My Ups and Downs in Fantasy Tennis

Today, Andy Murray beat Roger Federer in the first semi-final at the ATP Masters Series tournament in Madrid. I can only describe my feelings as mixed. Roger Federer is my favorite tennis player, but I had Andy Murray on my fantasy tennis team for this week, so his victory was a good thing for me. After several weeks of disastrous results, two of my fantasy team were among the four players left in the semi-finals. That left my other guy, Gilles Simon (pictured), a very hot young player from France, to play the ATP's new number one player, Rafael Nadal, in the other semi-final, and, beyond my wildest dreams, he won.

I have been playing fantasy tennis on the ATP Tour website for the past three years. My first year was great. I fulfilled my goal of ending the season in the top 200 out of more than 12,000 competitors. Last year wasn't so good, and again this year I'm struggling, although I have not yet given up on my goal of ending the year in the top 500. After Murray's and Simon's victories today, my ranking is 643 out of 11,823 teams entered, with only two weeks left in the season, so you can see that I have an uphill battle. Nevertheless, I now have a lock on the title in this week's tournament, one of the biggest on the tour after the Grand Slams, so my ranking will be going up, no matter what.

The way the Fantasy Tennis game works is, you can choose 8 singles players and 1 doubles team for every week while the game is being played. My team is called Gremlins, because that was the only name I could think of when I registered to play the game. In 2008, it started on April 20th with the ATP Tour Masters Series tournment in Monte Carlo. Whatever prize money your players win during the tournament is credited to you, and the fantasy players who win the most prize money are ranked the highest. As of today, my team has won $15.068,757 for the season. The catch is that you can only use each player 5 times, so no matter how you try to manage your resources, by the end of the season most of the top 10 players are used up. Fortunately, there are always a few lesser-ranked players who turn out to have a very good year, like Argentine Juan Martin del Potro and Gilles Simon, who has done so well for me this week and those are the players I am relying on right now. Next week I have to cover three tournaments, in Lyon, St. Petersburg, and Basel, and then the last week of the season consists of only one tournament, the ATP Masters Series event in Paris. Don't ask me what players I'm going to choose for the coming week because the tournament draws are just being announced. Whoever they are, I just hope they have a good week.