Would There Be Interest In Las Vegas Live Drafts?

[Greg Ambrosius]

We have been asked for years if we'd ever consider live drafts for basketball. The answer is an obvious "YES" if the demand was there. Unfortunately, we haven't felt enough demand for a live event in the past to really commit to a location.

However, it would be foolish not to keep gauging the interest out there and seeing if we could enough folks together for a live draft. It would be too hard to do it in multiple locations, so ideally we'd love to host a hoops extravaganza on the weekend before the NBA season at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I think we could easily get a beautiful suite reserved for live drafts and even an auction if the demand was there. Why not a 12-team NFBKC auction with folks bidding most of their dollars on the two best players in the game, Kevin Durant and Lebron James? How much fun would that be?

We have the Super League planned for Sunday night, Oct. 27th and Classic League set for Saturday, Oct. 26th. If we were to do anything live in Las Vegas, that would be the weekend as folks had a chance to gamble on a little football on both days while slipping in some time for NFBKC drafts. Wow, what a great weekend that would be.

Again, I'll admit that we probably are short on time to get everyone to make this happen this year, but give me some feedback on the boards here or via email at [email protected] and let's see where it takes us. Is there really enough interest in a live draft weekend in Las Vegas during the heart of the football season? And is there enough interest in a hoops auction league that would set the standard for the industry in this format? And if all this works, then let's host our highest dollar leagues live in Las Vegas as well because that would be fun, too.

Thanks for any feedback on this folks. We're interested, as you can see.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Thanks to everyone who responded to our question involving live hoops drafts in Las Vegas. We got a lot of emails and several phone calls about this and everything was positive. We didn't expect to pull off a live event for this year, but there is definitely interest from our customers to host a live event next year in Las Vegas and that's exactly what we're planning to do. We think with enough advance notice that we can host the industry's first live high-stakes fantasy basketball event next year at the Bellagio Las Vegas.

We'll start small and build it up, but a weekend of college football, NFL games, high-stakes fantasy basketball drafts and maybe even our first auction league could lead to a lot of folks planning ahead for this. We're excited about it and we have some great plans for this.

So let's enjoy the online drafts this year and we'll obviously have most of our drafts online next year as well, but I will say it here first that we really think that next year will be the start of live hoops drafts in Las Vegas. Thanks for your response to this and let's make it happen together in 2014. Thanks all.