Skill driven fantasy game for individual sports

Abstract

The fantasy games are booming in India with potential FDI investment of 10000+ crore and creation of around 12000+ jobs. ''! Fantasy games are popular across team sports, but it is difficult to design the same for individual sports. Thus, the report details the concept and design of a fantasy game for individual sports and proves that it 1s skill driven. The fantasy game has been designed for the sport of Tennis but can easily be extended to other individual sports. Initially, the report details the existing fantasy Tennis leagues and the shortcomings of the same. The WTA Fantasy Tennis League is a year-round event making it tiresome for users and the Grand Slam Fantasy does not involve the users during the tournament. Learning from the shortcomings, a fantasy game has been designed for Tennis knockout tournament. It involves changing of number of players to be selected, budget and pricing in each round. The scoring in addition to the fantasy points for match, set, game, points won includes points for other aspects like serving, winners and break points. Also, negative scoring is present to discourage longer games. There are two advanced models — Opponent and Form mimicking a skilled player. The US Open 2020 data has been considered for the models. These models are compared against 10000 Null Models which selects player by random chance. It was found that Opponent models outperformed both Null models and Form Model. The better performance of Opponent Model than Null Model was found 69.32% times statistically significant. This proves analytically that the fantasy game 1s a skill driven one. These two models can be combined to give a more optimum model. Also, this hypothesis can be proved for other datasets as well in the future. There are other factors like surface, fitness, track record which can also be considered for mimicking skilled player.