Draft Your Team Now For EPT Deuville On Fantasy Poker ManagerNew Free-To-Play Social Game Allows You To Draft Fantasy Poker Team |
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The next big thing that Alex Dreyfus, one of poker’s most respected entrepreneurs, has been teasing us about lately is Fantasy Poker Manager, a free-to-play social game from Zokay Entertainment, the comapny that owns and runs the Global Poker Index.
Poker players should not be too unfamiliar with fantasy poker, a variant of fantasy sports based on live tournament poker events. Daniel Negreanu annually stages what is perhaps the most famous fantasy poker league, his $25,000 WSOP fantasy draft. Usually around the same period, arguably as a direct result of Negreanu’s event, numerous poker communities get the fantasy poker itch as well and set up their own leagues and contests, making use of whatever platform they can find.
Fantasy Poker Manager definitely seizes on this passion and attempts to provide the community with a sophisticated fantasy poker home that doubles as a great resource for tournament poker information. The FPM database alone contains results for over 1,000 different players, making it useful even for non-fantasy research. Users are provided with constantly updated stats relating to players’ performances and “value,” all conveniently powered by FPM’s older brother, the Global Poker Index.
“The Fantasy Poker Manager will help bring a new level of excitement and interaction to live poker tournaments,” said Zokay CEO Alex Dreyfus in a press release.
This may seem ambitious, but it is not at all implausible. The multi-billion dollar fantasy sports industry is widely credited for getting sports fans that much more into the games, and Dreyfus is admittedly trying to replicate that for poker. Much like sports bettors, fantasy sports contestants are more invested in the outcome of games because they have something of their own riding on it. In addition, fantasy sports enthusiasts feverishly seek out game and player info to try and make better decisions for their teams, and all of this helps to enlarge the greater sports media industry.
Can the same be done for poker? Dreyfus certainly wants to try. “It will help promote poker as the sport that it is and will bring the fans and professionals of poker closer together.”
Fantasy Poker Manager lives on Facebook, meaning that many users will already have quick access to it. The interface is colorful, well designed and fairly easy to understand, even for those who are not very experienced with fantasy poker. For those who are still lost, the game provides an easy and accessible user guide.
Here’s a breakdown of how it works: when you sign in to Fantasy Poker Manager for the first time, you will be afforded 1,000,000 “virtual” (play) credits, to be used to “purchase” poker players for your team, ahead of a pre-set tournament such as the upcoming LA Poker Classic main event. You’re allowed 10 players on your team (up to 12 if you complete certain achievements, such as “liking” FPM on Facebook). A player’s “market price” is heavily determined by his/her current GPI standing, but also influenced in part by a “popularity factor” which is based on user-submitted data.
Once your team is set, you sit back as the actual real-life tournament plays out, and as you can probably conclude on your own, the better your team’s real-life counterparts do, the more points they will score for your team. (The game tries to make it easy for users to know which players are “expected” to play in the events by providing this information ahead of time.)
There is also the option to “challenge” your friends’ teams (ideal on a social network such as Facebook), with some interesting “prop bets” that should definitely be up some users’ alleys. For example, I can “bet” you 100 virtual credits that the players on my team will end up with more cashes than the players on your team, or that my team will end up scoring more points than yours.
A question that will probably linger on a lot of users’ minds is: can I play Fantasy Poker Manager for real money? The answer, as of right now, is no. Dreyfus is no stranger to the realities of online gaming law, in America and abroad. He has been an online poker operator himself with the EU-facing Chili Poker, which he never allowed to take bets from American players.
Purchasing additional virtual credits with actual cash is an available feature on Fantasy Poker Manager, but that’s as far as it currently goes. However, it is understood that an eventual real-money possibility is not being ruled out.
Real money or not, it is hard to argue that Fantasy Poker Manager is an uncreative addition to the poker playing landscape, and the software itself must be given credit for being fun and having a lot of potential. It will remain to be seen how the poker community responds to Alex Dreyfus’s new baby in the short term – but with the World Series of Poker, and the fantasy poker itch that comes with it, only a few months away, it shall be interesting to track the evolution of Fantasy Poker Manager as it progresses into what could realistically become a very big thing.
If you’d like to draft your own team for the upcoming EPT Deauville main event, click on the banner below. You can even check out some of the picks made by EPT champions such as Jake Cody and Liv Boeree.
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