ON DEADLINE: Mixing politics & sports

Some fantasy sports buffs might kick themselves for paying way too much for A-Rod. Me? I overspent on the state of Utah.

We were five people who, apparently, can't get enough of numbers, sports and politics. Last week we gathered our chairs in a circle - with maps, notes, charts and laptops at the ready - and fused our passions by conducting our own fantasy election draft.

"I spent more than an hour to devise a math formula based on risk/reward for electoral votes and points needed," one of the participants wrote me in an e-mail the night before. "I'm bringing my A-game for this."

OK, so maybe we're a little bonkers - or just hopelessly overcome with election fever.

So there we sat, bidding for states, one by one. Texas went for 47 "dollars" and was picked for McCain. Colorado was a bargain at $6 and predicted for Obama. Someone spent $38 on New York, again for Obama. None of us had done anything quite like this before - as best we could tell, we were inventing a new game - so strategies evolved as we went along.

In the spirit of two-party America, I kept track of all the winning bids with a red marker (McCain) and a blue marker (Obama), knowing that I'd be keeping an eye on my own little fantasy map as I watched the returns come in on Election Day. That's one advantage we'll have over other fantasy drafts: In sports, you have to wait for a whole season to play out; we'll know our winner on Nov. 4.

Preparing for the draft, I scanned the Internet to look for guidelines. Surely there were other sports-politics junkies holding their own fantasy draft parties, but I found none. (After we held our draft, however, I did discover a "2008 Fantasy Electoral College Game" on fantasydrafthelp.com, with rules a bit more complex than ours.)

So, feeling that we were breaking new ground, we made up our own rules. Here there are:

- Everyone starts with 108 dollars, or points or whatever you want to call them. (That's the number of total electoral votes - 538 - divided by the number of participants, rounded up.)

- We take turns naming a state, then we bid on it. The high bidder then predicts which candidate will win the state.

- The draft ends when we've picked all 50 states and the District of Columbia - or when everyone has run out of money.

- On election night, we receive electoral votes for every state we own that we predict correctly. (If you own Wyoming and predict it for McCain, you get three electoral votes if he wins it. You get none if Obama wins it.)

- The person with the most electoral votes gets a free lunch!

Obviously, with food on the line, a little research was essential. One would never show up for a fantasy baseball draft without a mental catalog of batting averages and ERAs, so it would be a waste of time to try to draft states without knowing the latest polls.

There are too many Web sites to count that give daily updates of state polls, with lots of maps in different shades of red and blue to denote whether the states are "solid" or "leaning" one way or the other. It was no problem putting together a game plan.

Of course, game plans don't always work.

My scheme was to overbid, if necessary, for safe states - states that are in the bag for one candidate or the other - and let my competitors duke it out for the unpredictable swing states. I got the big prize of California for 56 dollars and smugly proclaimed it for Obama, but I was soon running low on money after overspending for the McCain states of Alabama ($12 for nine electoral votes) and Utah ($7 for four EVs).

Soon, everyone was nearly broke except for one person who had wisely saved his money. He promptly grabbed every state that was left at bargain prices: Maine, New Mexico, Indiana, Wisconsin, Nevada, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma. He got up and danced a little jig in the corner of the room after the bidding was over, confident of his victory.

Looking now at our final tallies, I realize there is only one realistic scenario that would cause his empire to crumble and give me the win. I need McCain to carry the toss-up states of Florida, Nevada and Indiana, and I need Obama to take New Hampshire.

In that sense, fantasy politics is just like fantasy sports. There are people who hate the Yankees, yet they find themselves rooting for A-Rod because he's on their fantasy team. Imagine, then, the awkward feeling you might have if you're supporting someone to win the most important job in the country - as long as he does it without ruining your chances of winning a fantasy game.

Perhaps it is for the best, then, that fantasy politics - unlike fantasy sports - can come around only once every four years.

Unless, of course, we do the House of Representatives in 2010.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Joseph White covers sports in the nation's capital for The Associated Press.