I was in Denver this past weekend for the wedding of one of my best friends and FantasyLabs co-founder Peter Jennings. We had about half of the FantasyLabs team there, which was awesome.
Don’t mind the fact that I packed light brown shoes with a dark gray suit – nothing to see there folks. Completely normal attire that doesn’t look ridiculous in the least.
It was a spectacular wedding at a spectacular venue – Arrowhead Golf Club – and everyone had a fun time blah blah blah…onto the story.
Peter invited so many DFS players that we honestly could have held a fantasy sports convention. In addition to the Labs guys, there was dinkpiece, Kcannon, EmpireMaker, SaahilSud, Davis Mattek, Jeremy Levine, BirdWings, and a bunch of other top players and business guys.
It was no surprise, then, when props started popping up on the day of the wedding on certain events that would take place. Will Peter or Ashley cry? How many times will Jesus be mentioned during the ceremony? And the big one that got all the action: the length of the best man’s speech.
The best man is Peter’s friend Beckmann and I believe early bets were coming in at over/under five minutes, but the total quickly jumped to 7 min 30 sec. Beckmann is definitely an outgoing person, but that’s a long time for anyone to talk in front of over 100 people. I got my money in on the under. I actually had a really nice potential arbitrage opportunity pop up when I heard someone was taking bets at 6 min 30 sec. I tried to get the over on that – in which case I would break even if the speech fell short of 6 min 30 sec or went over 7 min 30 sec, but win both bets if it fell between those numbers – but I ultimately couldn’t get that number.
At some point during the reception, the best man found out about the bets on his speech. Beckmann is obviously one of Peter’s best friends and he’s very familiar with the DFS scene, but what he said when he learned of the action goes to show the absurdity of hanging out with high-stakes DFS players:
“How much is on it so far, like $200k?”
There wasn’t anywhere close to that amount on it, but think about how insane it is that his initial reaction to learning about the bets was to assume there were literally hundreds of thousands of dollars being placed on the length of his speech.
Now obviously the bets were tainted with Beckmann learning about them. Maybe I’m saying that because I’m bitter the speech went 8 min 20 sec. Or maybe it’s because some of the guys on the over clapped incessantly every time there was a pause in the speech. Completely normal behavior.
The moral of the story: it’s not really a wedding until you have two dozen grown men pull out their phones and start their stopwatches to time the length of the best man’s speech.