What Is Fantasy Sports
Right out of the gate, to avoid confusion, the term manager will describe a person participating in a fantasy sport while a player will describe the professional athletes whose performance you are following.
Fantasy football lets you try your skills as a fantasy owner. After you join a league, you scout for and draft players, compete against other fantasy owners, and use all your skills to win the championship. Learning how to play fantasy football is easy; conquering your competitors and becoming a champion is a. SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio is the only 24/7 radio channel exclusively dedicated to fantasy sports. Get expert advice, strategy and information plus hear interviews with athletes, coaches and insiders to help you dominate your league. Fantasy football is a growing hobby or game - whatever you want to call it - that is catching the nation by storm. Millions and millions of people participate in fantasy football every year. So for those of you that don't know about the game, below is a brief explanation.
It’s the 21st century, so to define “fantasy sports”, let’s take to the internet, specifically everyone’s favorite research starting point – Wikipedia:
A fantasy sport is a type of online game where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players’ players in actual games. This performance is converted into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by each fantasy team’s manager. These point systems can be simple enough to be manually calculated by a “league commissioner” who coordinates and manages the overall league, or points can be compiled and calculated using computers tracking actual results of the professional sport. In fantasy sports, team managers draft, trade and cut (drop) players, analogously to real sports.
Being a fantasy sports manager is similar being a day trader in the stock market. Envision individual players as stocks. Your goal is to buy, sell, and trade your players in order to have the highest accumulated value at the end of the season.
- Traditional fantasy sports, which initially lasted for the duration of a season (and were based on the real statistical performance of players), were not included in UIGEA because they relied on participants’ knowledge of their players’ skills. With the right application of expertise, proponents of DFS argued, a fantasy player could profit.
- If you’re new to daily fantasy sports, the first thing I’m going to tell you is that “daily fantasy sports” is a pain to type over and over, so we call it “DFS”. If that was a revelation, this glossary is for you. If you have no idea what “fading Calvin Johnson in GPPs is a great contrarian play” means, you’d better read on.
Where does “value” come from in fantasy sports? One word: statistics. In every sport, there are a multitude of stats that can be used to define an individual player’s level of performance. If you look at at a baseball box score, hits, RBIs, batting average, earned run average (ERA), and strikeouts are just a few commonly used stats that demonstrate how each player impacted the outcome of the game. Every other sport has similar stats: in football, a sampling includes rushing yards, touchdowns, interceptions thrown, and extra points kicked; in basketball, there are points, assists, turnovers, and blocks; in soccer and hockey, there are goals, assists, shutouts, and plus/minus. Not just scoring plays, but ALL statistics could have value in fantasy sports.
Value is also governed by the rules of the market, the market being your fantasy sports league. Before the season starts, your league will agree to a set of scoring rules for how each player’s statistics will be counted. Based on the scoring rules chosen by the league, managers will then select a certain number of players to be on their teams, typically done by a draft. Any players that are not taken in the draft are free agents. (Check out our introductions to each fantasy sport to see specific scoring, draft, and free agent formats.)
With a full team of players, you are now a fantasy sports manager!
You have made an initial investment by drafting players onto your team. Once the season begins, you must begin to manage and evaluate your investments. Have your players been helping or hurting the value of your team based on your league’s scoring system? Are there any free agents that have been performing better that could help your team? What factors are affecting a player’s performance? These general questions are just a sampling of those that managers need to be constantly trying to find answers to. For certain players, you will be happy to buy and hold them all season. For others, you may determine it is in your best interest to drop them – making them free agents – and add another better performing player.
You might make changes to your roster every single day; you might make them once a week; you might only make a few during the whole year. Your league’s rules and competitiveness will determine how active of a manager you need to be to be successful. The most fun leagues, though, are those in which every manager regularly participates in trying to improve their rosters.
Fantasy sports offers a glimpse into what actual professional sports general managers value when they assemble and manage their teams. You becoming engaged to sports in a whole new level. Once you start playing. you will likely find yourself not just interested in the wins and losses of your chosen team, but also the individual performance of players throughout the league, perhaps even on your chosen team’s rival.
Here at PFS, our goal is to emphasize that fantasy sports are meant to be friendly competitions, done for bragging rights more than anything else. We see an opportunity to increase the value of those bragging rights. What if, along with winning your league, you were able to say that you donated money to cause you care deeply about. That is exactly what PFS does: we bring people together to play fantasy sports and raise money for your favorite philanthropic organizations.
Join us in learning more about your favorite sports while raising money for great causes!
Most people have heard of fantasy sports, and millions play it. But let's be honest: Odds are someone in the room with you right now has no idea what it really is or how it works.
Something about putting together virtual teams based on real players -- and then judging the performance of those fantasy teams based on how the real athletes do on the field?
Exactly.
It began as a fun game played among friends. But today it's a multi-billion dollar business that has a tremendous influence on real, live sports. Many of the same corporate interests involved in pro-sports have gotten on the fantasy bandwagon (Time Warner, which owns CNN, has invested in FanDuel one of the biggest fantasy sports companies).
Here's a breakdown for the uninitiated.
How does fantasy sports work?
Fans choose from real players in an online selection process, or a draft, to assemble a fantasy team. The players' real-game statistics are compiled and compared to see whose fantasy team has done the best.
Players track how their fantasy team is doing using various web sites or mobile apps. Some players join leagues with friends and compete against only people they know. Others join public leagues hosted by web sites and compete against strangers.
Who plays?
Some 56 million people play fantasy sports in North America. About 10 million of those players are teenagers. About 19% of adult men play fantasy sports, compared to 9% of of women, according to estimates STATS Inc.
And wealthier fans are more likely to play: 16% of people with incomes of $50,000 or more play fantasy sports, while only 10% of people who earn less than $50,000 participate.
A total of $18 billion is spent on fantasy sports annually. By comparison, $140 billion is wagered on real sports and $70 billion is spent in lotteries.
What Is Fantasy Sports Gambling
Is fantasy sports legal?
Yes. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which Congress passed in 2006, specifically says fantasy sports are allowed under federal law because they are classified as a game of skill rather than a game of chance. The only caveat is that players may not bet on the outcome of a single game or the performance of a single player.
What Is Fantasy Sports
But fantasy sports are banned in five states -- Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Washington. The Fantasy Sports Trade Association is lobbying to change the laws in those states.
Are there regulations?
What Is Fantasy Sportsbook
Right now there really is no government authority that oversees fantasy sports, the way gambling regulators oversee sports betting in Nevada.
The recent scandal involving DraftKings and FanDuel could bring calls for greater government oversight of the industry, if not calls for an outright ban.
How big a business is fantasy sports?
Big. Overall, the industry brings in about $1.5 billion a year in revenue. Most of that money comes from advertising on the sites. Sites such as DraftKings and FanDuel pay out more than 90% of the fees they collect as prize money in order to attract players to the game.
What Is Fantasy Sports Betting
Many of the major media and Internet companies such as Disney's(DIS) ESPN unit, Yahoo(YHOO) and CBS(CBS) have become major players in the business.
DraftKings and FanDuel have each raised about $300 million from investors and have valuations in the billions. Their investors include sports leagues such as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, as well as owners of several NFL and NBA teams.
What is the fastest growing part of fantasy sports?
DraftKings and FanDuel have grown rapidly by offering so-called daily games, where players pick a team for only one day, or in the case of football, one week.
Traditionally, fantasy sports leagues competed over the same period of time as the real sports league that they tracked. But these leagues can be time consuming to play.