Deal Done

It's a harrowing experience sometimes to be in a fantasy football league. One of the more challenging things is to negotiate a trade. I tend to be rather risk adverse myself, which costs me all too often. There have been plenty of times in life where I was afraid to accept the risk and ended up losing more than I would have for fear of making a move. Those were really more significant events than a fantasy football trade, but the latter encapsulates things well enough.

It's lovely, of course, when the first offer someone makes is a fantastic one for you, but that is not too common. Sometimes you have to be the one to make the first move, and that is something I do rather seldom, but I appreciate the truth of it. I certainly would like to think that I was the one preying on someone else, rather than fearing that I was being victimized by any particular trade offer made to me. Perhaps that will be my next trade.

Whether you make the first move or they do, it's very likely that someone will not be happy enough with the balance of the deal to agree right then and there. What follows is a crushing, grinding process of debating players' merits and making minutely different counter-offers. There's a lot of psychology at play, whether the two negotiators quite realize it or not. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that no deal need be made at all, so invested in the process may one become.

I've generally done all right with trades, but I won't attribute that entirely to my own abilities. I think I've had a lot of luck, with unknown factors appearing later, or unexpected outcomes leading me to become the big winner of the deal. That I've done well in any deals is partly a produce of how many I've made, and maybe this is where it's true that 90 percent of life is just showing up. People come to me with offers because I'm generally amenable to considering them reasonably.

Well, I've just made another deal, and I don't know quite how well it will play out. I can console myself in any case that I drove a harder-than-average bargain, or at least it seemed that way from my perspective. I doubt the deal can go really badly for me, but in any case it has gone. It is now for the fates to decide whether the players I have acquired are to be of any more use than the one who I have given up. I certainly hope so.