It's already Week 5 of the NFL season, and the dust is starting to settle. You are getting a much clearer picture of where your team stands, what is working, and what you may need to do to secure a playoff berth.

While you are working on the right waiver moves, trades and weekly lineups, ASL is already working on your next draft.

The latest part of The Machine rebuild brings back one of the most important features of the original product: Your Draft, the live draft room designed to help you make better decisions while your fantasy draft is actually taking place.

As with the other pages I have shown recently, these are the real pages being rebuilt for the new Machine, but they are still running with sample data. The live league connections, projections and probability calculations that will ultimately power them come later. You can already explore the rebuilt product yourself at www.themachine.run.

Your Draft: Take The Machine Into the Draft Room

Most fantasy draft tools begin with some version of a player ranking.

The Machine was designed to do considerably more.

During your draft, Your Draft keeps track of what has already happened across the entire league and continually helps answer the question that matters most when you are on the clock:

Who should I take now?

The rebuilt page brings several pieces of information together in one place:

• Draft Pick Recommendations — The Machine ranks the players it believes will most improve your championship probability, rather than simply sorting everyone by projected fantasy points.
• Need by Position — A graphical view helps identify where your roster is strongest and weakest as the draft develops.
• Probability to Win — See where your team currently stands against the rest of your league as the roster takes shape.
• Live Draft Board — Follow every selection across the league, see how many picks remain before you are back on the clock, and watch the board fill as the draft progresses.
• Player Lists by Position — Keep separate QB, RB, WR or other position lists open, search for individual players and compare projected fantasy points without leaving the draft room.
• League-Wide or Team View — Follow the entire draft sequentially or narrow the board to one team's picks.
• Automatic or Manual Operation — The finished product is designed to follow supported league drafts automatically, while manual mode provides drag-and-drop control when needed.

That last point is important. The goal is not to make you spend your draft entering information into another piece of software. Where supported, The Machine is intended to follow the real draft and provide recommendations as it unfolds.

The recommendation itself is also what makes this different from an ordinary draft cheat sheet. The highest-projected player is not necessarily the player who most improves your particular team's chances of winning your particular league. The Machine knows your roster, your division, your fantasy schedule and the other teams in your league. It simulates the entire league using probability distributions all the way through the playoffs and championship game, evaluating not only how each potential pick helps your team, but how taking that player hurts the other teams — including the teams you still have to play.

The result is a recommendation based on what ultimately matters: your probability of winning the league. That championship-probability approach has always been at the heart of The Machine, and it produced real results: users of The Machine won their fantasy leagues at 2.7 times the rate of the average fantasy player.

The Machine Your Draft Page - Fresh Mode & Classic Mode

See The Machine in a Real Draft

This short two-minute video from the original Machine shows the concept much better than I can describe it. You can watch The Machine follow an actual draft, continually reassess the league and recommend picks based on championship probability.

By the end of the draft, the team following The Machine has approximately a 23% chance of winning a 12-team league, compared with roughly 2.5% for another team.

The closing line says it all:

“Be this guy, not this guy.”

For anyone who wants to see how The Machine worked through an entire draft, I also have complete draft videos for MyFantasyLeague, ESPN, CBS Sports, Yahoo and RealTime Fantasy Sports.

Those are old videos of the original product, but they provide a good picture of what we are working to bring back — and ultimately improve upon.

Simulated Draft: See the Draft Before It Happens

We have also rebuilt Simulated Draft, a smaller but useful pre-draft planning tool.

Simulated Draft asks The Machine to play out the entire draft as if every team made what The Machine considers its ideal selections. The result isn't intended to predict every pick perfectly. It gives you a baseline for understanding how the draft might develop and which players could realistically remain available when your selections arrive.

That can help before draft day when evaluating trades involving draft picks, making keeper decisions or keeper-player trades, considering different draft strategies, estimating which players may survive until a later pick, or planning around the strengths and weaknesses of your existing roster.

In keeper leagues, the simulation also helps establish values for players already on your roster rather than simply trying to predict the literal draft order.

And Simulated Draft serves another purpose behind the scenes: its player values seed The Machine's Auction Draft Table, where those values are eventually translated into recommended maximum bids.

The Machine Simulated Draft Page - Fresh Mode & Classic Mode

You can also watch the original Simulated Draft in action here: The Machine — Simulated Draft.

The Draft Room Is Coming Back

Last time I showed the rebuilt trade tools and said that Draft Day was next. Now you can see it happening.

Your Draft was one of the largest and most important screens in the original Machine. It brings together the draft board, roster needs, player projections and The Machine's probability-based recommendations in the place where fantasy owners have some of their biggest decisions to make.

There is still substantial work ahead. These pages need to be connected to real leagues, live projections and the analytical engine that will ultimately drive the recommendations.

But the Draft Room is back on the screen and you can follow the rebuild at www.themachine.run.

The Machine is coming — and your next draft is already taking shape.