LittleWyvern.com

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past two weeks. I have been trying to spend as much time as I can at my computer, but obviously that time has been spent trying to put together our new website. Well, that and the occasional LAN game of UT3 with Lukas and my brother…

My life outside of web development has not been terribly interesting. The only other new news is actually old news in that my chest pain and random heart freakouts have been coming back pretty strong. I’m still fairly sure that it is all just a bit of psychosomatic nonsense, but it’s still pretty annoying. For about a week I had a lot of trouble sleeping – it’s hard to fall asleep when my heart is pounding inside my chest with an intensity as though I had just finished a round of wind sprints – and one night in particular the pain woke me up, and then kept me up, for most of the night. It’s not scary anymore, mostly just obnoxious. Hopefully it goes away again, and soon. It’s probably just related to the recently ambiguous stress of starting my own company.

Oh, and speaking of that… yes… it’s official: Colosso Productions LLC is a fully legitimate and legally recognized entity. That being the case I suppose I am now allowed to talk about Phase One of our plan to take over the world. Like most ingenious multi-phase plans of the sort, the goal of Phase One is humble in nature and can be summed up as “don’t go completely broke.” So far so good. (Though, in fairness, recent success to this end has far more to do with my competency at poker than any particular business savvy.)

The first venture, of what will hopefully be several, is the creation of a fantasy sports website called Fantasy BlueBook. As the name hopefully helps to convey, the purpose of the site is to provide accurate and meaningful valuation data on professional baseball and football players (get it? Blue Book… player values… ??). Lukas knows sports, I know websites, and we are both pretty far above average when it comes to math (even though we couldn’t all get degrees in Math to prove it). Anyways, although we both use the internet to do quite a lot of research for our fantasy teams, we found that there is a fairly large gap in available information that FantasyBlueBook.com will attempt to satisfy. The basic problem, as we see it, is that while there is a massive market saturation in terms of amateur websites providing allegedly expert advice, the advice that is given is universally universal in nature. That is to say, everybody claims that their information is for everyone.

The truth of course is that the particular value of any player is highly dependent on a wide range of variables. As an extremely simple example you can consider the difference in values of a particular running back between leagues that use a Points-Per-Reception scoring system and leagues that don’t give credit for those receptions. Someone like Reggie Bush who catches a lot of balls in the backfield might be a top five player in the first league, but not even in the top twenty in another. Things become increasingly more complicated when you consider that it’s not just the scoring systems that vary between leagues, but entire team structures and player counts. I played in three fantasy football leagues this past season. One of them required two quarterbacks to start each week, the others only allowed for one (thereby increasing the relative values of QBs because of their extreme relative scarcity). Another of my leagues was a dynasty league where teams were allowed to keep a variable number of players between seasons (thereby negating the value of superstars who are unavailable at the draft, but tremendously increasing the value of rookies that could be potentially carried over for future seasons). Finally, the third league used an auction style draft that used cash bidding to acquire players instead of the otherwise standard round-robin “everybody takes turns” style of draft. Relative values of players in an auction draft is based not on your position in the draft order (and corresponding likelihood of player availability when your next pick comes up), but on assigning correct cash values to each player and position requirement and managing your draft bankroll.

Most of the people who read this blog will understand the concept, but hopefully this helped to give a general idea to those of you who don’t. The point to take to heart here is that the value of any given fantasy player will change (sometimes quite dramatically) from situation to situation. The existing sources of “expert” information generally ignore this fact, touting their latest and greatest Top Ten lists and claiming them to be universal. Lukas and I think we can do better.

The goal for FantasyBlueBook will be to allow our members (initial access will be free while we work to build our brand, but we already have membership fees and plans in the works) the ability to generate customized listings of fantasy player values that are tailored to their specific needs. Using a combination of statistics, projections, and our own mathematical formulas we will hopefully be able to provide information to our users that is far more useful than that which existing online sources currently provide.

There is a substantial amount of work that goes into this, probably more than two people can reasonably accomplish on their own, but so far things are going pretty smoothly. The website is nearly complete from a programming standpoint, and all that remains before we can launch is to finish importing our statistics and fine tune some of our formulas. I will be sure to let you know when it is up though.

Ugh, I would talk a bit more, but Lukas and Eric are yelling at me to join their game of Risk. I guess I have to go… it is the game of world domination after all… and I can’t expect the world to dominate itself.