Everyone has heard of Fantasy Football and Fantasy Baseball, in which common individuals “draft” professional athletes to their virtual teams and then compete against one another for bragging rights or real money. But Fantasy Poker? Could our favorite intellectual sport really benefit from fantasy leagues? If recent events at the 2011 World Series of Poker are any indication, the answer is an emphatic “yes.”
Over the past week, poker pros Erick Lindgren and Daniel Negreanu organized a Fantasy Poker draft in which 15 individuals but up $25,000 each to create a massive $375k prize pool. The draft party, held at the Aria, used an auction format in which teams bid on players until each had eight, with each team’s performance to be tracked over the course of the 2011 WSOP.
Organizer Erick Lindgren said that people love fantasy sports, and there’s no reason why poker can’t be a part of that, stating that fantasy leagues make the matches more exciting for railbirds.
The phenomenon is getting a big assist from Stan Magusiak, an Internet application developer who created www.25kfantasy.com to allow players to watch the WSOP Fantasy Poker action as it unfolds. The site is expected to garner plenty of traffic, as the Fantasy Sports Trade Association says that nearly 30 million people in the US and Canada alone participate in some sort of fantasy league every year.
Negreanu, who is known for his participation in Fantasy Hockey, is already planning to expand Fantasy Poker next year. He wants to add more categories, such as NLHE players and female players.
Aside from Negreanu and Lindgren, noted poker pro Barry Greenstein is among the fifteen individuals with a draft team. Greenstein said that he has little experience in fantasy sports, but knows the poker community well enough to compete. Unfortunately for Greenstein, he drafted Phil Ivey before Ivey’s announcement that he wouldn’t be playing in the WSOP. Situations such as these are par for the course in fantasy sports, where a seemingly great pick-up can go sour when a player ends up on the injured list.
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