extend so that the risk of missing a pick overnight is minimized.

If you miss two (2) consecutive picks in a slow draft you will be placed into autopilot mode. You can turn off autopilot at any point, but it will turn back on if you miss the next pick after turning autopilot off.

There are a set amount of slow drafts available for a contest. In the event of slow drafts running out, more will only be created if the contest has not reached the threshold of 95% of it's total entries.

As the draft approaches the start of the season, and draft clocks shorten, we will extend the length of the overnight pause.

Each sport may or may not have slow drafts at any given time.