Cramming For My Fantasy Football Drafts

Uh-oh, both of my fantasy football drafts are later this week and I've done zero prep work (unless you count 5 minutes watching the Redskins pre-season fiasco against Carolina). No cheat sheet, no draft strategy, no mock draft, nothing.

Time to start hitting the fantasy sites and cramming. Cramming is a bad thing for fantasy drafts...especially in a 14 team league where 210 players are drafted. There will always be last minute updates and adjustments to your rankings right up to draft day. But you have to be familiar with the players and their teams in order to make those tough middle round picks.

Can't do that all in a cram session. It needs to be started weeks in advance, even earlier for best results. That's something I didn't make time for this summer.

Fortunately both are online drafts this year. Might help if I'm able to do a quick search online before pulling the trigger on a pick. Yeah, I'll keep telling myself that.

The Mole Revealed

My pick for the Mole (Mark) ended up winning the $420,000 prize. I was convinced he was the Mole. Mark played a good game and I'm glad to see he won the cash. He was surprisingly close to being executed many weeks while Paul, the guy who pegged Craig as the Mole earlier than anyone, got whacked at the final four.

This season was a big improvement over season #2 and those disasters known as Celebrity Mole. The game was better balanced and Jon did a credible job as the show's new host. We're looking forward to the next season.

Craig played a great game as Mole. He played up his weaknesses, got on everyone's good side and had them all rooting for him as a fellow player. Brilliant.

Now back to the Olympics...

Fallen Sword Hits 2 Million Registered Players

The web based MMORPG Fallen Sword registered its 2 millionth player this week. I don't know how that compares to popular titles like World of Warcraft but considering that Fallen Sword is a free game, two million sounds like a cool milestone.

A friend introduced me to the game last year and it's one of the most impressive free games I've tried. Lots of features and no ads. Congrats to the FS team!

Survived The Great Urban Race

Didn't qualify for the national championships, but we had an awesome time running The Great Urban Race in DC last weekend! We finished in the top 100 out of 174 teams.

The race was fun and tougher than expected...there was only one mandatory clue on the list and none of the teams solved it. It was to take a picture at the address where XM Satellite Radio was established. We found out later that the correct answer was the NPR building.

We made a couple mistakes that cost us serious time. The biggest was not taking more time at the beginning to solve more clues and better map our route. Unlike The Amazing Race where teams get one task at a time, in the GUR you get a list of 12.

Several teams competed in costumes (there's a prize for best costume). Our favorite was the Yip-Yips. They were also the craziest for running around hot, humid DC in costumes made out of fleece blankets.

It was a great time and we got to see some cool parts of DC. We'll be back next year!