The $25K Fantasy's $1.10 Problem

Five thousand fifteen teams entered the $25K Fantasy contest, and the single most popular strategy—stacking chalk—is losing to a player drafted at a dollar ten.

Naoya Kihara costs $1.10 on average. He's on 136 teams, just 2.7% of the field. He's scoring 411.1 points.

Patrick Leonard costs $32.20 on average. He's on 524 teams, 10.4% of the field. He's scoring 94.1 points.

That's 4.3x the points at 3.4% of the price. The market got this one backwards.

Naoya Kihara costs $1.10 on average, sits on 2.7% of teams, and is scoring 411.1 points.

The Chalk Tax

The five most-owned players in the $25K Fantasy are Patrick Leonard (10.4%), Calvin Anderson (9.1%), Phillip Hui (9.0%), Shaun Deeb (9.0%), and Ari Engel (8.6%). Together they appear on roughly 2,316 roster slots across the contest.

Their average draft price: $36.40. Their average score: 144.8 points.

Now look at the five biggest value beats, measured by ODB's isotonic-curve expected-points model (delta = actual score minus expected score at that draft price):

| Player | Ownership | Avg Price | Avg Score | Expected Pts | Delta | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Naoya Kihara | 2.7% | $1.10 | 411.1 | 33.0 | +378.1 | | Koray Aldemir | 5.6% | $18.10 | 301.1 | 70.0 | +231.1 | | Yueqi "Rich" Zhu | 0.6% | $1.00 | 229.0 | 33.0 | +196.0 | | Quan Zhou | 1.1% | $1.00 | 193.0 | 33.0 | +160.0 | | Calvin Anderson | 9.1% | $22.60 | 225.5 | 72.5 | +153.0 |

Their average draft price: $8.76. Their average score: 271.9 points.

The value group scores 88% more points at 76% less cost. And four of the five sit on fewer than 6% of teams, meaning any roster that found them also gained a massive differentiation edge over the rest of the field.

Where the Money Burned

The flip side is just as instructive. The five worst busts relative to their draft price:

| Player | Ownership | Avg Price | Avg Score | Expected Pts | Delta | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Michael Moncek | 2.0% | $88.70 | 69.3 | 151.9 | −82.6 | | Aditya Prasetyo | 0.2% | $38.00 | 17.0 | 89.0 | −72.0 | | Eugene Katchalov | 0.4% | $22.20 | 16.2 | 72.5 | −56.3 | | Konstantin Maslak | 0.8% | $12.70 | 0.9 | 56.4 | −55.5 | | Aleksejs Ponakovs | 0.3% | $11.00 | 1.0 | 56.4 | −55.4 |

Moncek is the headline here. At $88.70, he carried the second-highest average draft price among any player with meaningful ownership and returned fewer points than Phillip Hui, who cost $20.70. Teams that rostered Moncek paid a premium and got replacement-level output.

Konstantin Maslak and Aleksejs Ponakovs combined for 1.9 points on $23.70 in draft capital. The ODB curve expected 112.8 points from that spend.

The Structural Lesson

The $25K Fantasy field is behaving like a sports-betting market with a name-recognition bias. Familiar players attract ownership. Ownership clusters around mid-to-high price tags. And because salary-cap contests reward differentiation, the teams loading up on 8-10% owned chalk are all beating each other while the low-ownership value picks separate the top of the standings.

Calvin Anderson is the interesting bridge case. He shows up in both the top-owned list (9.1%) and the top value-beat list (+153.0 delta). At $22.60 he wasn't cheap, but his 225.5-point output crushed the expected 72.5 points at that price. He's the rare instance of chalk actually delivering.

But one player out of five isn't a strategy. It's variance.

Methodology Note

Value deltas are calculated using the ODB isotonic-regression curve, which maps each draft price to an expected point output based on historical WSOP performance at that salary. Delta = actual score minus curve-expected score. Ownership and price data pulled from the $25K Fantasy contest snapshot on July 5, 2026. All 5,015 entered teams are included. "Top owned" is ranked by ownership percentage; "top beats" is ranked by delta.