Fantasy Sports: A Popular HobbyWritten by Jeff Oreilly
A Fantasy Sport is a game where a person builds a team comprised of individual players of a professional sport. These team "owners" compete against others based on individual professional's real statistics. Simple versions of this convert statistics into points earned by each team, then determine outcome. Other more complicated versions create a computer model of game by inputting statistics of each player generated by their professional sport. Examples of fantasy sports are Fantasy Football, Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Hockey, etc.Fantasy Football is played by football fans who assemble a team of real NFL players with their real statistics. These teams join a league of from 8-12 teams, then compete throughout a regular season. Often these leagues even have playoffs at end of season. A typical roster is made up of 2 quarterbacks, 3 running backs, 5 wide receivers, 2 tight ends, 2 placekickers, and 2 defenses. Points are scored similar to real football, with extra points added for running or passing for many yards at a time, and points subtracted for turnovers. Fantasy Baseball has a very similar format to Fantasy Football, with players who manage baseball teams made up of real life baseball players. It is earliest form of Fantasy Sports, with origins in a form called "tabletop baseball". This form of Fantasy Baseball was made up from customized baseball cards with stats from recent seasons. Players then made up fantasy teams from these cards and played imaginary baseball games against each other. Tabletop baseball evolved into a form called Rotisserie Leage Baseball, where stats were taken from current season and events such as injuries were counted into game. Methods of choosing players for a team include an auction, where players pay for which professionals they want, or a round-robin draft until teams are filled.
| | Football BettingWritten by Daniel B. King
From about August onwards Football Betting (NFL) becomes big business for sportsbooks. There are plenty of winners and losers over course of any given season - pros and recreational bettors join in action for what has become biggest sport in US in terms of betting.So how can you improve your football betting this season... Point or Unit betting: You've may have seen touts advertise NFL Sides or Totals picks across internet -"grab our 5 star blow out game tonight.." or "get our 100 star double header.." The advantage of one team over another in sides and totals (over/under) market is small - cetainly not enough to justify betting 100%, 50% or even 20% more stake money on one team in a match up as against another team in a match up. Try to keep stakes same. When odds are longer say in futures betting - you can increase or decrease stakes to a degree. You would not necessarily want to bet same on a 250/1 outsider as you would a 5/1 favourite. 2. Standard Deviation: This has proven to be ruin of many a good sports bettor. The problem is that he did not yet know he was a good bettor - he gave up before he found out... Basically it takes a lot of bet samples, especially in sides and totals market where odds are short, to know if you are a profitable bettor or not. Quite often a bettor can have a bad losing streak to start off with. You may go 4-9, then 5-8, then 2-12 - but this might not necessarily mean that you are a poor gambler. It is just standard deviation at work - fundamentally you are hitting a bad streak, yet well within laws of probability.
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