Fulfilling a Filipino fantasy

If you’re a sports fan, one of the reasons to love the Internet is being able to play Fantasy Sports. It adds another dimension to watching your favorite sport; it gives you a chance to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones; it allows you to display your competitive mean streak and flex your brain muscles in the realm of sports. The concept of Fantasy Sports though is highly American. Ergo, most of the websites that offer fantasy games are tailored to the American sports fan. I say "most" because there’s a brave new player in the world of Fantasy Sports, specifically Fantasy Basketball. Countrymen, I give you PBFantasy.com. PBFantasy.com is a Fantasy Basketball website dedicated and designed for the Filipino sports fan.

The Philippine Basketball Fantasy website is the brainchild of three De La Salle Computer Science graduates — Kendrick Chong, Brian Ng and Gregory Chua-Madarang. They first launched the alpha PBFantasy.com on August 2006. At this point in time, most of their game testers were close friends. In November, they did closed-beta-testing which included their friends, their friends and their friends’ friends. Last January 2007, they launched PBFantasy.com in an open-beta, which meant anybody could sign up and play, but just for fun. The formal season of PBFantasy.com, "Season 2," started right after the NBA All-Star Break, where they are giving away great prizes (more on that in a bit).

What inspired them to create a Fantasy website just for Pinoys? Well besides being Fantasy Sports players themselves, they wanted to be able to extend the opportunities offered by premium Fantasy websites to the Filipino. "There are thousands of Filipino fantasy basketball players out there and many of them are good," Kendrick Chong says. "With PBFantasy, every one of them has the chance to show their skills in fantasy basketball and at the same time get a chance to win amazing prizes (and of course, bragging rights!)"

You read that right — PBFantasy.com offers prizes to its winners. Most foreign Fantasy websites that offer prizes require a fee to play, while PBFantasy.com is free of charge. The most popular Fantasy games, like the one Yahoo offers, are free to play, but the only thing you get out of them is a virtual trophy. When you play in PBFantasy.com, you have the chance to win a Sony PlayStation 3 (Grand Prize), an Apple iPod Video (Second Prize), an Olympus Digital Camera (Third Prize) and a slew of other prizes, including cash. I don’t know about you, but being able to win a PS3 just by playing Fantasy Basketball sounds like a good deal to me.

PBFantasy.com currently offers a Fantasy game for the widely popular NBA. What sets PBFantasy.com from the likes of Yahoo Sports is their system for player acquisitions and values. PBFantasy.com strays away from the standard "fantasy draft," where players pick players on a turn-based system until they form a team. Instead, they use a money-based system that revolves around demand and performance, like a stock market. Each team owner is "given" $50 million to purchase eight players to create his or her team. Player prices are determined by the overall demand for that player. For example, the highly-prized Kevin Garnett (around $14 million) would have one of the highest price tags while lesser-regarded players like Anthony Johnson (around $2 million) go for significantly less. The players’ prices, though, aren’t always reflective of their production, so finding the right balance between price and performance is key.

I like this system a lot because not only do you have to be competent in the realm of NBA basketball, but you also sometimes have to summon your inner financial analyst to be able to pick up bargain players, buy low on rising studs and sell high on those slipping off their game.

The owners of PBFantasy.com are envisioning an expansion of the website to offer Fantasy games for local leagues like the UAAP, NCAA, PBL and PBA, a move that will surely capture renewed interest in local sports. "We envision PBFantasy to be the hub of all fantasy games here in the Philippines." Chong says. "For existing fans of fantasy games, expect more of your fantasy wishes to come true! And for the would-be fantasy gamers, join now and play the newest gaming genre here in the Philippines – Fantasy Games!"

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For more information, visit the PBFantasy website at http://www.pbfantasy.com.

For questions, comments or corrections please e-mail me at emailcarlramirez@yahoo.com.