WTF is daily fantasy sports? – TechCrunch

If you’ve watched or been to a professional sports game in the past year you’ve no doubt seen advertisements for daily fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel.

In just a few years the industry has become the hottest thing in the sports world probably since cable TV.

And with the recent merger of the two companies, it’s pretty clear that they plan on sticking around for a while.

As a whole, the daily fantasy sports industry is pretty new; DraftKings hasn’t even been around five years. But the two companies have raised a combined total of over $1 billion in venture funding. They quickly spent this money making their companies, and by extension the entire daily fantasy sports industry, a household name.

First, what is fantasy sports?

To understand what daily fantasy sports is, it’s first necessary to understand plain old fantasy sports because that’s been around a lot longer.

A fantasy sport is a game where participants assemble imaginary teams using real players of different professional sports team. So for the NFL you’d draft a team consisting of one quarterback from Philadelphia’s team, a running back from Oakland, a wide receiver from Atlanta’s team, etc.

Everyone else in your league does the same thing, and then your teams compete against each other. So how do you decide who wins? Points are assigned to certain actions – so a quarterback throwing a touchdown is 6 points, or a wide receiver would net your team one point per catch he had that game. At the end of all the games you add up all of your players’ points, and whatever team has the highest score wins.

So what’s the difference?

Traditional fantasy sports typically occur over an entire season – so in September you and your friends would draft teams, and you wouldn’t find out who won until the season is over in January. This also means you’re stuck with the same players you draft at the beginning of the season, unless someone in your league wants to trade with you.

But daily fantasy sports, as you can tell by its name, doesn’t last a whole season. It lasts a day: You draft your players in the morning, and by the time the games are over in the afternoon or evening, you know who won.