How to Play

Every division is a pool of units (the "players") with its own fixed draft format. Four divisions draft one fixed roster under one salary cap; the Legacy pool keeps its 8-league ladder. Provenance labels ride on every unit — some divisions are explicitly attribution slices or watch-only prospects, and the cards say so.

The Legacy division (Pool Classical) drafts on the original ladder instead — Tennis Doubles (K=2, $5,000 cap) up through Soccer (K=11, $22,000); Football and Mega exceed its 12 units and are not offered. See the formats page for the full reference, or browse the pools to meet every unit.

Everything happens on the Build page. The flow, using the actual controls:

1. 1Pool selector — pick your division. For the four fixed-draft divisions the Formatbox shows the draft (e.g. "exactly 3 of 6 · $12,000 cap"); only Pool Classical shows a League dropdown (Tennis Doubles → Mega).
2. 2The "Constraint for this combo" banner tracks your Pick n / K count and shows the salary cap that will be enforced.
3. 3Click units in the All-Star pool grid to add or remove them — each card shows the engine, ticker, rank and salary. Clicking a selected unit removes it.
4. 4The Live previewpanel ("Portfolio Gate E") recomputes as you pick: Sharpe, Calmar, Max DD, annual return, α-Sh, β and a PASS/FAIL read, plus a salary meter with Used / Cap / Remaining. Max DD, Sharpe and Calmar are computed exactly from the sealed daily-returns files; α-Sh and β remain client-side approximations until save.
5. 5Optional: the Coach AIbox offers its top-3 cap-legal rosters for your division (the Coach's pick + alternates #2/#3, same frozen objective) — Load this rosterputs one into the draft, and the intended move is to edit it before saving: beat the Coach, don't copy it. The builder also warns you (never blocks) if your finished roster exactly duplicates an already-fielded team or the Coach's published benchmark. A Weighting toggle (Equal-weight / HRP) affects the preview; season scoring itself is equal-weight.

Season 0 — the soft launch — runs 2026-07-14 → 2026-07-21 (6 sessions). The scoring rules were sealed before the season started and do not change; the Season-0 designation and close date are a dated, hashed addendum — both hashes are printed below. Season 0 is our live shakedown — the promoted Season 1 opens with a fresh pre-registration, new features, and the full player catalog. Season 0 results stay on the permanent record.

• Score— a unit's season score is the cumulative sum of its published daily net returns; a team's score is the equal-weight mean across its units. Salaries never weight the score.
• Score vs. statistics — your score accrues from your first session and is always visible (team-page hero band, leaderboard SEASON SCORE column); the statistical tiles (Sharpe, Calmar, drawdown…) need 5 sessions, because annualized ratios on fewer are noise.
• Recomputed daily from the published per-pool files (/data/alpha-leagues/cell_returns_*.json) — no hidden inputs.
• Tiebreaks, in order — lower team max drawdown, then lower total salary spent at creation, then earlier sealed creation timestamp.
• Anti-hindsight— a team created after the season start scores from its sealed creation time. You cannot draft yesterday's winners into yesterday.
• Missing data — a unit with no published row on a date contributes 0 that date (zero-fill). No interpolation, no back-fill, no exclusion.

Coach AI publishes its top-3 rosters per division — the "Coach's pick" plus alternates #2 and #3, ranked under one frozen objective. What it optimizes is fantasy scoring under your division's cap: a correlation-penalized selection (score minus a λ=0.5 pairwise-correlation penalty — roughly "Sharpe-minus-correlation") solved exactly under the roster and salary constraints, with the objective formula frozen in the published recommendation file. In the builder the suggestion box offers all three; loading one and editing it is the intended move.

Beat the Coach, don't copy it. The Coach's pick is the par, not the answer sheet: it is published before the season and rides each division leaderboard as a non-competing benchmark ghost, so copying it can only ever tie a ghost. One swap makes a roster yours.

What it does not do: it is not investment advice, not allocation advice, and not a prediction. Several divisions are gross-of-cost attribution slices or watch-only prospects — drafting them is a game move, not a trade. Full spec: Coach AI page →

The league's integrity pitch in three sentences: the rules were sealed before the season started, and the hash printed above binds them. Every input to every standing is a public file, and the scoring function is deterministic arithmetic. If your recompute of any number disagrees with ours, ours is wrong.

The open league is duplicate-tolerant by design: two people can field the same lineup. A private group flips that inside your circle of friends — drafted units become exclusive within the group, first claim wins, so it plays like a real fantasy draft (my Sherman, not our Sherman). Groups (beta) — rules finalize in the Season 1 pre-registration.

1. Create a group on the Groups page — name it, optionally lock it to one division. You become commissioner and first member, and get an 8-character invite code.
2. Share the code with friends — they join on the same page. Joining records an email as a member and nothing else; no group flow sends email.
3. Draft with exclusivity— pick your group in the team builder and units your friends already claimed render greyed out ("Claimed by <name> in your group"). Saving claims your whole roster atomically: if two of you race for the same unit, exactly one save wins and the other gets the claim error back — never a half-claimed roster.
4. Group board— your group page ranks member teams with the identical frozen scoring as the open league. Every group team is also a normal sealed open-league team; the group is an organizational overlay and is never part of the team's sealed creation event.

Beta rules of thumb (to be finalized in the Season-1 prereg): claims are per group per division and permanent for the season (no releases); one team per member per group; max members frozen at creation. The global open league is untouched — exclusivity never applies outside your group.

The Locker Room is your home bench: every team and group saved under your email in one place — season scores, division ranks, invite codes, and one-tap links to each team's public verification receipt.

1. Sign in with an email link — no password. We email you a single-use link (expires in 15 minutes); tapping it starts a 30-day session on that device. Sign out any time from the locker room.
2. Nothing moves— every team ever saved under the address you sign in with is already there. Ownership is the email itself; there's no separate account to create.
3. One preference — the weekly standings digest can be turned on or off per team from the locker room. That consent flag is the only thing login can change: rosters, seals, and scores have no edit route at all.

Login is optional and additive (soft-launch beta): building and saving teams works signed-out exactly as before. When you ARE signed in, the builder locks the owner-email field to your session so new teams land in your locker room. Soft-launch note: if the sign-in email bounces with a "not enabled" message, email your address to the operator to be added as a tester.

First-claim groups reward whoever saves fastest. Draft Day replaces the race with a real draft night: the commissioner schedules a time, everyone shows up, and you take turns claiming units on a pick clock — snake order, like fantasy football. Draft Day (beta) — mechanics finalize in the Season-1 pre-registration.

1. Schedule— from your group page the commissioner picks a date (at least an hour out), a pick clock (default 120s), and the division. Rounds = the division's roster size. Members RSVP in the draft room so everyone knows who's coming — the draft starts on time either way.
2. Provably fair order — the moment the draft is scheduled, the server publishes a SHA-256 order commitmentand keeps its random nonce secret. At draft start the nonce is revealed and the order derives from hashing it with the member list — serpentine every round. Anyone can recompute the commitment and the whole order in four hash calls (the exact recipe is printed in the draft room). The house can't rig what it committed to before the reveal.
3. On the clock— only the on-the-clock member can pick, one unit per turn; every pick is checked against your remaining budget so you can't strand yourself over the cap. Miss your clock and the room auto-picks for you (best available by salary, marked "(auto)") — drafts always finish. No websockets tricks: the room simply re-checks the state every few seconds.
4. Rosters seal themselves— when the last pick lands, every member's picks become their sealed open-league team automatically: equal weights, same creation seal and verification receipt as a builder save. The draft is an organizational overlay — nothing about it enters the sealed team record.

Sign-in required: draft actions (scheduling, RSVP, picks) need a locker-room session — the first Alpha Leagues feature gated on login. Spectating a draft room is open to everyone. While a draft is scheduled or live, builder saves into that group+division pause so nobody can snipe units mid-draft.