Fantasy Football, Vegas Style

Chad Schroeder is on the clock. He’s one of a dozen men seated around a U of tables in a conference room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas on the first Friday of September. No one speaks. Not the chief psychiatrist at a hospital in Memphis; not the securities analyst from San Diego; not the Canadian political pundit; and not the movie producer behind Cruel Intentions and Donnie Darko, who is calling in from his home in Long Island, where he’s recovering from surgery. Schroeder sighs heavily, lets out a quiet “f––k,” and says, “Steven Jackson.” And with that, he has made the St. Louis Rams running back his third pick in the National Fantasy Football Championship’s Diamond League draft.

The Diamond may well be the world’s most serious fantasy football league. The entry fee is $10,000. The winner stands to pocket $80,000. It is the most expensive among more than 300 pay-to-play leagues run by the sports information company Stats, which holds its drafts in Las Vegas, New York, and Chicago, as well as online. More than 1,000 players, nearly all of them men, will spend a combined $2 million for the right to manage some 4,000 teams in Stats football leagues this season. There are a handful of other companies with high-stakes leagues, but none with a five-figure entry fee, according to Greg Ambrosius, who runs the Stats leagues. “There was a competing contest that did a $25,000 [league] at one point,” says Ambrosius, “and they actually did fill it. But they, of course, took the money and ran.”