Month: December 2025

I haven’t participated in fantasy sports in nearly a decade now. I was kicked out of a fantasy football league that I was in with some people from college once they found out I’d be forced to auto-draft again because I would be in the desert in Namibia without internet access. They tried to get me to rejoin that league a couple of years later, which I declined, and that league no longer exists. After stopping fantasy football, I found my overall enjoyment increased. I could just cheer for my team and let that be that. This year, I hardly watched football at all. That is what happens when the team you support is terrible.

One of the methods of doing a fantasy football draft is to have a player auction. Each owner has the same total amount of money they can spend compiling their roster. Each player is drawn at random (within the relevant position group), and then the bidding starts. Allocating players this way creates many more dynamics for you as the fantasy owner. Do you spend big on a certain player? Do you bid in order to get others to use up more of their money on a player they particularly like? Do you just accept that you are going to be weak in one area of the team? I’ve always thought it would be more fun than the more traditional snake draft, though I’ve never been a part of such a fantasy league.

But what if I told you that the auction dynamic is actually used by a major professional sports league? It’s a league most Americans haven’t heard of, but it is watched by tens of millions of people every night for something like two months—the Indian Premier League. It is a T20 cricket league, which isn’t important for this post. What this post is about is that the league had its annual auction earlier this week. While it doesn’t rise to the circus that is the NFL draft, they hosted the auction in Dubai this year and with some fanfare. This year’s was a so-called mini-auction as there were fewer players up for bid. Every few years, though, there is a mega-auction before which teams are only able to retain a small number of players. It can lead to some wild resets of the competitive balance.

The players come in sets based on what positions they play and their status of whether they have played for their national teams. Each player sets a minimum price for themselves, and when their name is drawn the bidding starts. There are more complications than that, but even the order in which people are drawn within their set can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars given the way the auction dynamics unfold. There were also players this year who received no bids the first time their names came up and then saw a bidding war unfold when their name came up again during the accelerated portion of the auction later. I find it all fascinating to review.

If you want to listen to an in-depth story of the league’s history (and have around four hours in which to do so), you can find an episode of the Acquired podcast from earlier this year. Since it involves big business and Bollywood, there are some twists in the tale.

I read fiction in the evenings before bed. It is something I started doing during my Biglaw days in an attempt to help myself mentally unplug from the day and go to sleep. It hasn’t always been effective. Long books with chapters of around 10-12 pages are ideal. The Count of Monte Cristo was an early success and now sits on the bookshelf to my right as I sit typing this, but not everything has been a hit and I’ve become much more willing to give up on a book in the time since I began this habit. There’s something about slogging through War and Peace that will do that to a person.

I just completed my third of Dostoyevsky’s longer works, The Idiot. I read Crime and Punishment in high school and The Brothers Karamazov a couple of years ago, both of which found me at the right times in my life to be impactful. This one didn’t. Perhaps it was bound not to do so since the main character’s most salient features are his complete innocence and naivety. It left him a little flat on my reading, especially in comparison to Alyosha, a similarly angelic figure in Brothers K. Dostoyevsky wrote The Idiot earlier, though, so perhaps it isn’t a fair comparison. Regardless, the ending didn’t hit very hard when I read it. I actually suspect it will mean more once some time has passed as the deeper undercurrents of meaning which I enjoy so much in Dostoyevsky are very much present.

I’ve not always limited myself to the classic tomes of fiction (I read and enjoyed Trust a few months back), but there is something to be said for allowing the Lindy Effect to take its course. I’ve now started The Lord of the Rings. I expect to enjoy it more; at a minimum, the characters’ names will be consistent throughout. That is one quirk of Russian literature that can be difficult to follow.

One of the members of my church small group is currently a 1L. His first law school exam is tomorrow. I’d been trying for weeks to meet him for dinner but our schedules hadn’t lined up. Due to my early Thanksgiving celebrations and his returning early from Thanksgiving in order to study for exams, we were able to go out for dinner on Friday. It also marked a rare trip to Raleigh for me.

We talked about plenty of things as it had been a while since we’d gotten together, but the focus of the conversation was on his upcoming exams. Sitting there trying to remember what I did successfully and what I wished I could change about my own law school exam preparations, I can’t say that it surfaced the fondest memories. I habitually buried myself in the recesses of the international law library, a place without natural light and that could only be accessed by navigating the labyrinth of interconnected buildings of Harvard Law School. It was (and presumably still is) the sort of place where you could set a very sad horror movie. At least I wasn’t disturbed much down there; my only human contact would be with a confused janitor. That first semester, though, I tried to study alongside classmates. I did not recommend it to him. I also gave him permission, repeatedly for emphasis, that it is okay to not go back to studying on the same day when you have an exam in the morning. The goal is to be empty when you finish the test, especially with the way many law school exams encourage word vomit and continuing to type more and more until the allotted time is complete, and you need to recharge after that. Beating yourself up over not immediately going back to studying won’t help. I hope he takes at least that message to heart.

The restaurant itself was also very good, a mixed cuisine place with influences from across the Levant and the southern Mediterranean. It will be a recommended spot on the always in-progress restaurant spreadsheet I maintain. Going with another person was nice too because it allowed us to get multiple things and share them instead of me having to commit to a single choice per course. That, though, wasn’t the main point of the evening. The point was to give some encouragement to a young man who is now in the final stages of the marathon that is the first semester of law school and needs to kick hard to the finish.