Becoming a Best Ball Bro: Do Elite Tight Ends Exist Anymore?

JJ Zachariason (0:01)

Rich, are you someone who has dreams at night? Like, do you frequently have dreams when you're sleeping?

Rich Ryan (0:06)

Occasionally. Sometimes I try to force it. I try to think of something and then manifest a dream about it, but it never works. I've even looked into like journaling, like waking up and then writing it down.

But yeah, ultimately my dreams tend to escape me. What about you?

JJ Zachariason (0:22)

I'm a dreamer. I have dreams basically every single night. And last night, I had a nightmare. Last night, I dreamt that I drafted Ramandre Stevenson at ADP. I'm JJ, and I've been playing in best ball leagues for years, but there are people out there who play a lot more than I do. And there are people out there who have won a lot more than I have. And I want to learn from them. This season, I'll be documenting my journey of Max entering Underdog's best ball mania contest. And I'll be doing so with guidance from some of the most successful best ball players on the planet.

This is the year where things start to change. This is the year where I officially become a best ball bro.

Welcome in to episode number three of Becoming a Best Ball Bro. I'm JJ Zachariason, joined as usual by my co-host Rich Ryan. Rich, what's going on, buddy?

Rich Ryan (1:17)

As always, man, I'm great. I have a Vegas trip coming up this weekend, my annual pilgrimage to the World Series of Poker. So I'm doing all the dad stuff.

I had to pick up my mother-in-law from the airport this morning. I gotta get the car service today. So a lot of dad stuff to get out of the way to get me ready and primed to head out to the desert this weekend.

JJ Zachariason (1:40)

Yeah, are you playing some poker out there?

Rich Ryan (1:42)

Yeah, so I'm playing one of the opening events.

It's called the Mystery Millions. It's a $1,000 buy-in and it's a really fun event.

So it's a bounty tournament and people might be familiar with bounties where you knock somebody out and then you get a static prize essentially for knocking them out. The most popular in a lot of casinos is called a black chip bounty because the black chips are worth $100, so you get $100 if you knock somebody out. But in this tournament, they take $300 from everybody's entry, they put it into a bounty pool and then starting on the second day, so there will be probably 1,000 players remaining, when you knock somebody out, you get a random bounty. And the bounty could be as little as $1,000 or as much as $1 million. So it incentivizes you to be super aggressive, build up a lot of chips and then be in the position to knock out as many people as possible on day two.

JJ Zachariason (2:35)

So when people say that they're going to play poker, I play poker or I did casually, I understand poker, but is it just a default that you're playing Texas Hold'em? Is that what's happening at this point? Is that how people in the poker space talk about poker?

Rich Ryan (2:50)

I would say so.

There's obviously other games, Omaha variants, seven card stud variants, but they make up a smaller percentage of the tournament schedule for the World Series of Poker, which is actually more inclusive of those events because they want to put on a big product for even the mixed games. But if you go to your local casino and you look to play poker, it's going to be 95 plus percent Texas Hold'em.

JJ Zachariason (3:15)

Yeah, man, I remember the Texas Hold'em wave that hit when we were, you and I were like in high school-ish, like in middle school to high school. At least from my perspective, it was a wave.

Rich Ryan (3:26)

I was going to bring this up at some point. You seem like such the ideal person to have been caught in this wave, because the people that I've interacted with, especially in the DFS world, are people that transitioned from poker to DFS and then are probably now into baseball. So I was wondering, what was the poker experience like for JJ in high school?

JJ Zachariason (3:46)

My friends, if any of them listening to this right now, are probably laughing hard, because we would play poker basically every weekend, but the way that I approached that kind of thing was just so insanely conservative that I ended up just not really playing them.

Rich Ryan (4:04)

Oh, no.

JJ Zachariason (4:04)

Like, I didn't really get into... I knew poker, I watched them play at Hangout. I'd play a little bit too at times, but then I didn't really get into it until more into adulthood.