Fantasy Hockey Experience

[Nuge93]

Writing a paper for class about Fantasy Hockey (or other sports as well) and would love to hear about your experience with fantasy sports.

Please include:
-How you started
-Why you like it/why you keep playing
-And anything else you want to mention about it

Please note that by replying in this thread, I have your permission to use it in my essay.

Thanks!

Click to read more...

 

[King Mapes]

You get to write about this in school? I never had teachers like that..

Honestly, I got started because some guy I never heard of sent me a pm (he seen many posts of mine in the Blue Jays thread). I completely forgot about the draft and he messaged again and I stuck with it. After baseball season I started doing hockey ones. I instantly became addicted.

I like it because I get to have my favorite young players on my team. I love to wheel and deal and I get super pumped to draft. I've currently been working on a draft the last few days that happens Saturday. I'm compiling a list and plan on scratching their names off the list as they get picked. I also just like to show off my hockey knowledge. Despite having done about 15 leagues since 2009 I've only finished worse than 5th once and that was a league I took over a month into the season.

 

[M4TR1X]

I started playing fantasy hockey about 11 years ago. I basically started when I saw a friend in a baseball fantasy league, and I had no idea what exactly it was about. Not loving baseball I wasn't as intrigued but when he mentioned that fantasy hockey exists, I was quite enthused. That following autumn season I searched around on the web for fantasy hockey pools and found some results on 'Yahoo!'. Though because I lacked plenty of knowledge and wanting to learn the ropes I thought it was best for me to join a league before ever getting the idea to plan to create my own.

Countless years later when facebook was booming and I was able to connect with so many friends, I took it upon myself to create my own hockey pool. This first year was a complete fail because I didn't rake in a whole load of "active" members. The following year I ran one up again and tried to the best of my ability to know that everyone I was recruiting was committed and active. I was lucky and successful and ran a pool with generally the same core of guys for 4 seasons. Now days I don't really enjoy managing fantasy hockey but rather just play.

Some of the reasons I enjoy playing include, having an excuse to pay attention to other teams more closely, the fantasy feeling of managing a hockey team, and competing with other people to be the best.

 

[Isles5513]

Several years ago, my uncle who has been the commishiner of his fantasy football league since 1990 (yes, the pre internet days of fantasy sports where he would calculate scores manually from stats in the newspaper), got me and my friends started in fantasy football. I was instantly hooked. I played fantasy football and fantasy hockey with my friends. I even got into fantasy baseball with a few friends, and at that time I knew almost nothing about baseball. I ended up learning a lot from it. I only played fantasy baseball for two more years after, but it taught me a lot about baseball, a lot of baseball players, and I even started watching some baseball games. After that, I focused more on fantasy hockey and fantasy football. Two years ago I became co-owners with my uncle in his fantasy football league. His league is a 31 player roster where we start 2 QBs and full IDPs. That league just entered its 25th season. I'm currently in that league, another league with similar player format, and 4 fantasy hockey leagues. 2 of them are full dynasty leagues. 1 is a keeper league with 7 keepers. The other is just a normal standard fantasy hockey league.

Fantasy hockey and fantasy sports might be a small part of my life, but it has had a huge impact on me. It teaches us about our favorite sports and teaches things that you thought you knew about your favorite sport, when in reality you didn't know how much you didn't know about it.

Hope this helps! I had more to say, but had so much things to say that I forgot while I was writing this.

 

[fedfed]

I started because one forum I was attending frequently at the time (2009) was running a league, and I signed up. At first I was laughed at by more experienced players as I made a couple mistakes, but I finished 3rd in the league of 12/14 players in my first year, so I decided to keep doing it.

I do that because it combines sports (hockey and soccer) with some brain exercise. I like to exercise my brain. It's like chess, just with athletes for pieces. The idea of running an imaginary team may seem childish at first, but chess is an imaginary war, too

P.S. OP, you might also be interested in watching the ESPN documentary "Silly Little Game" about the roots of fantasy sports if you haven't already. Really made me much more appreciative of the culture of fantasy sports.

 

[Isles5513]

P.S. OP, you might also be interested in watching the ESPN documentary "Silly Little Game" about the roots of fantasy sports if you haven't already. Really made me much more appreciative of the culture of fantasy sports.

I completely agree. It was a great documentry. I believe it's on Netflix, at least the American version.