At the Brera Ballroom inside the Cosmopolitan hotel and casino on the Las Vegas strip on Saturday night, two former NFL players sit about 30 feet away from each other.
One is Bo Jackson, the marquee attraction at FanDuel’s World Fantasy Baseball Championship. Jackson, who hosted a home-run derby for the best of the daily fantasy sports world at a nearby baseball facility on Friday evening, holds court at the open-bar party on Saturday, greeting fans with stories of his days as a baseball and football megastar.
The other ex-football star, Wayne Chrebet, sits quietly nursing a beer near the bar. Chrebet, who played wide receiver for parts of 11 seasons with the New York Jets, wears a loose-fitting throwback White Sox jersey that reads “JORDAN 45” on the back. The only obvious indications of his past as a professional athlete are the large ring he earned at his 2014 induction to the Jets’ Ring of Honor and the strong, broad neck that seems inseparable from NFL experience.
Unlike Jackson, Chrebet is not here on account of his heroics in professional sports — though, as a dogged fan favorite with an undersized frame and incredible hands, he had plenty of them. Now 42 years old and a financial advisor for Barclays, Chrebet made the trip to Vegas to compete with the rest of the world’s best daily fantasy baseball players for the $1 million grand prize that will go to the night’s winner.
Wayne Chrebet (right) at the World Fantasy Baseball Championships in Las Vegas on Saturday. (PHOTO: FanDuel.com)
“I picked it up last football season, continued on during basketball, and now to baseball,” Chrebet tells USA TODAY Sports when asked of his history with FanDuel.
Chrebet, now 42 years old and a father of three, suffered multiple concussions during his NFL tenure, including the devastating one that left him unconscious on the field in a game against the Chargers on November 6, 2005 and ended his career prematurely. In the early days of his retirement, he needed help with everyday tasks and sometimes struggled to get out of bed. And given the ominous threat of the brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which plagues so many of his former colleagues, Chrebet credits daily fantasy sports for helping him keep his mind active.
“From what I’ve heard from former players that had issues with concussions, it’s important to stay sharp,” he says. “Reading, puzzles — just using your brain. This allows me to do that, keep me focusing on stuff. It’s when you sit back and do nothing that you grow old too fast.”
FanDuel’s rules are reasonably straightforward: Contestants can enter any of thousands of daily leagues, which vary by entry fee, the number of entries, and the payout structure. Sometime before the daily slate of pro games starts, the fantasy GMs select a lineup that fits under FanDuel’s preset salary cap, with player prices varying by day depending on matchups, trends, and park factors.
Wayne Chrebet lays on the field after the 2005 concussion that ultimately ended his career. (PHOTO: Robert Deutsch/USA TODAY Sports Images)
Players earned their way to Saturday’s event by winning qualifying leagues throughout the season. The World Fantasy Baseball Championship consisted of 90 entries, though some players earned up to four seats in the contest. FanDuel provided airfare and hotel rooms in Vegas for all the competitors and awarded $4 million in prizes on Saturday night alone, with even the last-place finisher winning $10,000.
Tommy Gelati, a 36-year-old New Jersey native, stock trader, and fantasy expert for Scout.com and Sirius XM who entered Saturday’s contest with over $700,000 worth of winnings on FanDuel, compares daily fantasy sports to day trading on the stock market.
“It’s the same thing,” says Gelati, who finished in sixth place on Saturday to take home $100,000. “Season-long fantasy is basically investing in players. Daily fantasy is day-trading players…. Our job is to find the value, and find those guys that are a little underpriced.”
Chrebet plays daily fantasy sports “pretty much every day,” by his own account, and believes his background as a pro athlete does give him some aspect of an advantage against most of his competition.
“I look at all the statistics like everyone else does, but mine’s more about knowing the history of what players have done against everyone else — the recent history,” he says. “And the mental aspect of it — I know that in football, certain guys had other guys’ numbers, like some defensive backs I would rather go against, some not. It’s the same thing for batters and pitchers. Some guys hit other pitchers better; those are the matchups I look for.”
Bo Jackson greets fans at the World Fantasy Baseball Championships (PHOTO: FanDuel.com)
Chrebet’s success on FanDuel appears even more impressive after a quick survey of his competition: Many of the contestants in Saturday night’s event are full-time professional fantasy players. The night’s $1 million winners, 29-year-old Ray Coburn and 31-year-old Cory Albertson, both spend upwards of 30 hours a week playing daily fantasy sports. The pair, who met during their days playing online poker, also won $1 million at an event sponsored by DraftKings.com, another daily fantasy sports site.
“The nice thing about playing fantasy sports and having enough success that you don’t need to worry about earning money, is you do have enough time to focus on other hobbies and projects,” says Albertson, before crediting the seven-figure winnings to the heroics of Tampa Bay Rays catcher John Jaso.
“It’s all research,” says Coburn. “It’s 99% research, 1% subjectivity.”
Andres Alvarez, a 32-year-old former software developer, left the comforts of a full-time job in the booming Boulder, Colo. tech sector to focus on playing daily fantasy sports. Alvarez admitted he was actually down $200 when he decided to make the leap and declined to say exactly how much he has earned since. But he left Vegas with $250,000 for finishing in third place on Saturday.
“I’d had a little bad luck, but I said, ‘If I want to be serious about this, I can’t half-ass it,’” Alvarez says. “Some people in the DFS sphere that told me about the money to be made there, and it was very easy to look at that and say there is a huge potential here. So I wasn’t about to be swayed by one bad week. For DFS pros, you have to have that mentality.”
Cory Albertson (center) and Ray Coburn (right) pose with Bo Jackson after winning $1 million on Saturday. (PHOTO: FanDuel.com)
Professional fantasy players like Albertson, Coburn and Alvarez are hardly uncommon here: Winning a qualifying event takes some luck, but plenty of skill. And given the amount of money there is to be won and the apparent value of both research and so-called “volume playing” — setting multiple teams per day to hedge bets and maximize the chances of winning, it makes sense for some to leave mundane day jobs behind to focus on fantasy.
And all that emphasizes how incredible, and how unlikely, it seems for a guy who was once in the business of playing actual sports to be here competing with guys who spend the bulk of their waking hours playing fantasy ones. Chrebet, who finished 29th out of 90 entries and earned $25,000 on Saturday, stresses that daily fantasy sports is “not a job,” as he has been working in the financial sector for seven years now.
“I just enjoy the rush of it,” he says. “It keeps me sharp: The studying, the analysis. I try not to put too much time into it; I’ve got three kids and a job.”
Looking around the room at his competition, Chrebet says, “It’s funny because I know some of these guys: I listen to them on the podcasts, and learn their information. They know me, but I’m fans of theirs as well. It goes both ways.”
