First, for what it's worth, I numbered you among those beating the weekenders, not as a weekender yourself.

So, just to finish up, the guy who won the NFBC Main Event, the guy written up in The Gray Lady, that guy plays a very balanced approach. But the main event is draft. He finished second in the auction championship, losing to the guy who punted saves.

I realized two things by virtue of our thread today. One is that auctions lend themselves to trying to game the system because there is a turbulent distributions of talent from stars and scrubs to balanced to punters. Extreme strategies and numbers arbitrages can happen because any player can be had for a price. In a draft the talent distribution is smooth. Each player gets one player from each tier. It's tougher in that format to force the right players to execute a strategy that requires concentrations of certain kinds of categories.

The other thing I thought about today is that the RCL and the NFBC Main Event, both drafts, also have a much larger number of total teams as compared to the NFBC auction, which has "only" 135. So a strategy where you punt has a greater chance of success in the overall, because the penalty for a low finish is one category is not as punitive.

Not sure if you saw this already, but interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/sport ... wanted=all

Ha, that Pig Farmer article is awesome.

The Pig Farmer's main competitor picked AROD in the first round??? How did he even get close to 2nd place with genius moves like that?

This is a patently false statement. With 390 teams in both years, the odds of winning twice are 1 in 152,200. Your odds of flopping a royal flush in Hold'em, on the other hand, are 1 in 649,740.

I don't mean to say that the Pig Farmer won solely because of luck, but having Verlander, Kemp, and Granderson have bad 2010's, thus decreasing their value in the 2011 draft and allowing him to nab all three players, then having bounceback 2011's, seems like a bit of luck. Not to mention that there is no way he predicted Asdrubal Cabrera's 2011 with that 17th-round pick and the Farnsworth pick was simply a late-round flyer that panned out.

Picking up Allen Craig for an injured Holliday and having him do as well as he did and hit a home run in the last game of the season? Luck, luck, luck!

Not to say that the Pig Farmer isn't modest and humble about his accomplishments, but we should always be aware that fantasy baseball, just like poker, is a mysterious mix of skill and luck and we should never allow our heads to swell to hat-busting size.