What Exactly Are Fantasy Sports?
To avoid misunderstanding, the term manager refers to a person who participates in a fantasy sport, whereas the term player refers to professional athletes whose performance you are watching.
It’s the twenty-first century, therefore let’s go to the internet, notably everyone’s favorite research starting point – Wikipedia.
A fantasy sport is a type of online game in which participants form imagined or virtual teams of genuine professional athletes. These teams compete based on their players’ statistical performance in actual games. This performance is transformed into points, which are collated and totaled according to a roster chosen by the manager of each fantasy club. These point systems can be simple enough to be computed manually by a “league commissioner” who supervises and controls the overall league, or they can be collated and calculated using computers that follow genuine professional sport results. In fantasy sports, team management, like in real life, draft, trade, and cut (drop) players.
Being a fantasy sports manager is akin to being a stock market day trader. Consider individual players to be stocks. Your goal is to acquire the most aggregate value at the end of the season by buying, selling, and trading your players.
In fantasy sports, where does “value” come from? Statistics, in a nutshell. There are numerous stats that may be used to define an individual player’s level of performance in every sport. Hits, RBIs, batting average, earned run average (ERA), and strikeouts are just a few of the regularly utilized figures that show how each player influenced the outcome of the game. Every other sport has comparable statistics: In football, rushing yards, touchdowns, interceptions thrown, and extra points kicked are examples; in basketball, points, assists, turnovers, and blocks are examples; and in soccer and hockey, goals, assists, shutouts, and plus/minus are examples. All statistics, not simply scoring plays, could be valuable in fantasy sports.
The rules of the market govern value as well, with the market being your fantasy sports league. Your league will agree on a set of scoring criteria for how each player’s statistics will be counted before the season begins. Managers will then select a set number of players to be on their teams based on the scoring rules chosen by the league, generally through a draft. Any players who are not selected in the draft become free agents. (For specific scoring, draft, and free agent formats, check our introductions to each fantasy sport.)
You are now a fantasy sports manager with a whole team of players!
You have made an early investment in your team by drafting players. When the season begins, you must start managing and evaluating your investments. Based on your league’s scoring system, have your players helped or hindered the value of your team? Are there any free agents that have been doing well and could benefit your team? What factors influence a player’s performance? These are just a few of the general questions to which managers must constantly seek answers. You’ll be happy to buy and hold certain players all season. Others, you may decide it is in your best interest to release them, making them free agents, and replace them with a better performing player.
You may make changes to your roster every day, once a week, or only a few times throughout the year. The rules and competitiveness of your league will determine how active a manager you must be to be successful. The most enjoyable leagues, however, are those in which every manager actively participates in attempting to improve their rosters.
Fantasy sports provide a glimpse into what professional sports general managers look for when assembling and managing their teams. You’re getting into sports on a whole new level. Once you begin playing. You will most likely become interested not only in your chosen team’s wins and losses, but also in the individual performances of players throughout the league, and possibly even on your chosen team’s rival.
Our goal at PFS is to emphasize that fantasy sports are meant to be friendly competitions, done primarily for bragging rights. We see a chance to boost the value of those bragging rights. What if, in addition to winning your league, you could say you donated money to a cause you care deeply about? PFS does exactly that: we bring people together to play fantasy sports and raise funds for your favorite charitable organizations.