Proof Fantasy Sports Players are Dedicated (Or Crazy)

There are over 35 million fantasy sports players in the US and Canada.  Fantasy sports is a multi-billion dollar business with no signs of decreasing popularity.  Every major sports league actively supports and/or sponsors their own fantasy sports games.

However, some fantasy sports players are truly in a league by themselves.  One particular fantasy league was featured on NBC's Tonight Show.  The person who ends up in last place actually has to get a tattoo (a permanent one) of a design chosen by the person who wins the league.

Check out these Tonight Show clips and see for yourself! (Clips courtesy and credit to NBC.com)

Part 1


Part 2

2013 NFL Draft Pari-Mutuel Fantasy Sports Game Results

To continue the early testing of the totally new pari-mutuel fantasy sports game website, ProContest.com, a free play game based on the NFL draft was offered.  Crafting a bona fide fantasy sports game around the NFL draft is a completely new concept, never before seen.  This game has great potential with regard to monetizing this huge event that attracts approximately 25 million viewers each year.  This game was alluded to during the reporting of the Week 17 results at the end of last year's regular season in this post.

The four races that constituted the NFL Draft game were:

1. Position Most Selected Rounds 1-4
2. Position Most Selected Rounds 5-7
3. Conference Most Selected Rounds 1-4
4. Conference Most Selected Rounds 5-7

Here are the results for the various game elements along with their final odds to Win as determined by contest entrants:

Position Most Selected Rounds 1-4
Win    Other/Field / 14:1
Place  Cornerback / 28:1
Show  Defensive End / 4:1
Favorite:  Defensive End at 4:1

Position Most Selected Rounds 5-7
Win    Offensive Line (Any) / 5:1
Place  Running Back (Any) / 7:1
Show  Other/Field / 9:1
Favorite:  Offensive Line (Any) and Wide Receiver at 5:1

Conference Most Selected Rounds 1-4
Win    SEC / 4:1
Place  Other/Field / 11:1
Show  Pac 12 / 23:1
Favorite:  SEC, Big 10 and Big 12 at 4:1

Conference Most Selected Rounds 5-7
Win    Other/Field / 10:1
Place  SEC / 7:1
Show  ACC / 10:1
Favorite:  Big 10 and Big 12 at 5:1

For the early round position race, the favorite Defensive Ends did finish in the money, just a whisker behind the second place finisher Cornerback.  The Cornerback position was a longshot at 28:1 and came in second.  The Other/Field entry was at 14:1 but did come in first by a wide margin.

For the late round position race, the favorite Offensive Line (Any) did win but the other favorite Wide Receiver finished out of the money.  The Runningback position at 7:1 placed and the Other/Field entry at 9:1 showed.  The finish order was fairly closely correlated to the final odds for this race, with the exception of the co-favorite Wide Receiver.

For the early round conference race, the favorite SEC did win and won convincingly.  The Other/Field entry placed just ahead of the Pac 12, which showed.  The Pac 12 was a longshot in this race at 23:1 but came in third and just missed a second place finish.

For the late round conference race, both favorites Big 10 and Big 12 finished out of the money.  The second favorite SEC placed, but the Other/Field entry, at a reasonable 10:1 won.  Rounding out the in the money finishers, the ACC also going off at 10:1 showed.  This might have been reasonably expected as the big conferences should do well in early rounds with minor conferences or Division II or III players potentially being selected late, making the Field/Other entry more attractive.

Overall, the NFL Draft pari-mutuel game performed well with regard to game mechanics.  It definitely is an option to be offered as a pay-to-play prize awarding game in the future.  We're initially thinking of an entry fee in the $5 range, with prize tiers (multiple winners per prize tier that vary based on total number of entries) in the range of $250/$50/$10.  This kind of high prize to entry fee ratio should be more attractive than that offered by those other "daily" fantasy sports sites.  Just think that perhaps next year, you can watch the NFL Draft and have the potential to win cash prizes!

Stay tuned to ProContest's blog for further developments on that, other games/sports, and general ProContest info.

Week 17 ProContest Pari-Mutuel Results

To finish the NFL regular season contests, ProContest.com offered a free play NFL Week 17 game.  The game consisted of four yardage-based questions/races:  Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver and Team Defense.

This was another early the offering of this new fantasy sports game that combines pari-mutuel wagering (Win, Place, Show) with fantasy statistics.

Here are the results for the various game elements along with their final odds to Win as determined by contest entrants:

Quarterback (QB)
Win    Brees NO / 9:1
Place  Rodgers GB / 11:1
Show  Manning DEN / 11:1
Favorite:  Romo DAL and Field/Other QB at 6:1

Running Back (RB)
Win    Field/Other RB / 12:1
Place  Morris WAS / 9:1
Show  Peterson MIN / 7:1
Favorite:  Peterson MIN at 7:1

Wide Receiver (WR)
Win    Crabtree SF / 9:1
Place  Other/Field WR / 7:1
Show  Johnson HOU / 9:1
Favorite:  Johnson DET and Field/Other WR at 7:1

Defense (D/ST)
Win    Denver / 6:1
Place  Other/Field DEF / 13:1
Show  Other/Field DEF / 13:1
Favorite:  Seattle at 5:1

For the QB position, three very good quarterbacks did well, even in late December.  And, in addition, the final odds for each were very nice.  Romo was expected to do well and interest was generated by the field entry, but neither of these two favorites finished in the money.

For the RB position, expectations and interest were high on Peterson MIN, and he did not disappoint.  The favorite did finish in the money, but just a bit shy of two other performances that were also spectacular, breaching 200 yards rushing each.

For the WR position, the field entry did Place, but the other favorite, Johnson DET, did not finish in the top three.  Smart folks did do well by selecting Crabtree SF to Win, with final odds at 9 to 1.

Denver was close to being the odds-on favorite, going off at 6 to 1, and getting the Win.  Two of the field entries Placed and Showed.  The favorite, Seattle at 5 to 1, did not finish in the money.

We'll have a similarly formatted game for the NFL playoffs ready to go on Wednesday, so keep your eyes peeled and get ready to register on ProContest.com and play (if you are residing in the eligible locations).  This game again will be free to enter.  This will be the last game of the NFL season, but we will explore crafting games for the upcoming Arena Football League season, so those fantasy football enthusiasts don't get too discouraged.

Also, we're looking at crafting a new game for the NFL never before seen.  Stay tuned to ProContest's blog for further developments on that, other games/sports, and general ProContest info.

First Pari-Mutuel Fantasy Contest Yields Interesting Results

As part of its soft launch effort, ProContest.com offered a free play NFL Thanksgiving game.  The game consisted of four yardage-based questions/races:  Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver and Team Defense.

This was the first open offering of this new fantasy sports game that combines pari-mutuel wagering (Win, Place, Show) with fantasy statistics.  This is the first truly innovative concept in fantasy sports game play in quite a while.

For those interested, here's the results for the various game elements along with their final odds to Win as determined by contest entrants:

Quarterback (QB)
Win    Stafford DET / 6:1
Place  Romo DAL / 2:1
Show  Brady NE / 11:1

Running Back (RB)
Win    Morris WAS / 5:1
Place  Foster HOU / 4:1
Show  Ridley NE / 12:1

Wide Receiver (WR)
Win    Johnson HOU / 8:1
Place  Other/Field / 3:1
Show  Johnson DET / 3:1

Defense (D/ST)
Win    New England / 21:1
Place  Dallas / 4:1
Show  Washington / 3:1

For the QB position, there was a tie with regard to passing yards between Stafford DET and Romo DAL.  What separated the two was that Stafford had a better yards per attempt average.  Although both quarterbacks had 441 yards passing (a very good day for both), Stafford did that with fewer passes.

A bit surprising was that how the New England defense went off at 21:1, when they were playing the New York Jets, a bad offensive team this year.  This shows that by exploiting knowledge and skill, players can make some very good choices.

As the launch process moves forward, new games will be offered to allow users to gauge user acceptance and to try new game metric concepts.  Pari-mutuel fantasy sports has the potential to further drive new growth in the skill game areas as well as create new offerings in regulated wagering, particularly with venues already familiar with pari-mutuel wagering, such as horse and dog racing.

FSTA Fantasy Football B League 2012 Draft Roster

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) had its summer conference this week in San Francisco.  Overall a decent conference, but unfortunately for those that attended the San Francisco Giants game in the evening of Day 2, they missed Cain's perfect game by 1 day.  Bummer.

One of the standard events is the FSTA Experts League fantasy drafts.  Even though it is June, we had our draft.  It is tougher doing that even before training camp and exhibition games, but the conferences are scheduled well before the football and baseball seasons in order for the various participating companies to get some business done well before they are tied up with servicing YOUR fantasy leagues.

The general rules for the league are as follows:

It's a 12-team league, with three 4-team divisions.  The regular season runs Weeks 1-14, with Weeks 15 & 16 playoff weeks.  Each division winner plus 1 wild card make the playoffs.  We start 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex (RB, WR or TE), 1 K and 1 Def/ST.  There are 6 reserve slots.  There are NO trades in this league.  For add/drops there is a $100 bidding budget for the entire season where teams can "silent bid" for free agents.

Scoring is as follows:

Passing

1. 1 point per 30 yards
2. 3 points per TD
3. 2 points per 2-pt conv
4. -1 point per int and/or lost fumble

Rushing

1. 1 point per 10 yards
2. 6 points per TD
3. 2 points per 2-pt conv
4. -1 point per lost fumble

Receiving

1. 1 point per 10 yards
2. 6 points per TD
3. 2 points per 2-pt conv
4. -1 point per lost fumble

Kicking

1. 1 point per PAT
2. 3 points per FG 1-29 yards
3. 4 points per FG 30-39 yards
4. 5 points per FG 40-49 yards
5. 6 points per FG 49+ yards

Defense/Special Teams

1. 1 point per sack
2. 2 points per int and/or opponent's fumble recovery
3. 6 points per TD (int or def fumble return, punt or kickoff return)
4. 2 points per safety
5. 6 points for no points scored by opponent
6. 3 points for 2 to 7 points scored

YouGaming drew the 8th spot in the draft, which was a typical serpentine draft.  Here's who we drafted by round:

1. Rodgers, A. QB GB
2. Lynch, M. RB SEA
3. Nicks, H. WR NYG
4. Colston, M. WR NO
5. Pettigrew, B. TE DET
6. Moore, D. WR OAK
7. Spiller, C.J. RB BUF
8. LaFell, B. WR CAR
9. Floyd, M. WR ARI
10. LeShoure, M. RB DET
11. Palmer, C. QB OAK
12. Gerhart, T. RB MIN
13. Green Bay Packers Def/ST
14. Janikowski, S. K OAK
15. Jeffrey, A. WR CHI
16. Royster, E. RB WAS

During the draft, I basically ignored bye weeks and focused on who was best available with regard to projected fantasy points.  That being said, if a particular position was getting thin or to a point where the talent level dropped off significantly, I'd grab a person even though there may have been a better point producer elsewhere.  I did that with the TE pick in the 5th round.

The scoring system in this league definitely is WR friendly, being a PPR league.  Also, scoring for kickers rewards those with range, so grabbing Janikowski makes a whole lot of sense.  Rodgers was available at 8, so I grabbed him.  He or Brady are really the only rational 1st round QBs given this league's scoring system.  For those who have questions/comments about my draft, feel free to comment and I'll give you a feel for the dynamics of our draft.  As with your leagues, you make your plans, but to an extent, you'll modify your approach based on what your competitors do.

Life-Changing Payouts From Fantasy Sports

Many people's only involvement with fantasy sports is with free games or low stakes entry fee games. However, don't think that there isn't big money to be won playing fantasy sports. This is true even though fantasy sports is not gambling. Yes, NOT gambling. People can bet on sports but playing in a fantasy sports contest is not gambling.

What makes fantasy sports different from typical sports betting is how fantasy sports contests operate. In a nutshell, fantasy sports games operate as contests. These contests can either be free or pay-to-play. We'll discuss the pay-to-play as one of the generally accepted elements for gambling isn't met - consideration.

To be gambling, typically an activity needs all three elements - prize, consideration and chance. For the free to play games, if there is no cost to enter, then there isn't any consideration and therefore it's not gambling. So, isn't pay-to-play then gambling because there's consideration? Not necessarily because of the element of chance. Fantasy sports generally is viewed as a skill game. Generally, because states can have different interpretations of what constitutes chance. Overall, in about 41 of the 50 states, fantasy sports are viewed as a game of skill rather than chance.

In the UIGEA, fantasy sports contests are defined as a game of skill and exempt from internet gambling restrictions if they operate within certain guidelines. Basically, you can't have a fantasy team be 100% of a real team, you have to explicitly state your prize structure and levels and not have them vary with the number of game participants, and the real-world games used as basis of games should be more than just a single game.

As stated at the beginning of the post, most people only deal with free games or games with low stakes and prizes. But there are some life-changing payouts out there playing fantasy sports, even in a contest format.

From the Fantasy Sports Business blog, they list a few of the high-stakes fantasy sports contests and top payout levels:

World Championship of Fantasy Football - $300,000
RapidDraft.com - $100,000
Footballguys Players Championship - $100,000
Fantasy Football Players Championship - $100,000
National Fantasy Football Championship - $100,000

So, the top prizes for these five non-gambling fantasy football contests total $700,000. Life changing payouts for playing fantasy football and getting to watch LOTS of NFL games! How cool is that?

Would This Be an Indicator of the Most Accurate Fantasy Football Prognosticator?

Over the last couple of years, I've done a few posts regarding fantasy football projections, which you can see here. here. here and here. I have a pretty strong bias that fantasy football magazines aren't significantly more accurate than just predicting what happened last year would happen this year (at least for quarterbacks). Do I buy fantasy football magazines? Of course! Hey, it's fantasy football season! Now I do recognize that I am paying for historical information and a nice paper-based reference. I am not paying $7.95 for rare insight. Nowadays you can get pretty good fantasy info for free.

With regard to accuracy, I've been thinking of what indicator could be a good "tell" that the magazine or publisher might have more on the ball than the competition. Yes, being accurate in every player and position is the objective, but if you could choose just one position and if that accuracy was good, could it be an indicator? I've got an idea here that I will share and you can determine if it has any merit.

I'm thinking that the fantasy prognosticator that does the best with regard to projecting kickers is likely to be accurate with the other positions as well. The reason I say this is that the kicker generally participates in every scoring drive, offensive or defensive. Of course, kickers on good offensive teams will likely score more points, but would they score the most kicker points? Maybe not.

For example, if Kicker 1 on a good team and Kicker 2 on a not so good team are playing each other this week. Team 1 beats Team 2 28-16. Kicker 1 scores 4 extra points or 4 points. Kicker 2 gets 3 field goals and 1 extra point or 10 points. See? Kicker 2 generates more fantasy points.

If a prognosticator gets kicker rankings (and maybe even point projections) correct, they are likely to get other position rankings correct. If they can determine that a kicker is going to get a good number of field goal opportunities but not extra points, that will help paint the picture with regard to quarterback, receiver and running back stats for that team as well. Get the kickers right, and the other positions will follow suit.

That's what I am going to look at this year. I am going to do a follow-up post to lay out a few fantasy football magazines and their Top 15 kickers. We'll see how accurate they are.

2009 Fantasy Football QB Prediction Results

In a previous post, I provided some fantasy football QB rankings and compared them to a couple of fantasy football magazines. The intent was to test the hypothesis that basically saying what happened last year would happen this year wasn't radically different from the "deep analysis" provided by fantasy football information sources, which you need to pay for. To recap the methodology stated in last year's post:

"I will take last year's QB rankings and use the premise that the rankings from last year will be the same as this year. There will be a couple of adjustments. If for example, a QB moves from one team to the other and will be the starter, I'll keep that QB at the same ranking, even though they changed teams. QBs coming back from injury will be replaced with the highest rank position from the best of their replacements (i.e. Brady for Cassel). They will be projected at the ranking level that their substitute had last year. Finally, I put in Mark Sanchez in the slot held by Gus Frerotte (#29). Frerotte is not in the league at this point and Favre is now in Minnesota.

Could that cause some inaccuracy? Yes, but to keep the level of my "expert analysis" to a minimum, I'll keep the adjustments paltry and simplistic. You will also see by doing this just the few instances where you can intuitively (i.e. for free) make your own adjustment and not pay $7.99 to read something you basically already know. I made one adjustment to be fair to the magazines, dealing with Brett Favre. They didn't have him in their top rankings so I assumed that they would placed Favre in the position of the top rated Minnesota QB (#27). "

"The stats were based on total performance (passing and rushing), not just TDs. The league I was in counted passing TDs for 3 pts instead of 6 pts, so QBs that maybe didn't pass as well but got some stats rushing may show up higher in this list than the rankings your league has. The ranking lists of the magazines also were based on a performance model, not just TDs, to keep the comparison consistent."

Here's the results for my projections and fantasy football magazines A and B (names omitted):

YouGaming Blog
Correct within 5 or less spots - 12 (40%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 21 (70%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 9 (30%)

Fantasy Football Magazine A
Correct within 5 or less spots - 15 (50%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 24 (80%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 6 (20%)

Fantasy Football Magazine B
Correct within 5 or less spots - 18 (60%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 23 (77%)
Incorrect by 11 0r more spots - 7 (23%)

The fantasy football magazines were able to beat the performance of simply stating what happened last year would happen this year, but not by very much. Overall results to get rankings within 10 spots is pretty much the same. So, at least compared to the magazines considered, you could have simply taken last year's QB stats rankings as your cheat sheet and likely not done much worse. What this analysis doesn't take into account is the actual numbers produced by the quarterbacks. It could be that even though a QB is off by several spots in ranking, the actual difference in performance stats may not be drastically different, particularly after you get past the top tier of quarterbacks.

What is fairly consistent but not reported in detail is that after the top 20 quarterbacks, no one did very well in terms of accuracy. If a prognosticator could do a very good job of predicting quarterback rankings from 15 to 30, that would be a great value as often those players would be your bye week QB or your QB that can keep your team solid if your top QB on your roster has a nagging injury or a tough weekly matchup.

I may consider this year looking at actual projected stats to see how well the fantasy football magazines do in that area.