Design of fantacy games for skill dominance

Abstract

The fantasy game industry is Indiais expected to grow to US$ 3.7 billion by 2024 and globally to US$ 48.6 billion by 2027. However, most fantasy games are played for team-based sports like cricket and football and not for individual games like tennis, squash, and badminton. The issue lies in the understanding and design of fantasy games for individual sports to ensure that the fantasy game is mostly skill based and not chance based. The project attempts to suggest an alternative design of fantasy game for individual games, specifically for tennis by understanding issues that lie with the existing game formats. The existing formats include Tennis World Fantasy format and Grand Slam Fantasy format. Grand Slam format has not been widely accepted due to the shortcomings in their scoring pattern, i.e., large points assigned to users who guess the winners of semi-finals and finals correctly undermining theskill used during the entire course of the game. As Tennis World Fantasy format has been widely accepted, heuristic strategies that could be employed while playing in this format are studied and recommendations are made to overcome the success of these heuristic strategies so that the game inclines towards being more skill-based. For this study, only men’s-single games in grand slams are considered. After understanding how the distribution of total points obtained by a user would be on random selection, the same is studied for the heuristic strategies that could be used using Monte Carlo Simulation. The two strategies studied are selection of players based on their performance in the recent grand slams and based on the world rankings of the player at the beginning of the tournament. Employing these strategies gives players a much larger total score (hence helping them win the fantasy game) over those who choose players based on assessment of performance and current form of players. To combat the issue, a new format of tennis fantasy sports is suggested where top 25 players from both the lists above are considered premium players while the rest are considered normal players. A fantasy league player can choose only up to 4 premium players. This results in the distribution of total scores on random choice being similar to that of unconstrained random choice. Fantasy game designers could pay closer attention to outcomes of simple heuristic strategies and employ constraints/checks within the game's format to make the game more skill-based.