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fantasy sports fun

May 8th, 2006 | sport

To be honest I was never into fantasy sports. It was too much work and research to do well. To do well took planning and stats keeping, and I was never that into any sport. But nevertheless I decided to have a go last August.

August is the start of the 38-week long Premiership League season. The guys at a Fulham FC fansite I check out almost daily put together a fantasy league using Premier League’s fantasy set-up. Many said Premier League got it all right and was simply the best fantasy game site as far as management and set-up. Since this was my first fantasy team ever in any sport I have no idea if it’s true, but I can say I thought it was a top-class organization running it.

Why start playing fantasy stuff now? Well, I just recently started my interest in the game of soccer and the Premiership. I knew that having a fantasy team would require gaining knowledge of players from all 20 Premier League teams. What better way to learn about the league than having a fantasy team? Plus many of the others on the fansite were making teams, and there was mention that the winner would get a Harrods Hamper. With all that in mind, Stover FC was born. After starting my team and joinng the FulhamUSA league I also joined 2 other leagues (using the same Premier League fantasy game) started by people that post on the BBC 606 forums.

A 38-week season is a long time. Since this was my first fantasy try I wasn’t expecting much. As weeks went by I clung to the top 10 and every week I felt a bit better about doing well in the league. It was quite fun actually…scouting out players and teams, seeing who will start and how well one team plays against another team.

The season ended on Sunday. I’m quite happy to announce that my fantasy team got 2,087 points. This means nothing to you, so I’ll say this: I won the FulhamUSA league, The Usual Suspects league (one of the 606 leagues), and placed 5th in the BBC 606 league. Of the 810,382 teams, my team ranked 1,307. The site also ranked the top 50 fantasy teams by ‘team fans’ and ‘countries’ so I happy to say among people that noted they were Fulham FC fans, I ranked #16. Of all the people from the USA, I made the list at #29. To put it plainly, I had a wonderful fantasy season. 1,307 out of 810,382…wow! To top things off one guy at the FulhamUSA site put together a make-shift fantasy Champions League. Taking points from the official game, we’d add them up for our own competition. Well, I ended up winning that too.

Sure a lot of it was luck, and I know that. But I know there were alot of choices along the way that I had make…which players to play, which ones sat on the bench, which players to transfer out/in. It took time to do it well…and don’t forget about the luck thing. So will I play again next season? Honestly I’m not sure yet. It’s one hell of a long season, but it was fun too.

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