There have been many hobbies that have been created in part due to the popularity of the internet. Downloading porn and getting in message board debates about the latest star wars films comes to mind first but another hobby that has helped the sports fan on the internet is the boom in popularity of Fantasy Sports Teams. This article will help to give the dummy with no knowledge of Fantasy Sports a bit of information to help him understand what fantasy sports is all about and hopefully decide to join in on the phenomenon sooner or later.Let’s start off with the basic definition of fantasy sports as defined by our favorite free encyclopedia, http://www.wikipedia.org.
Fantasy Sports:A Fantasy sport is a game where fantasy owners build a team that competes against other fantasy owners based on the statistics generated by individual players or teams of a professional sport. Probably the most common variant converts statistical performance into points generated by a fantasy team, and are typically simple enough to be manually calculated by a “league commissioner.” More complex variants use computer modeling of actual games based on statistical input generated by professional sports.
Boobnewb’s Definition of Fantasy Sports: A fantasy sport lets the average fan become the imaginary general manager of a sports team. You can decide which players you want on your teams based 75% on the knowledge you have of the sport and 25% based on the luck you have in picking those players in a fantasy draft. You can show off to your friends how good you would be compared to them by choosing just the right players on your team that will make your team a successful club compared to theirs through a process of mathematical statistics like goals,touchdowns, baskets etc.
Have you ever seen a sports team’s general manager make a horrible trade or make a horrible draft pick? Are you sitting on your couch and thinking to yourself that you could do a way better job than that idiot if you were given the job of being the team’s general manager? Well, now thanks to the internet you can put your money where your mouth is and create your very own fantasy sports team. Before the internet; fantasy sports still existed but it was more difficult to keep track of statistics with simply a paper, a calculator and a pen or pencil. When computers and printers were invented it made things a bit easier thanks to the help of spreadsheets with programs like excel that would help to do a bit of the work for you. Now with the help of the internet it has made viewing results for fantasy sports much easier thanks to up to the minute results and websites that automatically do the all of the work in keeping track of statistics for you.
Generally, Fantasy Sports start off with a commissioner. This is the owner of the league and can also be a player in the game as well or simply be there to enforce the rules and be impartial to any players who are in the league. The commissioner can set the rules for the league such as how many players will be allowed to join the league as well as set the point totals for each statistic. The next priority for the league is to set up a draft date. These can either be live on the internet or done offline in some fashion between all the members of the league.The commish can either decide in which draft or order the players are selected or he can let the internet randomly pick who gets which pick in the draft. Also, unlike most of the normal drafts in professional sports, in fantasy sports every single player in the league including rookies for the upcoming season can be chosen to be on your particular team. Once the draft is finished, all the members of the league now have their teams all set up and ready to go for the upcoming sports year. Usually, depending on the sport, you need to make sure you draft well for each particular position of a roster.
In football you need to focus on receivers or quarterbacks where as in baseball you might want to make sure you have a good pitching staff. All of these choices are yours to decide and will help to make you or break you.The next step in fantasy sports can either go one of two ways. In fantasy sports, there are usually two different methods of play: Head To Head or Rotisserie. In head to head, you and your opponent for the week square off in a number of different statistical categories and whoever wins more of those categories wins the round for that week.
So, if let’s say your team scored more touchdowns and got more interceptions and your opponent simply won more field goals made then you would win the round for that game.. Rotisserie leagues take less concentration and are simply leagues that keep track of a set number of statistics throughout the year between all the members of the league as opposed to squaring off against someone every other game. Also, they require more thought when drafting as you need to draft a more well-rounded team to compete and win.
Now comes the fun part. You basically just follow your favorite sport and hope that you made the right decisions to bring your team to glory. Along the way you can make a few changes to your team as well by making trades with other players, dropping players and picking up free agents that weren’t chosen in the draft or having to move new players on to the team due to injuries to one of your team’s superstars.
Just remember, whatever happens in real life will happen to your fantasy sports team so choose your players wisely. Also, another attraction to Fantasy Sports lately is the gambling appeal to the game. You can either join a league and put some money in a pot with the winner taking home all of the money or simply play the game for the love of the sport with no money involved; it’s up to you. Some of the more popular websites on the internet even have large cash prizes or electronics giveaways and is one of the many types of gambling where you can win based on your knowledge of the sport and not purely on luck.So find a couple of friends to join your league and invite them over, crack open some beers and chips, make things interesting by placing bets and remember that it’s only a game and you’re there to have some fun. In future articles, I will discuss some tips to help you win your fantasy sports league as well as go through the various different fantasy sports that are out there by going through em one by one. In the meantime good luck in starting up your own fantasy sports team.
[ratings]
Entries (RSS)