In one of the comments Derek Carty noted the similarity of his team and ours.  Specifically, he was talking about the general price range of players that we bought.  My feeling auctioning against him went quite a bit deeper than that.  Throughout the auction we were very often the last two bidders on players.  As they used to say on the trading floor, it felt like we were "trading off the same sheets." There were however two groups of players where this was distinctly not true.

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Somewhere in the course of this debate the tag "quant" stuck. Even though  Bill tried to explain early on  that we are traders, not theoreticians and I touched on my gaming history (Bill is also a very accomplished games player).  I think it is worth taking a moment to clarify what our experience and skill sets are and how those apply to FBB.

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In the comment threads Chris Liss said:

"I don't know every step my brain makes. I just look at the facts, and form impressions which I translate to a loosely ordered list and trust myself to get the job one at the auction. I'm not sure why you're convinced that making these calls ahead of time is necessarily helping you.  "

That is a fair question and I am going to answer it.

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This is a claim I've made a few times in the comments and before any more veins pop in any more foreheads I am going to clarify what I mean by this.

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Before I start, I want to say the following:  Bill and I feel we have analysis to share, and would like to do so regularly. We were surprised at the sheer volume of objections, and how far afield they seemed to run, when we tried to begin our presentation with some general points. Neither of us are particularly quick writers and we are both extremely busy with work and family.  At this point we feel the most constructive way for us to proceed is to share details in a hopefully regular manner without delving into what appears to us to be an endless and somewhat premature debate. It's a long baseball season, and I'm sure by the time we are done we will have addressed many questions and at the least will be better situated to address anything that remains undiscussed.

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Hi, my name is Robert Dixon.  I am a co-owner in the league.  I've been a serious games player and bit of a math geek pretty much all my life.  I really enjoy fantasy baseball and am excited to be part of this league.

Back in the early 1990s when I was in college I took up tournament Scrabble. I'd already been in the tournament chess scene for a few years and assumed that Scrabble, like chess, would be filled with a bunch of games loving people looking for an outlet for intellectual competition. I was very wrong.

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