Daily Fantasy Advice: What is Fantasy Sports?

Before checking out sports blogs for the best daily fantasy advice, it is very important that you first have a good idea of what fantasy sports is all about.

Fantasy sports as we know it got its start in the 1960s, with stats from Major League Baseball and the National Football League serving as the basis for team scoring and rankings. Players, or managers, would select a team of real-life baseball or football players in a draft setting, with managers randomly assigned draft positions. Leagues would typically be composed of eight to twelve managers. That fundamental basis for fantasy sports remains to this day, though there are a great many other varieties – most notably basketball, soccer, and hockey – that are popular with players all over the world.

Nowadays, almost all fantasy sports leagues are conducted online. Yahoo Sports and ESPN are among the most popular fantasy sports providers, and it’s easy for anyone to sign up, form their own team, and compete with friends or with strangers without paying a single cent. These leagues run all season long, giving players ample opportunities to tweak their lineup – adding, dropping, or trading players – in pursuit of first place. It’s also possible to win money by playing fantasy sports, with each manager required to pay an entry fee and the top three placers winning a percentage of the combined entry fees. Still, it’s the free leagues that remain most popular, due to the casual nature of these leagues, and the very fact that they don’t cost you anything at all.

There are also services from the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel that offer daily fantasy competitions with big cash prizes up for grabs. This, might we add, is what we focus on in this site. Unlike traditional fantasy sports leagues, which are played throughout the course of a real-life sports league’s season, daily fantasy sports allows you to choose a lineup of available players for the day while staying within the allotted salary cap. You get to pay an entry fee for each day you enter, and if you emerge as one the top players in a field of hundreds, or even thousands, you win some real-life money. These daily fantasy services, however, have gotten lots of criticism, as they tend to resemble gambling more than they resemble traditional fantasy sports. Still, they can be a lot of fun, as the fees are usually small, with much bigger prizes awaiting you if you do well on a certain day, especially by heeding sound daily fantasy advice.

Leo Aranas is an online writer and blogger.