Since 2006, ESPN.com has held a fantasy poker draft leading up to the World Series of Poker, and the poker writers and players involved pick the team of players that will perform the best at this year’s WSOP. On Monday, ESPN.com Poker Editor Andrew Feldman published the results of the fifth annual draft, which was held last Friday.
This year’s league consists of 12 teams, captained by Feldman, Chops from WickedChopsPoker.com, Bluff Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lance Bradley, Poker Pro Magazine’s Chad Holloway, ESPN.com’s Gary Wise, poker pro and Poker News Daily contributor Bernard Lee, and poker pros Eric “basebaldy” Baldwin, Howard Lederer, Mark Seif, Daniel Negreanu, Gavin Smith, and Dennis Phillips. The draft was a standard fantasy sports-style “snake” draft in which the last person to pick in the first round selects first in the second round, the last person to pick in the second round led off the third round, and so on through eight rounds.
Negreanu dominated the league last year, getting five bracelets and a Main Event final table appearance from Phil Ivey and Jeffrey Lisandro. In his blog at FullContactPoker.com, Negreanu wrote that he feels he has another “really strong” team this year. He also noted that had he had the number one overall selection of the draft, he would have taken Ivey. As he had the second pick and Ivey was already drafted by Chops, Negreanu picked himself. Both Smith and Seif also drafted themselves, Smith in the second round and Seif in the seventh round.
The scoring for the ESPN.com fantasy poker league is as follows:
Make the money – 1 point
Make the top 50 – 2 points
Make the top 20 – 5 points
Make the final table – 10 points for a tournament with 100 players or fewer, plus 1 point for every 100 players beyond that
Ninth place – 1 additional point on top of base final table points
Eighth – 2 additional points
Seventh – 4 additional points
Sixth – 6 additional points
Fifth – 10 additional points
Fourth – 15 additional points
Third – 20 additional points
Second – 30 additional points
First – 40 additional points
Point totals will be doubled for any event with a buy-in of $10,000 or more.
And now, the teams, listed in the order in which they selected in the first round:
Chops
Phil Ivey
Carlos Mortensen
David Benyamine
Faraz “The-Toilet” Jaka
Brock “t soprano” Parker
Abe Mosseri
Tom Marchese
Josh Arieh
Daniel Negreanu
Daniel Negreanu
Scotty Nguyen
David Chiu
Justin “Boosted J” Smith
Todd Brunson
Freddy Deeb
Brett Richey
John Monnette
Andrew Feldman
Jason Mercier
Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier
Chau Giang
Scott Seiver
David Pham
Alexander Kostritsyn
David “Doc Sands” Sands
Ryan “g0lfa” D’Angelo
Gary Wise
Allen Cunningham
Daniel Alaei
Andy Bloch
Eli Elezra
Issac Haxton
Tom Schneider
Nick Schulman
Vitaly Lunkin
Howard Lederer
Barry Greenstein
John Juanda
Robert Mizrachi
Chad Brown
Matt Glantz
Amnon Filippi
Ralph Perry
Thor Hansen
Dennis Phillips
Erick Lindgren
Jeffrey Lisandro
J.C. Tran
David Singer
Brandon Cantu
Greg “FBT” Mueller
John “The Razor” Phan
Nam Le
Mark Seif
Tom “durrrr” Dwan
Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond
Ted Forrest
Doyle Brunson
Jennifer Harman
Johnny Chan
Mark Seif
Eric Froehlich
Lance Bradley
Erik Seidel
Howard Lederer
Chris Bjorin
Yevgeniy “Jovial Gent” Timoshenko
Patrik Antonius
Kenny Tran
Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger
Dan “djk123″ Kelly
Bernard Lee
Chris Ferguson
Michael Binger
Paul Wasicka
Eric “basebaldy” Baldwin
Max Pescatori
Dwyte Pilgrim
Roland de Wolfe
Jonathan “FieryJustice” Little
Eric Baldwin
Scott “BigRiskky” Clements
Matt Hawrilenko
Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo
Corwin “mig.com” Mackey
Shannon Shorr
Justin Young
James Van Alstyne
Michael Katz
Gavin Smith
Huck Seed
Gavin Smith
Jeff Madsen
Steve Sung
Bryan “badbeatninja” Devonshire
David Oppenheim
Chris Bell
Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar
Chad Holloway
Phil Hellmuth
Sorel “Imper1um” Mizzi
Mike Matusow
Annette “Annette_15” Obrestad
David Williams
Jason “JCarver” Somerville
Phil Laak
Amit “amak316″ Makhija