The Fantasy WSOP: How a Pricing Algorithm Turned Poker's Biggest Summer Into a Numbers Game

Somewhere between Viktor Blom's $21.60 draft price and his 303.8-point average score, the $25kFantasy contest stopped being about poker and became about pricing models, and almost nobody noticed.

Of the 3,815 teams entered in the 25kfantasy.com contest this summer, only 98 rostered Blom. That's 2.6% ownership on a player who is currently outscoring every single person in the field by raw average. Not by a little. By a canyon. His 303.8-point average score sits 231.3 points above what the ODB isotonic pricing curve expected from a player at his draft cost.

And yet: 419 teams took Ari Engel at $11.30. Engel is averaging 96.4 points.

This is a story about the gap between those two decisions.

The Chalk

Of the 3,815 teams entered in the 25kfantasy.com contest this summer, only 98 rostered Blom.

Let's start with what most people did. The eight most-owned players in the $25kFantasy field form a portrait of consensus thinking: Ari Engel (11% ownership, 419 teams), Shaun Deeb (10.1%, 385 teams), Brian Rast (9.1%, 346 teams), Scott Seiver (8.7%, 332 teams), Adam Friedman (8.3%, 317 teams), Robert Mizrachi (8.3%, 317 teams), James Obst (8.3%, 315 teams), and Mike Matusow (8.2%, 312 teams).

These are not random selections. They reflect a collective judgment about which players will accumulate the most fantasy points across a summer of WSOP bracelet events, weighted against a salary cap.

The logic behind the chalk is legible. Deeb, priced at $88.30 (the most expensive player among the top-owned eight), is averaging 249 points. At 10.1% ownership, he's the closest thing the contest has to a consensus "must-roster." Seiver, at $48.30, is returning 208.5 points. Rast, at $37.30, is at 199.1. These are premium prices producing premium scores. If you squint, it looks like the market is efficient.

But efficiency requires that the prices accurately predict output. And this is where things get interesting.

The Curve

The ODB isotonic curve is the backbone of Charlotte's fantasy modeling. It works like this: take every player's draft price, take their actual output, and fit a monotonically non-decreasing curve through the data. The curve answers a simple question: for a player at price X, what score should you expect?

At a draft price of $21.60 (Blom's slot), the curve expects 72.5 points. At $18.10 (Koray Aldemir's slot), it expects 70. At $88.30 (Deeb's slot), the expected return is considerably higher, somewhere in the range that makes his 249-point average look like a reasonable, if not spectacular, return on investment.

The curve doesn't care about narrative. It doesn't care that Blom is Viktor Blom, the man who once ran up millions on Full Tilt under the name Isildur1 and then lost them back in the same month. It doesn't care that Aldemir won the 2021 WSOP Main Event. It simply maps price to expected output and flags the deviations.

The deviations, this summer, are enormous.

The Mispricing

Blom's delta of +231.3 points above the curve is the largest in the contest. He was priced like a mid-tier mixed-game specialist. He is producing like the overall points leader.

Aldemir is right behind him. At a $18.10 draft price and 7.4% ownership (281 teams), his 301.1-point average represents a +231.1 delta. The two players generating the most value above their price are separated by a mere 0.2 points of delta. Yet Blom is on 98 teams, and Aldemir is on 281.

That gap tells you something. Aldemir's Main Event win in 2021 is recent enough to anchor in people's minds. He looks like a player who should produce. Blom, by contrast, carries the reputation of a volatile online cash game player, not a WSOP grinder. The market priced him accordingly. The market was wrong.

Below those two, the value cliff continues. Klemens Roiter, drafted at just $9.00, is averaging 277 points, a delta of +220.6. He's on 23 teams. Twenty-three, out of 3,815. Andrew Ostapchenko, at the minimum $1.00 price tag, is averaging 233.1 points (+200.1 delta) on 13 teams. Yueqi "Rich" Zhu, also at $1.00, is at 229 points (+196 delta) on 29 teams.

The five most underpriced players in the contest are owned, collectively, by 444 teams. That's 11.6% of the field. The five most-owned chalk players sit on more than 1,800 teams combined.

The majority of the field is paying premium prices for players who are meeting expectations. A small minority found players who are demolishing them.

The Busts

The other side of the ledger is equally instructive.

Michael Moncek was drafted at $85.10 on average, nearly as expensive as Deeb. He's averaging 68 points. The curve expected 151.9. That's a delta of -83.9, the worst bust in the contest by a wide margin. Ninety-four teams are carrying that weight.

Bryn Kenney ($39.50 price, 20.7 average score, -72.6 delta) and Aditya Prasetyo ($38.00, 17 points, -72 delta) round out the worst-performing premium picks. Eugene Katchalov, at $22.20, is averaging just 16.2 points against an expected 72.5, a near-total zero. And Konstantin Maslak, at $12.70, has produced a staggering 0.9 average points. Less than one point. On 39 teams.

These aren't obscure names buried in the data. Moncek is on 94 teams. Someone looked at an $85.10 price tag, decided this was the player to anchor a roster around, and got 68 points for it. Meanwhile, three slots down the board, Blom was sitting at $21.60, invisible to 97.4% of the field.

The Question the Contest Is Really Asking

Here's what makes fantasy poker different from fantasy football or fantasy baseball.

In the NFL, player pricing is refined by decades of public analytics, millions of participants, and weekly feedback loops. The market is deep and reasonably efficient. Finding a 231-point delta above the pricing curve would require something close to a miracle.

In fantasy poker, the market is 3,815 teams deep. Many of the participants are poker players, not quant modelers. They draft with instinct, reputation, and feel. They see "Viktor Blom" and think: cash games, massive swings, not a bracelet grinder. They see "Ari Engel" and think: volume, grinder, lots of events. The draft prices, generated by an algorithm, sit in front of them. But the relationship between price and expected output is not intuitive. It requires thinking in curves, not names.

This creates a strange and specific edge. The players who are winning the $25kFantasy contest right now are not necessarily the ones who know the most about poker. They're the ones who understood, before the first event of the summer, that a $21.60 player could produce 303.8 points. They're the ones who looked at the isotonic curve and asked: where is the market wrong?

That is a poker skill, in a way. Reading the board. Identifying where the money is mispriced. Making the unpopular play because the math supports it.

But it's also something else entirely. It's the discipline to ignore the name on the jersey and focus on the number on the price tag. To draft Blom at $21.60 when every instinct says he's going to four-bet his entire summer away. To skip Engel at $11.30 when 419 other teams are telling you he's safe.

Safe, in a contest with 3,815 teams, is not how you win. Correct is how you win. And correctness, this summer, looks like a Swedish player that 97.4% of the field decided wasn't worth the roster spot.

What Comes Next

The WSOP summer is far from over. Scores will shift. Blom's 303.8 average could regress. Moncek's 68 could climb. The curve recalibrates as more events produce data, and the deltas that look enormous on June 1 may narrow by July.

But the structural lesson is already clear. The $25kFantasy contest rewards a specific kind of thinking: the willingness to disagree with the crowd when the pricing model creates an opening. Of the top five value plays in the contest, none carries ownership above 7.4%. Of the top five chalk plays, none sits below 8.2%.

The crowd is clustered. The value is at the edges.

Somewhere on 98 rosters out of 3,815, Viktor Blom is quietly producing the best return in the contest. The other 3,717 teams are learning what quants have known for decades: the most expensive mistake isn't the player you drafted wrong. It's the player you never considered drafting at all.