What's in a name?

I think you are thinking of Bernie Hou. He was the face of SOM online for a while. He still works with Strat, doing a bunch of programming.

Thank you! I'm glad he's okay.

So I'm fourth generation Irish, which as any real Irishman knows is basically the same as still being on the Emerald Isle, so that's the Irish part of it. And the DC was that I lived in Washington DC in 2001, had just moved there after law school for my first "real" job, and came across Strat from The Sporting News, which at the time I digested a ton due to the Fantasy Baseball content (I started Fantasy in 1998 in Des Moines, Iowa... When I moved to DC I would fly back the weekends of the draft. The league is STILL going, though luckily it has moved to strictly on-line in format due to everyone moving around and such...). I was also Mayor of my hometown for 5 years, so you see a lot of my team named "The Mayors". It was a great time, so I like to remember those years when I can.

I dabbled in the Season play, but my love of Strat really hit with the decade mystery card format. Specifically the 80's and 90's. The opportunity to remain nostalgic, to bet on whether you had one of Mattingly's four unbelieveable years or his stinker (which I swear I got 90% of the time), knowing in the 60's set that if you got Johnny Blanchard's 1961 card with a .995 OPS for $1.5 million you were set (or screwed if you had the other four years...). Then I got hooked into the mystery card tourneys on here for a while, and I always did very well in the 80's and 90's, but never really cracked the 60's and 70's with any consistency, so stayed pretty middle of the pack in those.

I went through a very messy divorce in 2016 and saw in one of my mystery card leagues that someone was "forming a keeper league". That league was D2D, which I figured would be a nice distraction from everything else that was not going so well in my life at the time (and is the only league I've ever been a "forming member" of). So I jumped in, not really knowing what to expect. A couple of years later I filled in a vacancy in TKL. As some point I think I reached out to Seanreflex from a mystery league when there was an opening and got him roped into this, which ended up being a huge mistake, as now he gets me into every league he's in where there's an opening, so I'm up to 126 leagues... Wait, it just feels that way. 7 leagues. That's a lot to keep track of, lol... And during Covid I think Strat was a huge help for most of us as well, a nice distraction, especially for those of us who went fully remote. But glad to have met the majority of people that I've gotten to play with in these leagues.

Look at that, I wrote a novel, how uncharacteristic of me...

my manager name pays homage to my alma mater and my homeland, but it was formulated out of haste rather than creativity since I came across the TSN Stratomatic site in the early 2000s just after my son had been born and there never seemed to be enough time to get anything done in those days. I played in the tournament for a couple of years, then went into hiatus until a couple of years back when I returned and starting playing in keeper leagues. I was first exposed to the Stratomatic card game when I was in graduate school at the University of Kansas in the late 1980s, where there was a student keeper league that played face-to-face at the Student Union.

This thread has lost steam so I'm going to unsticky it in a day or two. Thanks to the contributors. Now we know.