Posts Tagged ‘fantasy industry’

FSB Daily 4/3: Fantazzle, Sporting News, CPR, SmackTalk, Advanced Sports Media

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Fantazzle this week launched baseball, golf and racing games to go with the football and basketball contests it ran for the first time in 2008.

– Sporting News and Zumobi have combined to create an application for iPhone and iPod Touch users that provides detailed SN content, including stats and player news.

– OK, that headline might be a little overly dramatic. The fact is that Fantasy CPR will join the lineup on BlogTalkRadio’s Fantasy Sports Channel beginning this Saturday.

– Unless you’re among the Major League Soccer faithful, you probably don’t know Taylor Twellman. He believes he can hang with you in fantasy baseball, though.

– FantasySmackTalk.com launched what it calls a “customer-driven fantasy sports advice website” earlier this week. The site appears to be heavy on videos, and the founders say they will focus on facilitating direct communication between its “experts” and users.

– For the first time in its existence, Advanced Sports Media’s Draft Analyzer is available as a Web application (no download). The product has been included in subscriptions to ESPN Insider and Fanball’s premium Owner’s Edge package.

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Knee Injury Can’t Stop Brady from Scoring in Fantasy

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

It’s been a big weekend for Tom Brady, and it has nothing to do with the Patriots trading Matt Cassel on Saturday.

The Web was abuzz Friday with reports that the star quarterback and secretly wed his Brazilian supermodel girlfriend, Gisele Bundchen, in Santa Monica, Calif. Even if all the reports somehow turned out to be false, it was a fantasy bonanza for Brady owners.

No, your cousin Frank doesn’t score any points in his keeper league for his quarterback getting hitched — even to a supermodel. Anyone with Brady on the roster in their celebrity fantasy league, however, is racking up the points.

“Tom Brady just came off the bench to become an every day starter,” says Ed Menendez, co-founder of Hollywood Draft. “Now you have to keep an eye on them to have another kid and to cash in on those baby points.”

In Menendez’s game — and other similar contests — participants build a roster of celebrities and score for things such as the person merely showing up in the news, having a child or getting married. With Hollywood Draft’s focus on the number of times a celebrity gets mentioned in various print and online sources, a union of this magnitude not only makes for a big day but could start a scoring run.

“It’s like picking up Darren Sproles and riding his 3-4 week fantasy point wave,” Menendez says. “Now you hang on and hope he doesn’t celebrate too much and get a DUI.”

Count on Mr. and Mrs. Brady showing up on plenty of rosters in Hollywood Draft’s next round of play, which is set to begin on March 1.

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FSB Daily 1/5: Calling All Expert Champions

Monday, January 5th, 2009

None of us would be doing the fantasy sports thing without the fantasy leagues that drive it all. Here at FSB.com, we like to recognize some of the folks who won their football leagues this season.

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.

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FLW Awards New Millionaire; Another Coming Thursday

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

The final tournament of the Wal-Mart FLW bass-fishing tour came to a close Sunday, presenting a million-dollar check to champion Michael Bennett. According to the FLW writeup of the tournament, Bennett is the youngest winner of the Forrest Wood Cup as well as the tour’s youngest millionaire. (Of course, the article doesn’t mention how old he is, and a web search didn’t turn it up either.)

The reason this result is of interest to the fantasy industry is that this was the last tournament in the race to the first-ever million-dollar fantasy prize. The FLW will award $100,000 to the winner of the fantasy contest that accompanied the Forrest Wood Cup, as it did six other times this season to winners at other tournaments.

On Thursday, however, the top 15 finishers in the seasonlong game will be brought together for an event in Columbia, S.C., during which Bennett will announce the top fantasy scorer for the season and hand over another $1 million novelty check. Other prizes to be given out include a Chevy Silverado, a Ranger Z19 bass boat, a $25,000 Wal-Mart gift card and a $20,000 BP gift card.

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