WSOP Fantasy Leagues Add Interest, Excitement
Jason Somerville and Jason Mercier won last year's $25K WSOP Fantasy league, thanks in large part to their having drafted Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier and Ben Lamb. Meanwhile, Barry Greenstein was doomed from the start after spending most of his betting units drafting Phil Ivey, who ultimately didn't play the WSOP at all!
The 2012 World Series of Poker begins in just over a week. While players, media, and WSOP staff are using these final days to prepare for another summer of poker in the desert, some are working out details to engage in a relatively new WSOP tradition -- the drafting of World Series of Poker fantasy teams.
So-called "fantasy sports" have taken off in a big way over the last decade, having drawn many non-gamblers and even casual sports fans to participate. The idea first came to prominence back in the early 1980s with "rotisserie" baseball leagues, although it really wasn't until the mid-1990s and the coming of the internet that the concept began to extend beyond hardcore fans and a "boom" of sorts occurred for fantasy sports.
The Fan Becomes "Owner"
While there are endless variations of fantasy sports available, most involve participants "drafting" players to create their own personal "team" with which they compete against others in the league. For instance, in a fantasy baseball league, a group of participants will conduct a draft prior to the season beginning in which they take turns selecting players to fill out their squads.
Usually there are requirements to fill each position (e.g., pitcher, catcher, and each infield and outfield position). Then once the season begins, participants can create "line-ups" and "start" certain players from their team, with the ability to change their minds and "bench" non-performing players in favor of others. Usually fantasy leagues include rules for trading players with other participants as well.
Every fantasy league additionally has some sort of scoring system in place to measure players' performance and thus determine who has drafted and played the best performing "team." In baseball, for instance, non-pitchers who have strong hitting days will earn their "owners" points for their hits, runs, and RBIs, while the pitchers who accumulate strikeouts and wins also score well for their "teams."
The teams, then, exist only as a "fantasy" insofar as they match players who in real life play against each other on different teams. The concept has recently gravitated to poker, and in particular the World Series of Poker, with participants in WSOP fantasy leagues selecting poker players to form "teams" with which to compete against other fantasy players.
Negreanu's $25K WSOP Fantasy League
To give an example and thus a better frame of reference for how a WSOP fantasy league might work, Daniel Negreanu introduced a $25,000 buy-in league prior to last summer's WSOP which attracted 15 teams (most of which had several "owners" pooling their money to play). In the end, the team drafted by Jason Somerville and Jason Mercier won the league, earning the pair a cool $225,000 worth of the prize pool. Here are the full results from last year's $25K WSOP fantasy league.
Somerville and Mercier's team did well largely thanks to their having drafted both Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier and Ben Lamb onto their team. As we remember, Grospellier had a great Series with four cashes, two final tables, and a bracelet in the $10,000 Seven-Card Stud event. And Lamb, of course, was even better, earning WSOP Player of the Year honors thanks to his four final tables, a bracelet in the $10K pot-limit Omaha event, and a third-place finish in the Main Event.
Negreanu will be running his WSOP Fantasy league once again this year, and this week announced the rules, scoring system, and payout schedule. By the way, if you have $25,000 to gamble on such an endeavor, the draft will be taking place on May 27th in Las Vegas. (There's another fantasy, for most of us.)
The rules for the $25K WSOP Fantasy League dictate that each team will consist of eight players, with each owner(s) given a total of 200 "betting units" to "spend" when building a roster.
In sports like baseball, players' statistics dictate their value for fantasy purposes -- thus, a player with a high batting average who hits lots of home runs will "cost" more if a fantasy owner wants to draft him. Meanwhile poker doesn't necessarily have such statistics for fantasy players to consult. After all, career earnings in tournaments or at the WSOP don't also include amounts spent on buy-ins, nor do such stats account for a host of other variables that make it hard to assign "betting units" to a player without ambiguity.
Thus in Negreanu's draft, the value of each player will be assigned by the owners themselves via an "auction"-style format. Taking turns, each team's owner(s) will nominate a player, then all of the teams will bid on the player until one "wins" the player by having bid the highest. Make sense?
Of course, once the bidding starts, owners must remain wary of only having 200 betting units to spend on their eight players. Last year Mercier and Somerville managed to draft Lamb for just 15 betting units and Grospellier for 18 -- a couple of bargains, it turned out. Meanwhile, poor Barry Greenstein spent a whopping 108 of his betting units to draft Phil Ivey, who just a couple of days after the draft surprisingly announced he wasn't going to play in the WSOP at all!
Once the teams are chosen, the players that have been drafted earn points according to a system not unlike ones used for "player of the year" races. Going deep or winning an event earns the most points, of course, with extra value added to higher buy-in events (e.g., events with a $10K buy-in or more earn double points) and events with larger fields. Negreanu has posted a document with an explanation of the scoring and other details, if you are curious.
Other Variations
Some WSOP fantasy leagues forgo the whole auction/bidding step and simply allow participants to draft players on a first-come, first-serve basis. In other words, a draft order is established (usually by a random drawing), then all undrafted players remain available whenever owners make their selections until the teams are filled.
I have seen other variations on WSOP fantasy leagues that incorporate elements of other fantasy sports, such as a requirement to fill certain "positions" on the team by making it necessary to have (say) at least one American, one European, one female player, one former Main Event champion, and so forth. And, of course, most other variations have considerably lower buy-ins than Negreanu's league does -- or none at all, with the leagues played for entertainment purposes only.
Joining a WSOP fantasy league can add an extra layer of interest to following results, giving fans a particular rooting interest that can get especially exciting when a player on one's own "team" manages a deep run in an event. And while other fantasy sports give fans a chance to "play owner" and select their own rosters, in poker the fantasy allows participants to "play backer" with the players they've drafted being like their "horses," so to speak, in whom they've invested.
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