$25,000 FanDuel Grand Slam Preview with ZooBird
Quick, what is the largest prize pool you’ve ever played for in a fantasy baseball league, daily or season long? While we do have some high stakes guys in the community, few of us have ever played for anywhere close to $25,000. I’ve played arduous, competitive full season leagues with a prize pool 1% as big as the FanDuel Grand Slam. This is an awesome promo. Someone is going to win $5,000 on opening day. Hopefully it’s me. For this, I’ll enter at least 10 teams at $10 a pop. It’s certainly going to be fun to sweat my teams and the teams of fellow Grinders.
I wanted to dig a little deeper into this massive event, so I spoke with Fanduel admin, Zoobird (WaiverWire here) about this awesome promotion. Here’s what he had to say:
This is a ballsy promotion. What was the planning process like? How did you decide on $25,000 as the Guarantee?
ZooBird: Honestly, coming up with the amount was more art than science. We don’t have a lot of history with season opening contests to fall back on, but we knew that we wanted the Grand Slam to be for a big enough prize that people would get excited about it.
For football you did another massive promotion, the $50,000 FFFC. In that event, players competed over ten weeks to earn ten spots in a one day contest played out live in Las Vegas. Why did you keep this promotion entirely online and in a one day format instead of drawing it out over weeks or adding in a live element?
ZooBird: While the FFFC was a huge success, it’s a lot of work to organize a live event. We didn’t think that was the best use of our time at the moment. However, don’t be surprised to see us do an even bigger and better FFFC in 2011. We went with one day tournament for the Grand Slam so that someone could wake up on the morning of April 2nd $5,000 richer…we wanted to give people the chance at a quick score!
As of now, we are just under one week from opening day. There are 380 entries so far, contributing just over 15% of the guaranteed prize pool. Do you think there will be an overlay? How many entries do you think there will be in the end?
ZooBird: When we set the $25,000 prize pool, we knew that there was a good chance of an overlay. If that happens, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The goal of the FanDuel Grand Slam is to draw in a lot of new players. If it does that, it’s a success. As far as the overlay…I don’t think we’re really going to know until the last three or four days, but it certainly looks pretty likely.
What would be your strategy for the Grand Slam if you were entering only one team?
ZooBird: In a field this large, you need to differentiate yourself. Definitely avoid the most obvious picks. No Pujols. No Mauer. No great hitters against relatively weak starting pitchers.
What would be your strategy if you were entering ten teams?
ZooBird: I’d probably pick about three players I like at each position and mix and match. If there were multiple players on the list from the same team, I’d group them together in the same lineups.
Do you have any other promotions up your sleeve for baseball season that we should know about?
ZooBird: It’s safe to say that we’ll be running a heavier schedule of regularly scheduled MLB tournaments than we have for NBA and NHL. We also have some other ideas that we’re working on, but nothing we can share yet.
Cameron MacMillan
RotoGrinders.com Fantasy Content Manager
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In addition to a full time job as a software product manager, Alex Zelvin works part time for Fanduel.com (Zoobird on FanDuel) and co-owns Dailybaseballdata.com
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