TJ Reid's Torching Squad Cashed Three Times in Event #2. The Fantasy Score: Zero.

TJ Reid's Torching squad put three players into the Event #2 money — Josh Reichard (113th), John Wasnock (135th), Brian Battistone (255th) — and the combined fantasy haul was zero.

Three cashes. Three zeroes. One roster. That's not bad luck. That's a scoring-model lesson hiding in plain sight.

The Most Prolific Zero-Point Team So Far

Event #2, the $5,000 8-Handed No-Limit Hold'em, is exactly the kind of event where fantasy managers expect their higher-priced assets to produce. Reichard, Wasnock, and Battistone all navigated a tough field deep enough to reach the money. On paper, that's a phenomenal sweat. Three separate players on one roster surviving to the payout, all in the same event.

Three cashes, three zeroes, one roster: TJ Reid's Torching squad is the most prolific zero-point team in the contest so far.

But the 25kfantasy.com scoring model doesn't reward survival. It rewards depth. Finishing 255th, 135th, or even 113th in a large-field $5K event doesn't move the needle. The magnitude on all three results registered as zero. Not close-to-zero. Literally zero.

That makes Torching w/ TJ the most prolific zero-point team in the contest so far: the highest number of individual cashes producing the lowest possible combined score.

Why This Matters for Roster Construction

Fantasy poker rewards concentration, not diversification. Getting three players to cash in the same event sounds like portfolio management done right. Spread the risk, increase the surface area, hope one breaks through.

The Torching result shows why that logic breaks down. All three players hit the same outcome band: deep enough to cash, nowhere near deep enough to score. None of them reached the stages where fantasy points start compounding. Instead of one player running deep and carrying the roster, three players flatlined in unison.

Contrast this with the Chocolate Factory approach from Event #2. That team also had multiple cashes from the same event, but the key difference is where those cashes landed relative to the scoring thresholds. Volume of min-cashes is noise. A single deep run is signal.

The Takeaway for Your Roster

If you're building a team on 25kfantasy.com, the Torching result is worth studying. It proves that "likely to cash" and "likely to score fantasy points" are two completely different player profiles.

A player who consistently makes Day 2 and grinds into the lower third of the payout structure is, paradoxically, one of the worst fantasy assets you can draft. They'll give you the dopamine hit of seeing their name on the payout sheet. They won't give you points.

What you want instead: players with high finish variance. The ones who either bust on Day 1 or show up at the final table. In fantasy poker, a 90% bust rate with a 10% final-table rate crushes a 50% cash rate with zero deep runs.

TJ Reid's Torching squad sweated three players through the money bubble of a $5K event. All three survived. None of them scored.

That's the whole lesson in one roster.