Fantasy sports

A fantasy sport (also known less commonly as rotisserie or roto) is a type of online game where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players' players in actual games. This performance is converted into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by each fantasy team's manager. These point systems can be simple enough to be manually calculated by a "league commissioner" who coordinates and manages the overall league, or points can be compiled and calculated using computers tracking actual results of the professional sport. In fantasy sports, team owners draft, trade and cut (drop) players, analogously to real sports.

Online fantasy sports are a multibillion-dollar industry.

Simulation games such as Strat-O-Matic are not considered fantasy sport, because they are not scored using real results of actual sporting events.

The concept of picking players and running a contest based on their year-to-date stats has been around since shortly after this World War II. One of the earliest published accounts of fantasy sports involved Oakland businessman and one time Oakland Raiders limited partner Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach. He devised fantasy golf in the latter part of the 1950s. Each player selected a team of professional golfers and the person with the lowest combined total of strokes at the end of the tournament would win. Golf is a simple fantasy game to administer and keep tabs on, since each participant is concerned only with the scores of his or her team members without anything else to complicate it. However, it was never organized into a widespread hobby or formal business.

In Oakland in 1962, Winkenbach formed the first reported fantasy football league, called the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL), with eight teams.George Blanda was the first player taken in the first draft in 1963. 1963 draft results

The first reported fantasy baseball league began in Boston in 1960. Harvard University sociologist William Gamson started the "Baseball Seminar" where colleagues would form rosters that earned points on the players' final standings in batting average, RBI, ERA and wins. Gamson later brought the idea with him to the University of Michigan where some professors played the game. One professor playing the game was Bob Sklar, who taught an American Studies seminar which included Daniel Okrent, who learned of the game his professor played. At around the same time a league from Glassboro State College also formed a similar baseball league and had its first draft in 1976.

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