Expert Inclusitivity

The Internet has changed our lives. Directly for most, but for those dinosauric gainfully employed few who still refuse to allow the instant information into their sheltered lives, then the indirect altering of their lives would still very much apply. Every darn thing we do is affected by the steady flow of information and misinformation on the Internet. My mother’s church group is on line now. They might not pray there (though I was hoping to find some for me) but the Internet serves them as another outlet for greater communication and knowledge for their special groups.

There is no exclusion anymore, save for those who cannot afford much of anything at all. That exclusion applies to all luxuries we take for granted, including computers and the use of the internet.Every working human has an equal opportunity to include themselves in something online. The debate that the Internet is somehow, and in some fashion, affecting your life is proven. There is no debate. Either you are a part of it or you are being left behind because of it.

In some areas of our spoiled lives, we haven’t just advanced our ways of doing things through use of the Internet recently, but are now on just another phase of change. Sports Fantasy pools fall into this category quite easily. We are now in a phase greater than the amount of Rocky movies out there. The landscape is always altering. The advantages extracted by use of the Internet was a must years ago but now it is a matter of which different route to take that will equate to the advantageous one. This article is not about the right one to take for your particular fantasy sports obsession. This article is a mere acknowledgment of the various avenues available for your travel down pleasures and a short example of my very own recent travels.

Before I go further - the easiest route to information about anything, specially about sport pools/betting is and always has been the one that we pay for -but the point here, however, is to feature the roads less traveled, or at the very least, less paid for.

Recently I was stuck with an odd predicament regarding, at that time, the upcoming NCAA Basketball Tournament. I will use the excuse of “encornerment”….I was cornered into participation in this small priced but well educated, amongst the others, Bracket Pool. They had it all setup on CBSsportsline.com and they could put my name on there that night. Got $25 and you get included. All I needed to do was to give in my picks and watch my bracket explode as it always has in the past. Oh, and drop the cash in their pockets as you leave.

So, I sucked it up, dropped my cash on their laps and went home to try and find out all the information I could on the upcoming Tournament. The Internet, as most generally accepted, is a wonderful source for information, any information but, like all things in life, has succumbed to the great law of all business in the world..Supply and Demand. Try looking up “Predictions for NCAA Brackets 2008″ in your handy search engine and your results will be littered with gambling sites that will sell you their secret winning picks. There is a demand for this service. I decided that I would continue my search and see if the supply of such help was out there still for free. The free help, I was to find out, is much more difficult to extract. Still, the difficulty meant more keystrokes, clicks and time. I decided this route would be worth it.

Keep at it and you will find help through various forums and Blogs. I kept at it. I had to. I hadn’t watched one game and didn’t know a Curry from a Hansbrough (though I was quite intrigued to see old Dell Curry cheering on his son in the stands. Way to go, Dell!) So there I was, cornered into this pool of which I knew nothing about, looking at this very odd chart, THE BRACKET, and wondering what the hey I was going to do. I hit the Blogs hard. One link leads to another link which leads to another link. I got out my trusty little pen, brought some handy intuition and made my bracket an exercise of elimination. I must have hit about 50 odd sites/blogs/forums. After eliminating those who had trouble in articulation, I was left with much help from those who don’t get paid nor acknowledged. They merely place their predictions down so they may have chance of typing “I told you so” at a later date.

The results are not fully in but from the mere jotting down of all these unsolicited, and unknowing opinions from Joe Fan(s) and then adding them up, I was able to make my bracket with some confidence. When the Sweet 16 had been decided, I had a sweet 13 of that said 16 and I stood in first place. My eventual demise was due to the strange results that would happen after that. Four first seed teams made the final four.

Turns out that those who paid no mind to the games whatsoever had the greatest advantage of all this year. They just went by the little numbers beside the names of the teams and chose their bracket that way. Number one winning every time. The eventual win by Kansas was not predicted by any in my pool and I would assume by very few everywhere. If you went by the favorites then you most likely chose North Carolina or UCLA. In the end, I took back the $25 I gave with a 3rd place finish.

Not bad for someone who knew zilch walking in.

Now, when dealing with fantasy drafts of players such as Hockey/Baseball/Football/Basketball, I think this theory would then need some modification but the same mode of transport and the process of elimination would remain very much the same. The sum of the idea I am presenting is to create a type of system that polls the results of many amateur viewers. A guy who started a blog and decided to visit Florida for Spring training for the week. That whole week has allowed him to observe firsthand what you could only extract from so few only a year or two ago. Blogs and forums are becoming as nice a source of information as any. Now, I do grant the negative few, the point about qualification of those said writers in their forums and blogs. They may have no real idea about what they report on. Then again, the same might be said for the sources we have used throughout the years. Check the predictions in the Hockey News at the start of the NHL season for example — Each and every writer had Tampa Bay going to the playoffs and in most of their top 8 seedings for the Eastern Conference, the Lightening were very near the top. Qualify that! The idea is that you take a poll of many and then have a better chance to extract a very good idea about who may truly come from the weeds and shine.

For the upcoming baseball season, there are many free sources of information out there. Almost every baseball city has their newspaper writers using a blog on their main sites or even independent of that. This is a wonderful new source of information for those like me, who have always felt a need for more…and more….and more. I am a Reds fan and now have bookmarks for about 5 different Reds Blogs that update with a new story daily, including a game thread each day that includes up to 400 comments about the game. I also have a bookmarked Blog from every single baseball city in North America.

If you knew anything about the Reds this spring then you knew about Johnny Cueto. Almost every pitch he made was updated on these blogs either via firsthand account by the writer of the Blog or by TV account from the many posters who visited. He was a hero before even throwing one pitch in a MLB regular season game. There was reason for this. These folks had seen him first hand and when you witness a pitcher who throws that 5 extra mph on the radar gun and has harnessed his control of it, the excitement one feels as a fan of that team is over the top to say the least.

The Next Pedro Martinez has been coming for years…In fact, Pedro may have already come in a Liriano or otherwise but they still use Pedro as the obvious benchmark for all others. The thin Pitcher who can throw the ball harder and faster than anyone else with pinpoint control and a solid array of controlled off speed for 7 innings at a time. Such a rarity is odd and gold at the same time, for real and fantasy purposes as well. To have the inside word on such a pitcher is gold…gold…gold. The story on Johnny Cueto didn’t likely slide under the radar of most seasoned fantasy players regardless of whether you had read about him on the Reds Blogs or not.

His story had been made public to all in a national sense in recent days by ESPN and other sport outlets, but you get the idea. The real deep sleepers for this year might have been best extracted from the many odd blogs/forums that are popping up almost daily. Google Google Google. As the new Baseball season progresses and the pools heat up with the weather, your new advantage still awaits.