According to his fantasy survey on ESPN.com — which the Worldwide Leader is having its fantasy personalities fill out — “Becker” is now writing under his given name: Pierre Becquey.

“I’ve gone by the pen name of Pete Becker for the past five years, but the reasons for it no longer exist,” he writes.

He doesn’t go into greater detail, but you can count on FSB.com to try to track down more information on this and all other hard-hitting news stories that send ripples throughout our industry.

As for the other ESPN fantasy surveys, here are some interesting tidbits:

Matthew Berry believes strongly in Jorge de la Rosa and all things 90210.

Tristan Cockroft thinks that Carlos Zambrano, Erik Bedard and Jake Peavy are all headed for the operating room this year.

Jason Grey wants to revive and commandeer the Nego League hall of fame nickname “Cool Papa.” He’s magnanimously placing “Old Hoss” on the open market, though, and has decided for some reason to leave “Wee” to Willie Keeler.

Christopher Harris is pretty sure he’ll be fired in 2009, which would leave fantasy NASCAR fans driving in circles.

Eric Karabell believes that the women of New England will be left in tears once again as Brady misses a second season.

Keith Lipscomb doesn’t think Dwyane Wade will spend nearly as much time in a wheelchair this year (unless, of course, he suffers an eye injury).

A.J. Mass says that Roy Halladay should be the first pitcher drafted in fantasy baseball leagues. (Though it’s tough to take anyone seriously who admits to being a Syracuse football fan.)

James Quintong thinks Joba Chamberlain will make his way back to the bullpen, where nipple rings are far more effective.

Nate Ravitz believes that Cedric Benson will rush for 1,000 yards for the Bengals in 2009. In related news, ESPN recently suspended drug testing for fantasy employees.

Brendan Roberts says the Rays will get over the hump and win the World Series. Pat Burrell asks that Phillies fans please stop referring to him as “the hump.”

Kevin Rounce believes that Matt Berry will overcome the urge to build on the artistry of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles and remain in his Bristol digs.

Organization:

The close of the NFL season ends the busiest portion of the calendar for many around the fantasy sports industry, but it opens the most hectic stretch for the FSWA. Board members are working feverishly to process entries for the association’s fifth annual writer awards, which will be given out later this month. Even so, President Mike Beacom — who succeeds Ryan Houston and Kirk Bouyelas in that position — managed to find time to sit down and answer some questions for FSB.com.

1) What was the motivation for the formation of the FSWA?
Ryan Houston and Kirk Bouyelas — both of Fantasy Asylum at the time — started the effort with Emil Kadlec and Bob Harris of Fantasy Sports Publications. The group felt that there was nothing that recognized writing in the industry. There are so many writers, and there wasn’t anybody to represent them. It’s been our mission to recognize excellence in fantasy writing ever since.

2) How did you enter the picture?
I stumbled upon the site in the early days in 2004 and noticed that there was no chairman, so I offered to serve in that capacity. We had several meetings, got things organized and before long we had a major sponsorship in place (a Ford fantasy contest).

3) Why is it important to represent fantasy writers?
Writers are the little guys in the industry. They don’t do it to make money. They do it because they love fantasy, and because most of them love to write. We’re a community, and we try to give a little bit extra to the writers. We’re trying to build a place for them to come together.

4) How did the FSWA go about building its membership?
It’s a grassroots organization. Unlike the [Fantasy Sports Trade Association] and most other trade organizations, we’re writers more than businesspeople. We had to put out the product, and, slowly but surely, people came to us. Companies such as Rotowire and Talented Mr. Roto really pushed the importance of the organization with their staff and encouraged their writers to join.

5) How strong is membership today?
Close to 100 new members have joined this past year alone. We’re thrilled with that number. We’ve pushed FSWA membership harder, but I don’t know if I could attribute the growth to any one thing. There’s growth in the industry, and now we’re more established. We had a long list of things we wanted to offer from the beginning, and more of that is coming to fruition.

6) How important is the board of directors?
Our board is really important and is a huge part of who we are. The members care about their staff and about strong writing in the industry. Peter Schoenke (Rotowire), Matthew Berry (ESPN), Gregg Rosenthal (Rotoworld) — those are people that have been on the board for a long time. This year we added Michael Fabiano (NFL.com) and Brandon Funston (Yahoo), both of whom we’re thrilled to have. It’s been important to us to not only have names but people who support writers in this industry.

7) What has the FSWA accomplished so far?
Like the FSTA, one thing that we’ve done is to help create discussion among people from different sites. It’s one place that a discussion can occur among sites of different sizes.

8) What was the impetus for the creation of the annual FSWA awards?
It was a no-brainer. There were no awards for individual writing categories. There were people contributing an incredible volume of content, but there was nothing to recognize it. We’re very happy to have a strong relationship with the FSTA (at whose winter business conference the award winners are announced), and we do what we can to give back to that relationship.

9) How integral have they become to the FSWA’s image and mission?
It’s one of the things we do. It’s probably recognized as the biggest thing we do as far as the members go. Certainly in the future we want to do more and more, but it’s our big show. It gets a lot of recognition inside and outside of the industry, and that’s good for us. By recognizing those in the industry, I think we have gotten people excited. I don’t think that people write to win awards, but it’s nice to get recognized for your work.

10) Please describe what goes into deciding the recipients.
First of all, [FSWA technical director] George Kerwood plays an important role in posting all of the entries to the site. He burns the candle at both ends to get everything set up for the judges. Same is true of the rest of the executive committee. This year we had more than 800 articles submitted, easily a record number. Last year, we had a record, and it was a little more than 500. After everything is in place and categorized it becomes a two-step judging process. Our board reviews all of the nominations, and the finalists are reviewed by an independent panel of judges (two college journalism professors and a longtime sports columnist at a major market newspaper).

We go to large measures to keep it anonymous, which is very difficult when you have a community like ours where many people are familiar with each other and their writing. But we do everything we can to keep this awards process honest. No names on the articles, no titles, and we scan through each article to identify and remove any site references. It’s a lot of work, but the contest continues to grow each year so it means it’s worth all of the effort.

(Note: Beacom also serves as the publisher of SportsBuff.com, part of the same company that owns this site.)

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I got in contact with Jim Enright at Fanball.com when I was looking for a stats provider in order to experiment with the regular season concept of the Mock GM game. Fanball answered the call, and then later told me about the FSTA. From my first conference in February 2008 I knew there was no turning back.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: N/A

Three questions

1) You’re Mock GM fantasy basketball game is up for three FSTA awards this year. What makes the game new, different and intriguing when compared with what else is on the market?
What makes the Mock GM game new and intriguing is the feeling you get controlling an NBA team as if you are a real NBA GM using the rules of the collective bargaining agreement. There is a sense of ownership and accomplishment when you take over an existing NBA team and their current financial situation and turn that team into a contender. The game allows the user to live out their dreams of managing their favorite NBA team.

What changed from the 2004 origination to the 2008 relaunch?
Each year we add more pieces of the CBA to the game. The biggest change since 2004 was the addition of the regular season (real-time) portion of the game, where mock GMs play out their off-season moves in head-to-head competition with other mock GMs in an NBA-like, 18-week regular season during the NBA regular season.

2) You’ve been into programming and web design since before college. What first got you interested in that area and what were your earliest projects?
I was in a computer science program at the University of Maryland the summer before my senior year in high school, and for our final project we had to create a website. The website I created was the first version of what is today PASPN.net. You can say the project did not stop that summer of 1996 and has continued developing over the next 12 years.

3) Other than the Mock GM game, what other kinds of things fall under the PASPN.net umbrella? What, if anything, do you do on a professional level outside of running PASPN.net?
PASPN.net is an online community for all NBA fans and is a source for content and news for all things related to the NBA and fantasy basketball. Outside of running PASPN.net, I am an enterprise application architect providing consulting services to local businesses in the New York metropolitan area.

Several posts have already called attention to the champions of some prominent big-money contests and a few expert leagues, but there are many more such groups that deserve attention.

If you run a league of fantasy experts or triumphed in that setting, tell us about it (matt.schauf@worldfantasygames.com). We’d like to congratulate you.

And I thought Coke Zero accomplished enough by giving me a diet cola that actually tastes good …

Yates took home the top prize in the main event of the National Fantasy Football Championship, edging his closest competitor by fewer than three points. In yet another example of just how close these things can be, one more touchdown pass from Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers in Chicago’s Week 16 Monday night victory — the final NFL game on most fantasy schedules — likely would have vaulted the third-place Riverdog team of Todd Ullman to the championship mantle.

According to NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius, Yates is a high stakes veteran who previously competed in the World Championship of Fantasy Football before joining the NFFC in 2007.

The NFFC is put on by Krause Publications and supported by STATS. The contest expanded via a partnership with NBC Sports that began this season.

TSN and Contec are nearing the launch of a worldwide sports information service that will cover a wide variety of sports, drawing from TSN’s already global reach, and be available on any network and any handset. The service will be available for branding by mobile service providers seeking to enhance their offerings to customers and will reportedly be mostly supported by advertising.

Greater access to sports information and statistics can only help enhance the capabilities of foreign markets to access American fantasy games and for interested American fantasy players to take part in contests overseas, such as those centered on English Premier League soccer.

“Fantasy has not really played a role in what we see as an obvious and palpably apparent direction to pursue: the world of sports brought to users on the one communicative vehicle that almost never leaves their side — the mobile phone,” TSN founder, president and CEO Mickey Charles tells FSB.com. “Fantasy is the natural outgrowth of the effort, as will be other games that we have planned but that remain unannounced currently for clearly recognizable reasons, the same that keep us in the forefront of the industry.”

Charles says the venture arrives with the “clear-cut intention of opening the marketplace to a vast audience that will be attracted to participation that they believed necessitated access to the Internet until now.”

TSN and Contec have already built a strong mobile presence in the Far East, offering content in Chinese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesian, but Charles says his company is also focusing on Europe. He points to TSN’s exclusive deal with the NHL as a valuable resource there, as the league is popular in Scandinavian countries. Eventually, the partners plan to offer content in more than 100 languages.

• Blog Talk Radio: Fantasy Sports Channel
• CBSSports.com — Fantasy Football Today
• ESPN — Fantasy Focus Baseball
• ESPN — Fantasy Focus Football
• FantasySportsGirl.com
• RotoExperts.com Start em Sit em Sunday

• AOL Sports
• ESPN — Stephania Bell’s injury blog
• Fanball — Godfather of Fantasy Sports
• Fantasy Baseball Sherpa’s blog
• Fantasy Football Sherpa’s blog
• Rotowire — Rotosynthesis
• Sporting News — Fantasy Source Blitz
• William Del Pilar’s Locker Room Buzz

• BaseballHQ.com
• CBSSports.com Fantasy News Site
• ESPN Insider Answer Guys
• Fanball Owner’s Edge NFL
• The Huddle Fantasy Football Service
• KFFL Hot Off The Wire
• Rotowire
• Rotoworld/NBC Sports