In the previous post I described Draft Poker, which is Sports Poker based on a Daily Fantasy Sports contest. The hands in Draft Poker are fantasy teams the players draft. It then goes on to explain what it means to play poker with your fantasy team.
But the strangest thing about your hand is not that it is a fantasy sports team. The strangest thing is that you picked the hand yourself! Imagine if you could choose your own hand in a traditional poker game!
Five aces? I have six aces!
What is it about Sports Poker that makes it okay to choose your own hand? Live sports. The value of a Draft Poker hand (a fantasy team) depends on how the players on the team perform in the day’s games. You cannot be sure of what the best hand is when you choose it. This is totally different from traditional poker where the value of a hand doesn’t depend on anything except the cards in it. A full house always beats a flush. So, if you can choose your own hand in (say) Draw Poker, you will (obviously) choose a royal flush in spades. What if someone already chose those cards? Who knows and who cares! The whole idea of picking your own hand is unworkable in the world of traditional poker. That’s the point.
The live sports aspect of Sports Poker means that you cannot know for sure which hand is best until the Hand is over. In the case of Draft Poker, you cannot know the value of your hand until most/all of the games are done. Obviously if you’re good at drafting fantasy teams, you will have an edge in Draft Poker. But poker skills can be just as important, or more so.
As the games play out over the day, the number of fantasy points a given team is likely to accumulate starts to come into focus, so by the end of the day you probably have a good idea if you have a winning hand or not. But in Sports Poker you can make bets whenever you want. If your team gets off to a good start, make a bet to raise the stakes! If your team is off to a slow start and someone else makes a bet, you’ve got to make a decision! Can your team turn it around? Maybe they’re bluffing! This game is no easier to play than traditional poker.
The point of this post is to explain how it’s possible to choose your own hand in Sports Poker games. The key is that (unlike traditional poker) you cannot tell for sure what the best hand is. The name we came up with for Sports Poker hands you choose yourself is Fantasy Hands. In Draft Poker your Fantasy Hand is the fantasy team you draft. That’s how we came up with the name! But there are other Sports Poker varieties with Fantasy Hands that have nothing to do with fantasy sports. For example, Bracket Poker is Sports Poker based on bracket games, like the uber-popular March Madness bracket games. You fill out a bracket (or maybe a few brackets) and that’s your Fantasy Hand! You play poker with your bracket.
Not every version of Sports Poker has Fantasy Hands. Our current versions of Baseball and Football Poker use special decks of cards, and hands are dealt randomly to the players, like in traditional poker. The next couple of posts will be on Football Poker.