Reviewing This Year’s 25K Fantasy Teams

Friday night, the annual 25K Fantasy draft took place featuring 11 teams ponying up a $25,000 buy-in for a high-stakes fantasy poker league. Yours truly was involved drafting for Team Run it Up, and if you’d like to watch the entire draft, which was streamed on the PokerNews Twitch channel, you can do so by clicking here.

Team Brunson filled out its roster with with a chunk of mid-price players instead of going with a stars-and-scrubs strategy. While this isn’t necessarily a strategy I advocate for, unless you’re making a mid-draft adjustment, it did allow them to score a bunch of well-rounded players with lots of World Series of Poker success.

Robert Mizrachi, Brian Hastings, and Max Pescatori are all well versed in all variants of poker and have multiple gold bracelets, so it’ll be more a question of volume with this trio than anything. All sings point to Mizrachi and Pescatori putting in high volume over the summer, but Hastings feels like a question mark to me. If Hastings plays a lot, he’s a solid pick at a price of $30, but if he doesn’t then he’ll certainly need to make those dollars count with some big splashes in the few events he plays.

Best Pick: John Racener at $40 is a great pick, and this price is likely a bit less than his actual value. He plays all the games, has proven WSOP success despite not having a bracelet, and will definitely put in a high volume.

Worst Pick: Yuval Bronshtein, although he only cost $3, would be someone I would stay away from. Most of my reasoning here would be because I feel like I could find much better value for players in the $1-3 range that I think will play a higher volume, specifically more of the bigger buy-in events.

We went toe to toe with George Danzer in a battle for Stephen Chidwick. If you’re asking me, he’s the top guy this year. I know he hasn’t put up huge WSOP numbers, nor does he have a gold bracelet yet, but this is the year for Chidwick. Once we hit $95 and started going higher and higher, I was willing to go in the neighborhood of $125 to land Chidwick. Largely due to the point of the draft we were at and which big guns had already been selected.

Backing up his stud Chidwick with Ben Yu is a great play for Danzer. Yu might not be a stud in the eyes of many, but Danzer’s draft strategy was certainly to land two big guns and then fill in the rest with high-quality mixed-game players.

Best Pick: Because the market makes it feel like Chidwick is overpriced, Yu is the best pick on this team. I know my PokerNews Podcast co-host Remko Rinkema would disagree with me for who is the best pick on the team (he thinks it’s Alex Luneau), I can’t argue with Yu at $45 when he’s definitely one of the top 25 players drafted, plays all the games, and is playing a big volume.

Worst Pick: Alex Kravchenko shouldn’t be on anyone’s roster, let alone for $3.

Team Gorodinsky came out swinging for Dzmitry Urbanovich and ended up landing the Polish rising star for $85. The team also landed an equally solid player in Dan Kelly, but for almost half the price. That two-headed monster could really put up some big numbers for this squad.

Jesse Martin is always a solid pick, but the selection of Shawn Buchanan worries me a little. When I’m unaware of a players schedule or get some word he or she might be taking it easy during the summer, I tend to stay away from drafting them. If Buchanan plays a full schedule, the $25 is a steal. If he backs off and sticks to more high-stakes cash games, then I don’t like the pick.

Best Pick: Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi at $2 is great value. The guy is going to play a ton of events and can rip of deep runs and final tables like very few others. Yes, Mizrachi plays a bit of a whacky, aggressive style, but he’s a “go big or go home” pick you can’t really argue with for this cheap.

Worst Pick: I’m equally turned off by Jeff Lisandro and Chino Rheem. I don’t feel these two will be playing big schedules, especially Lisandro, so I would look to find value elsewhere.

Not a fan of Team Alaei’s draft strategy here. It’s neither stars and scrubs, nor is it a bunch of mid-priced guys. John Monnette is certainly a star, but I wouldn’t consider James Obst as another star. Sure, Obst is a top-quality …

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