Personal Profile: Robert Zarzycki
Who: Robert Zarzycki
What: author and No. 1 ranked player all-time in the World Championship of Fantasy Football
What does it take to rise to the No. 1 spot in the country’s premier fantasy football competition?
“I pretty much apply a simple method of stockpiling running backs and wide receivers,” says Robert Zarzycki, the top-ranked player in the World Championship of Fantasy Football. “That’s pretty much 90 percent of my strategy every year.”
Surely there’s a bit more behind his success than that. Zarzycki has finished fourth or better in his league in five of his six tries at the WCOFF — ranking first or second four times — and he finished among the top three overall in each of the first two seasons. Of course, giving away your secrets doesn’t make much sense when you’re trying to beat a few thousand other football fans in a game you all follow religiously. Maybe it does make sense, though, if you can turn them into a book.
“Drafting to Win is basically a book where I spilled all the beans,” Zarzycki says of his first book, released in 2005. “DTW was a result of me having so many original yet successful strategies and math concepts bottled up in my head that I just had to put everything down on paper. It contains just about every strategy and thought I’ve applied to fantasy football drafts.”
Zarzycki followed that literary foray three years later with Fantasy Football’s Big Six, which was released at the end of July and includes a foreword by our own Jeff Thomas.
“Fantasy Football’s Big Six is something I felt the fantasy football community needed after the success of high-profile events like the WCOFF and NFFC - that is, a book that taught strategy on all different kinds of FF leagues,” he says. “This book offers strategy on just about every kind of game you can find, with each type of game covered by a top FF player in that area.”
The “Big Six” refers to different league formats: redraft, where every roster starts from scratch each season; keeper/dynasty, in which owners roll over a number of players or their entire rosters from year to year; salary cap, where every owner can pick from the entire player pool, limited only by a set amount that can’t be surpassed by the sum of the set player “salaries”; auction, in which participants bid auction-style on players rather than drafting them in a slotted, round-by-round order; draft masters, where owners don’t set lineups and don’t play head-to-head but rather receive the highest possible point total for players on their rosters each week with the eventual winner determined by total points; and individual defensive player, which forgoes team defenses for individuals.
The leap to nationally recognized fantasy player and author of two fantasy football books is particularly interesting when you find out how Zarzycki got his start on the fantasy gridiron back in college. It turns out a group of his high school friends already had a league going and pressured him into playing.
“I really didn’t want to at first, but then I finally gave in,” Zarzycki says, recalling a time when giving in to peer pressure actually paid off. “The year was 1994. I think I finished in last place that year.”
OK, so maybe the payoff didn’t come right away.
“Being competitive, I studied the game and used my math skills to make the playoffs every year thereafter,” he says.
Zarzycki says he dropped out of the league in 2002 to prepare for the initial season of the WCOFF, which ended with him finishing 2nd overall and pocketing $22,000.
“I felt like I should enter it because my passion for fantasy football had grown so much, not to mention I felt like I was the best fantasy football player in my local league and wanted to take a shot at the national stage,” he says.
After failing to find anyone willing to partner with him and split the entry fee, Zarzycki put the charge and the trip on his credit card and made his first trip to Las Vegas. Six years later, he’s living there as a professional gambler and holds down the WCOFF’s top ranking.
Despite the setting and his current primary employment, though, Zarzycki’s 2002 venture into the WCOFF was no gamble, but rather an investment in his own strategic capabilities. That investment has yet to finish paying off.
Tags: fantasy football, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, high-stakes fantasy football, las vegas, robert zarzycki, wcoff, world championship of fantasy football
