This morning at 6AM I was at breakfast with a friend who was passionately describing his regression towards the mean waiver wire strategy in fantasy football. This led to an interesting discussion on statistical arbitrage trading strategies in the market, which led to a discussion of his abysmal investment track record through the dot-com age.

12 hours earlier, I was describing the Cover 2 defense to another member of my fantasy football league, so that she could better appreciate the essence of a trade proposal. We somehow ended up talking about Allison Stokke. She then called a few other friends about the trade, sent off a few emails, and studied her options.

Fantasy sports are social games. They’re really only fun when played with other people. You might play a pick’em game alone, but only so that you have bragging rights. Ultimately, fantasy sports are about explaining your crack-pot waiver strategies to your buddy, your grand theories as to why Reggie Wayne put up 23 points when he wasn’t supposed to, picking on the player making excuses for their injured lineup, and good looking pole vaulters.

We’re building CHALQ as a social fantasy sports platform. Today, we enter limited private beta, and we’re really excited to start communicating with our first group of beta testers. Over the course of the 2007 NFL season we’ll be inviting more and more people in to the beta to try out iterations of our draft rooms, roster tools, research wiki, trading interfaces, etc.

We’re starting today by testing the social tools that CHALQ’s fantasy products are built on top of. As groups start forming, friends are posting video comments on each other’s profiles, and private messages are flying back and forth — I bet we’ll see Ms. Stokke pop back up in conversation. Then we’ll know that we’re doing something right.