I have wrapped up a successful week in the ‘Woods by making Day 2 of the $1500 NLHE event here.  There are 17 players left and my stack of 159,000 puts me right in the middle of the pack.  I will cash for something between $5,000 and $180,000 tomorrow.

As part of my Day 1 performance, I made a gutsy call of an all in bet that was by far the best call I’ve ever made in any poker hand, ever.  I’m not exaggerating about that either.  I’m pretty proud of myself and I got uncharacteristically fired up over it, too.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll pick up some hands tomorrow and do some damage.  I will most definitely come up with a tell-all blog about this tournament, which has been an exhilirating one thus far.

DZ

I’ve had a great year so far when you measure it using the typical poker barometers:  my total profit and ROI are excellent.  Yet there is one troubling statistic:  my total hours played is very low.  Crazy low.  Espcially since my WSOP final table, I have played very little poker for someone who calls himself a professional card player.

This is the kind of statistic that should make normal working folk jealous–I’m financially secure and my life has essentially been one long vacation for about four months–but it is actually a little bit disturbing to me.  I’ve had several false starts in the last few months:  moments where I’ve told myself that it was time to kick things into gear and then failed to drum up sufficient motivation to play a long session.  When I have managed to sit down and play, I have found myself playing a disappointing, vanilla version of tournament no limit hold ’em.  This is a game where players fade in and out of the proverbial “zone,” and I have not been there in awhile.  The “zone” isn’t a place visited very often by people who are only playing because they feel obligated to.

There are probably a few reasons for this inertia.  One is that i surpassed all reasonable yearly goals only five months into 2007, which has made resting on my laurels a rather attractive option.  Another is that I’m shockingly conservative for a professional gambler.  Winning $250,000 earlier in the year has not changed my risk-taking proclivity one iota.  If anything, I have grown less likely to put a big chunk of my bankroll on the line.  The final reason for the inertia is a series of minor personal mishaps (e.g., computer dying, car defacement, other) that I have had to devote an annoying amount of time to.

Which brings me to today.  I am now at Foxwoods for the World Poker Finals, and I am once again announcing my intention to turn things on and get back into the zone.  I mean it this time!

And by Bellagio, I don’t mean the Steve Wynn version, I mean the original.  And by Budapest I mean Budapest.

Janeen and I just got back yesterday from a great little vacation.  A short recap:

Bellagio and the entire Lake Como region of Italy is probably the most serene place I’ve ever been.  It occurred to me after a couple of days there that I had not seen a person in an agitated state the entire time.  No one screaming, no one running, no one doing anything that might raise their heart rate.  I think the reason is that everyone on Lake Como–tourists and locals alike–is subconciously cowed by the awesome visual splendor of the place.

You get swallowed by your surroundings on Lake Como:  the lake itself is a massive, deep, still, shiny body of water.  It is ringed entirely by the Italian Alps, whose incredible proximity to the water’s edge makes a person on the lake feel especially tiny.  When you’re in Bellagio or any of the other lakeside villages, you are nestled into a very small crevice between two impossibly large creations of nature.  The effect is so striking that it alters one’s state of consciousness. 

Bellagio is the kind of place that can make a wacky person sane, and the kind of place that can arouse existential thoughts in the brain of even the dullust moron you know.

Lake Como’s villages, many of which are only reachable via ferry or other boat, only add to the overall effect.  They date back to medieval times (or later) and retain the look and layout with which they were designed.  These places are truly untouched by modern tourism.  The “streets” are actually cobblestone stairways built into the side of the Alps, making them unaccessable to automobiles.  The businesses, from the largest hotels to the amazing restaurants to the retail stores to the newsstands, are all privately owned.  You will not find a McDonalds or a Hilton anywhere near the lake.

Janeen and I spent 3 days in Bellagio doing the only things there are to do there:  relaxing, hiking around and eating.  And that was just fine by us.  Highlights included a ferry ride up the length of the lake, four or five excellent meals, and the breathaking view from our hotel room.  It is safe to say that this part of our vacation was romantic.  🙂 

Selected for the simple reason that neither of us had ever been there, Janeen and I went to Budapest for the second leg of our trip.  Once there, we decided that the time for relaxation was over and we threw it into hardcore tourist gear, as we attempted to cram every site in Janeen’s Frommers book into three days.

I am half expecting a mad Hungarian (Al Hrbosky?) to read this and correct me, but the main historical fact that I took away from Budapest is that Hungary is the Los Angeles Clippers of Europe.  From Roman times until the present, it seems that Hungary has been on the losing end of at least one war per generation, with no wins whatsoever sprinkled in.  They’re batting .000 in the A.D. period, and that’s a pretty bad slump.  The result is that Budapest has been sacked more times than Vinny Testaverde.

What this means for the 2007 traveler is that Budapest has no particular historical cultural identity, which is actually kind of cool because the city has been left to develop its own identity in recent times.  This means that although the city features architectural feats of old and even ancient vintage, it is a decidedly modern place. 

Janeen and I saw all the major sites and partook in all the expected activities.  This included the obligatory visit to one of Budapest’s famous public bath houses, which was strange for me because I’m typically rather private about my bathing.  This was nevertheless an enlightening experience, and I’m happy to report that Europeans and Americans continue to have very different ideas about what kind of bathing suits are appropriate for obese men to wear.

The best part about Budapest was mixing it up with the locals at night.  The city has several highly regarded restaurants, and Janeen and I ate dinner at two of them.  They were both relative cheap and delicious.  Even better was going out for drinks at local bars and clubs.  The bar scene in Budapest leans toward the bohemian; the best bar we visited was an old apartment complex in the old Jewish quarter that was sloppily revamped and turned into a rollicking scene filled with Hungarian and various expat hipsters.  Hungarians like to get down:  Janeen and I went club hopping in, of all bizarre places, a large multi-level mall.  Yes, in Budapest one of the local shopping malls turns into a club complex at night.  Once there, we wandered into a packed salsa party (a testament to how modern Budapest is and how global music has become), an authentic hip hop party (replete with metal detector at the entrance), an upscale-ish house music party (hilarious female model/do-nothing DJ on the decks) and your basic drunken pop music meat market (Sutton Place, eat your heart out!).

While I will surely have very fond general memories of Budapest, the singular memory that might last the longest is the fact that everyone there smokes cigarettes.  I’m not talking about 50% or even 75% of the people.  I’m talking about everyone.  It was insane.  I’m not even going to pretend that I’m not being prissy about this.  I have never been much of a smoker myself, but at the time that the New York City smoking ban was enacted, I was strongly opposed, believing that people should be able to do as they please in public.  Several years later, I am now firmly in the “smoking is a disgusting stinky gross habit and you should get that smelly shit out of my face” camp.  So you can probably imagine my discomfort as plumes of toxic garbage wafted across my nose in between bites of my gourmet dinners.  And at the bars, the general smokiness of Budapest was extended to its logical extreme.  Many of the bars are underground places without much ventilation, making the air thick with a visible cloud of fumes.  To Janeen and I these bars were literally unbearable.  Within five minutes in these places, our eyes were burning, my beer tasted vaguely ashy, and we had to flee.  Yet these places were rammed full of people completely oblivious and obviously fully adapted to those conditions.  Yuck!

Overall, Janeen and I had a great vacation.  The entire thing worked out perfectly.  Lake Como allowed us to empty our minds of all that sinister day-to-day clutter that we unkowingly accumulate.  Then Budapest let us see how other people live.  The whole thing sure beat the shit out of sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, which bores me to tears.  I’ll post some fun pictures once I get my hands on ’em.

Here’s a summary of what has been going on with me for the past week.

On Wednesday, I played in a $300 tournament at the Taj.  It drew about 150 players and paid 18 spots.  With 21 players left, I had the chip lead.  On the bubble, I still had the chip lead.  And with 14 players left, I was gone.  I decided to go on a bubble rampage and win the tournament right there.  Instead I self destructed.

The next day I busted from the Taj’s $500 event very quickly when I made a stand against a maniac and got outflopped.  The tourney had drawn only 95 players, and it was obvious that the $1000 the next day would bring even fewer, so I split and drove home on Thursday afternoon.  There would be better action for Sugar D online.  Up the Garden State Parkway I went.

Back in NYC, I was in a foul mood as I circled the streets of the Upper East Side looking for a parking spot.  I wanted an alternate-side spot that would allow me to leave my car for the entire weekend, but I was having no luck finding one.  Then finally, after over a half an hour of trolling, I saw it:  right on the corner across the way there was a spot.  I pulled across the street.  Upon closer inspection, it was actually two back-to-back parking spaces!  Nice.  And someone was pulling into the first one.  I prepared to pull behind this person and take the second spot.  But then the person stopped their car directly in the center of the two spaces, leaving roughly six feet in front of them and roughly six feet behind them.  Not enough room on either side for me to parallel park.

I pulled up to the side of the vehicle, lowered my window and got the attention of the woman behind the wheel.

“Excuse me, would you mind pulling forward so that I can park behind you?”

This polite inquiry did not sit well with the middle-aged black woman who had just finished turning two parking spaces into one.

“There isn’t enough room for both of us!  Find another spot, this one is mine!”  She said in a Jamaican accent.

“Ma’am, there absolutely is enough space for both of us.  You are taking up two parking spots.  Please move forward.”

“I will do no such ting!  Be on your way!” 

I was not in the mood for this woman’s bullshit, so I proceeded to put my car into reverse, swerved behind her, and then slowly pulled forward until my front bumper was nestled up against her back bumper.   She did not like this one bit.  She flew from her car, slammed the door and stalked toward my open window.

“What da hell do you tink you’re doing!?”

“I’m parking my car,” I replied as I opened my door and got out and instructed her to follow me as I walked to the back of my car, which was sticking maybe two feet into the crosswalk behind me. 

“My car is two feet into the crosswalk and you have left six feet of space in front of you,” I continued.  “Is this still one spot?”  She was now totally infuriated.

“What da hell is your problem?  Dis is one spot!  Are you on crack?!  You are!  You look like a fuckin’ crackhead!”

She was screaming and making wild hand gestures in my face, but I was the crackhead?  I remained calm.

“Ma’am, if you think this is one spot, you have not driven your car in Manhattan before.  Now please pull your car forward two feet.”

“I been working at dis hospital forty years!” she screamed as she pointed eastward, “and dis is one spot!  If I move foward, I never get out of here!”

“You’re not being very neighborly.  Please, just move foward.” I sighed and I rolled my eyes.  Now she stalked back to her car, put it in drive and moved it foward about a foot and a half.  Then she quickly put it in back in park, leaped out and scrambled behind it so that she was standing between our cars.  I was now beyond frustrated.  I got into my car and pulled forward about six inches.

“You’re hitting me!” she bellowed.  My car was not in contact with her.  Then she unleashed an incredible string of expletives that was truly shocking, even to me.

“Excuse me?” I said as I got out of my car and approached her.  “Care to repeat that?”

“You ‘erd me, motherfucker!”  Jesus.  There was now absolutely no way that I was conceding in this ridiculous dispute.

I proceeded to show her that I was still parked illegally by about a foot, while the empty space in front of her was about four feet long.  So we repeated the process two more times, with her standing between our cars and belligerantly swearing at me each time.  In the end, I finally was parked legally, and she looked like she wanted to punch me. 

I sarcastically said “have a good night, ma’am” as I gathered my belongings from the back seat, then surreptitiously wrote her license plate number on a scrap of paper.  She was lurking there with a murderous look on her face, and I had a feeling that a violent crime could be visited upon me any second.  Also, some form of criminal mischief seemed vaguely possible once I left the scene, which I managed to do unharmed. 

I walked the few blocks to my apartment.  My blood was boiling.  The trip to AC had been a washout because I had played undisciplined, stupid poker.  Then a long drive home was punctuated by a ridiculous dispute over a parking spot with a psychotic Jamaican orderly. 

Now I was finally back home, and I decided to spend the rest of the day playing poker online.  But first I checked my email.  I had a few messages, but as I opened the third one, I realized that something was wrong with my computer.  It was frozen.  No cursor pointy thing, no ctrl+alt+delete, no nothing.  Just frozen.  I turned it off using the power button, waiting the requisite ten seconds and turned it back on.  Then a few beeps, then a black screen with an error message that may as well have been written in a foreign language.  I repeated the process and got the same result.  Ummm, this was not good.

And indeed it was not.  Somehow my Microsoft Windows had been corrupted.  I spent most of my Columbus Day weekend talking to Hewlett Packard’s inept technical support staff, along with other computer-knowledgable people on the phone, trying various methods to restore my computer to its prior state.  It turned into an all-encompassing, life comsuming time drain.  In the end, nothing worked and I had some recovery discs fedexed to me.  Over $400 and four days later, I managed to save most of my files, but my computer still does not function properly.  It needs to be reformatted from scratch, and I need to transfer all the stuff I managed to save onto CD’s, then reload it onto the computer once it’s been reformatted.  I am writing this blog entry from my archaic laptop. 

Poker?  My job that I’m supposed to be refocusing on?  I haven’t played a single hand in almost a week.

Yesterday I needed to move my car to a new parking spot, in compliance with alternate-side parking rules.  I walked a few blocks to the car, which reminded me of my unpleasant confrontation on Thursday.  Despite my shitty mood, I chuckled to myself as I pictured my bug-eyed rabid parking nemesis.  But when I reached the car, my laugther ceased.  There was something white on my hood.  I walked and took a closer look.  Some kind of string?  Bird poop?  No…

Carved into my hood with key, in clearly legible, large lettering was a lovely parting gift:  “FUCK U.”

Life tilt.

Hello from what might be the most depressing place on earth on a Tuesday afternoon:  the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City.  I have taken a break from watching wheelchair-bound, toothless geriatrics stare at slot machines to jump online and make an announcement!

I hereby officially announce that I am going to be more focused on poker for the rest of this calendar year.

For the past month or so the only things I have felt like doing are:

-watching football;

– sending (arguably) witty emails to my fantasy football leaguemates; and

-observing the lifeless corpse otherwise known as the New York Mets rot before my eyes.

Now nothing is left of the Mets besides their coffin.  For the past two weeks they were like one of those time lapse photography things where you can see something that was once alive decompose before your eyes (and it was equally nauseating), but now they are just a coffin.  Good riddance!

Football only happens on Sundays (no college ball for me, thanks).  And email is getting boring.

So it is time to do something I haven’t done in quite a while–play some serious freakin’ poker.  Outside of the romantic European getaway that Janeen and I have planned in two weeks, I am going to focus on one thing:  getting serious about kicking people’s asses at the poker table.

Starting…..

….

now.

First up:  Trump Taj Mahal USPC tourneys.  Not the main event, some other piddley stuff.  Off I go! 

If you break down my career poker stats by location, there is a clear outlier in an otherwise pleasing, standard looking distribution:  the Borgata. 

I keep meticulous stats on my play, so I can confirm this fact easily.  Looking at a breakdown of my stats by location reminds me of one of my old favorite childhood pastimes:  studying the backs of baseball cards.  That is where, of course, the career statistics of each player were located, in a series of rows that each represented one season.  I remember being puzzled by some of the good players’ statistics:  often there would be a lenghty list of productive years surrounding one unsightly, disgusting year wherein that player simply sucked.  Maybe that year the player fought through an injury or a divorce or a drug problem or god knows what.  But for whatever reason, he plain old sucked for a full season during what otherwise would have been the height of his career, thereby irrevocably marring his baseball card.  On my poker card, I have one of those rows.  It’s labeled “Borgata.”

Virtually everywhere else I have ever played, I have either enjoyed a lot of success or at worst been about a break even player.  But not at the Borgata.  I have played there for a combined 98 hours since I turned pro.  I’d prefer not to disclose the exact amount I’ve lost there, but suffice to say it would have been easier, less painful and less time consuming to have walked to the end of the steel pier with a duffel bag full of $100 bills and dumped it into the ocean.

It’s a shame because the Borgata is easily the nicest casino/hotel in Atlantic City, and a terrific place to play poker.  I just get destroyed there.  Imagine the movie Groundhog Day, but with a new plot.  Instead of walking around Punxsutawney every morning, Bill Murray wakes up and gets punched in the balls.  That’s me at Borgata.

Back to the online grind… 

A couple of days ago I had an encounter with a tournament pro that really made me resent my near miss for the WSOP bracelet back in June.

This tournament pro is a loud abrasive guy with a serious chip on his shoulder.  He has had a lot of success in the past year or so, but the success has only served to increase his general irritability rather than mellowing him out.  I entered a $500 sit n’ go and found myself seated two seats to this jackasses’ left.  Then the following scene unfolded.

Jackass spends the first 30 mins of the sit n’ go talking nonstop shit.  He’s in a good mood and convinces the entire table to post a $100 last longer along with a $100 bounty.  I reluctantly agree to both.  Most of the table is very familiar with him.  The table is general is tough.  It consists almost entirely of east coast pros who all know one another.  I’m a quiet outsider in this group.

Eventually I am dealt KQs in the small blind, and with the blinds at 50 and 100, jackass openraises to 325 from the cutoff and is called by the button.  I consider squeezing but decide to just call, and the big blind calls as well.  The flop comes Q-Q-7.  I check, and so does the big blind.  Jackass bets 900 of his remaining 3000 chips, the button folds and I raise all in for around 2800.  The big blind folds.  Jackass is no longer in a good mood.

Jackass:   Well I guess my fucking kings are no good (fires cards into the muck).  Motherfucking donkey idiot calls me with Q-10 or some shit.  You guys believe this shit?

I had not uttered a word at the table until this point.

Me:  You had two kings there?

Jackass:  Yeah, and you cracked them with your bullshit Q-10.  Nice play.

Me:  I didn’t have a queen.

Jackass:  Give me a fucking break.  Do you know who I am?!  I play this game a lot better than you ever will.  You’re not raising in a four way pot there without a queen.

Me:  I didn’t have a queen.

Now he’s really pissed.  He turns sideways, stares right at me with wild eyes, and:

Jackass:  I will suck a big hairy nigger moose cock if you didn’t have a queen in your hand!  What the fuck do you think this is?  I’m ranked nineteenth in the world!  What are you ranked?  How much have YOU cashed for this year?

At this exact point in time, I wished more than ever that I had won that WSOP bracelet back in June.  For if I had, I would have responded by silently sliding my sweatshirt sleeve up to my forearm, smirking and showing Jackass the hardware.  But since that wasn’t an option:

Me:  I don’t care what your ranking is.  But if you’re gonna insist that we pull out our dicks and meaure them, I got two-outed on the river for a WSOP bracelet in June.

This answer did the trick.  Jackass stopped haranguing me and even asked a few earnest questions about the circumstances of my WSOP final table.  He busted a little while later, and I ended up chopping the sit ‘n go.

Next time I won’t bother lying about my hand.

I haven’t posted anything to this blog in over two weeks for a simple reason:  this is supposed to be a blog about poker, and I just finished a long poker hiatus. 

During my layoff I was completely obsessed with the start of the NFL football season.  Over the last two weeks, I spent an unnatural percentage of my waking hours studying team and player projections for 2007.  I then made a series of proposition bets based on those projections.  I can’t help but view the football season as a big challenge.  I love the game and know that I will spend much of the next five months watching it, and my instinct is to try to turn it into a moneymaking venture.

I am now in Atlantic City to play in the Borgata Open.  As I’ve mentioned before, I never ever win jack shit at Borgata, so I’m hopeful but not exactly happy to be here.  This trip is off to a predictable start:  true to form, I didn’t last two levels in today’s $500 event.

I’ll get you yet, Borgata!

I hate to bump my football entry so quickly, but last night brought some breaking news.

Yesterday I had my finest day of online poker ever, and I’ve commemorated it by translating this blog entry’s title into computerspeak.  For those of you who don’t speak that language, it translates roughly to:  “Go me.”

A quick recap:

At 4:30 pm, I entered the Pokerstars Sunday Million, a $500 tournament, and sprinted out of the gate.  By the first break, I had a massive stack, which is very unusual for me.  I continued building my stack, and by 5:50 pm, I was sitting among the top 10 stacks in the field. 

At that point, I had a decision to make.  I had planned on entering the Full Tilt $750,000 guaranteed, a $200 tournament, at 6:00.  But because I had such a big stack on Pokerstars, and since I’m not a terrific multitabler, I was inclined to focus on the Pokerstars tourney alone.  But while weekends were made for Michelob, Sundays were made for online action.  So at the last second I decided to enter the Full Tilt tournament and play it on autopilot while the Pokerstars tourney was in the foreground. 

I ended up getting quite deep in the Pokerstars tournament while barely paying any attention to what was happening on Full Tilt.  I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was running very good down on that second screen, but all my energy was focused on a very tough, tricky table on ‘Stars.  Eventually, I busted out of the Pokertars event in a disappointing 90th place, which was good for a profit of over $2,000.  At that point–which was over 5 hours after it kicked off–I finally began to take a serious look at what was going on at the bottom of my monitor on Full Tilt.  I was somewhere around 20th place with roughly 150 players left out of 3,800.  Yes, I somehow accomplished this by playing like a robot.  Evidently my autopilot function was operating at peak capacity.

Three hours later I found myself at my first “Sunday Major” final table, in 2nd place in chips.  The final table didn’t go as well as I had hoped, however.  The short stacks repeatedly doubled up while my chips were whittled down.  Still, I played some pesky poker and hung around, finally busting out in 4th place, which paid a handsome $42,000, easily surpassing my largest prior online score.  Although I felt I could have done a bit better at the final table, a $44,000 payday is nothing to sniff at, and I was appreciative of that fact.

Even at lower stakes, I find online poker to be way more intense and stressful than brick & mortar poker.  So when the Full Tilt tournament wrapped up, I was still really wired.  Amazingly, it was only then that I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten since around noon–about 15 hours earlier.  Because it was now around 3:00 am, and further because I am a schlub who keeps nothing edible in his apartment, and finally because I had just won quite a bit of money, I decided to give myself a little treat.  I took a cab all the way down to East Houston street to my favorite 24-hour pita joint, Bereket, and helped myself to some doner kebab.

The meal cost $9.50.  Transportation there and back was $31.00. 

Well worth it and delicious.

My experience in the main event of the Empire State Championships was eerily similar to my experience in the WSOP main event.  I turned a set after the flop was checked four ways and someone else made the nuts.  It doesn’t seem like I’m very good at getting away from my hand when I hit a set on the turn.

Since I got home from Turning Stone, my life has become increasingly dominated by my biggest non-poker obsession:  pro football.  This time of year really charges me up.  While the players in the National Football League prepare for their season in training camp, I also prepare by devouring written material about the teams.  As many of you know, the only serious gambling I do other than poker playing involves betting on NFL outcomes.  I have been remarkably consistent in my NFL wagering and have shown a profit in almost every year over the past eight seasons.  I am considering scaling the operation up a notch in 2007, but I might settle into my typical pattern of conservative, smallish wagering.  I’m not sure yet.

In particular, I love betting on NFL futures, which require an analysis of season-long propositions.  So I’ve been giddily cramming information into my brain for the past week or so.  The most common form of betting on NFL futures is a pursuit that hundreds of thousands of Americans partake in:  fantasy football.  I am a long time devotee of fantasy football, which is a specific branch of football nerddom that I take a lot of pride in.

Most of the people who play fantasy football never take the time to consider the game’s framework and how it relates to succeeding at it.  I don’t want to write a long boring dissertation about that framework (although I’d probably get some perverse pleasure from doing so), but here it is in a nutshell.

Fantasy football requires each participant to come up with statistical projections for individual football players.  Most casual players do not take this task literally–they only decide whether a player will be better or worse than he was the prior year.  More serious fantasy football players do consider the numbers more literally.  Each players’ projected stats are a function of three variables:  talent, opportunity and luck.  Depending on a players’ position, one factor may be magnified more than another.  For instance, the talent component is probably strongest for quarterbacks, while the opportunity component is very strong in running backs and especially kickers.  Luck is very pervasive throughout the game, as it is the prime reason for an individual football player’s injury, and injuries are very destructive occurrences in fantasy football.

Once a player has an idea about his projections, he can rank players and participate in a draft, making minor adjustments to his rankings based on positional scarcity and positional need along the way.  Creating rankings is now easier than ever because numerous websites provide player projections and rankings that have been compiled with Bill Jamesian precision, using very sound statistical analysis.  Thus, any moron can now draft a decent fantasy football team by simply printing out a list and using it at his draft.  This makes fantasy football a lot less interesting than it was in its formative years.  In gambling terms, pre-draft studying used to create a nice edge, and it no longer does.

However, all is not lost.  Adding certain variables to the fantasy football mix can recreate “edge” and once again reward the football nerd who studies up and understands the game’s framework.  Typically, these variables are forming a “keeper” league (players can stay on your roster for two or more years) and/or running an auction (self explanatory) rather than a straight draft.  Adding these twists to fantasy leagues increases the number of factors a player must consider on draft day.  At its simplest level, fantasy football requires only contrasting player projections against positional scarcity and roster requirements.  When new factors are added to the mix, that base consideration is joined by other concepts such as long term statistical projections (added in keeper leagues), manipulation of opponents, bankroll management and third level thinking, a.k.a. “thinking a few steps ahead” (all added in auctions).  And that’s fantasy football, from a macro perspective, in a nutshell.

The concepts added in auction leagues are similar to many of the concepts that must be mastered in poker, which definitely accounts for my unnatural level of happiness while I’m drafting a fantasy football team, and may or may not account for my historic success at the game.

Now I must go back to studying wide receiver depth charts.  Nerrrrrrd!