Turtles, John Henry, and Draftbug

We've already stirred up a minor controversy with Draftbug Millionaire, as I apparent didnt' exlain very well that the discussion of building a $70 bankroll up to $25,000 in one baseball season was more of a thought exercise than a specific goal for the project. This isn't a bankroll challenge in the strict sense. Our goal is for the participants to become 'pro' fantasy sports players. I fully expect that as they become confident in their results and ability to win, they're likely to choose to supplement their starting bankroll with additional deposits. And in some cases, it may take more than a year (possibly much more) to get to the point where they're earning $25,000 or more per year. At this point, we don't even know exactly when the amount of traffic on Draftbug will be able to support that kind of earnings.

While Draftbug Millionaire isn't really a 'bankroll challenge' in the traditional sense, the challenges that were popularized in poker by Chris Ferguson were one of the inspirations for the idea. Another inspiration was the story of 'The Turtles', a group of traders in the financial markets who were trained by two famous investors as the result of a bet about whether traders could be 'made' or whether they had to be born with some innate skill. It turned out that traders could be 'made', as a large number of the 'turtles' were wildly successful, earning hundreds of millions of dollars. One of them even bought as baseball team! John Henry used his earnings from trading to purchase the Boston Red Sox. I see a lot of parallels between financial markets and fantasy sports, so I suspect that successful fantasy players can be trained in the same way. In fact, I see all forms of speculation (financial markets, fantasy sports, gambling, etc.) as basically the same activity...but I'll save a detailed discussion of that for another day.