Fantasy sports are a fantastic alternative for people who want to be more involved with any traditional sport. Participants assemble fantasy or virtual teams based on real players who play in a professional sport. These fictional teams then face with other teams in a league where performance is based on the performance of the real players on your fictional team.
As such, there are no direct games competing your teams against each other. You may even find cases where two of the players in your fictional team are playing directly against each other, this does not matter as the scoring in fantasy sports is only based on your selected players and not their teams as a whole.
Fantasy Sports History
Fantasy sports have found huge fame in the modern world of the internet, the internet however was not the birth of fantasy sports in general. The first known fantasy sport was golf, with easy scoring and exciting game play, golf is perhaps the ideal sport for fantasy gaming. The first implementation of fantasy sport was believed to be shortly after the end of the second world war. Following shortly after its original introduction in golf, the mid 1960s saw the rise of baseball as the leading fantasy sport. From there fantasy sports spread mainly through universities to become an extremely popular game.
The Fantasy Sports
It would be unfair to define a set of sports that can be played in a fantasy league, there is no doubt that people do play sports other than these. That said, these are the most popular sports to play in a fantasy setting
- Fantasy Football – Based on American football, fantasy football is the largest sport in the fantasy sports industry. Not just limited to the NFL, fantasy football operates on several different leagues all the way down to high school football level. While this is the most popular online fantasy sport, it is also extremely common among friends who make private fantasy leagues.
- Fantasy Baseball – Appearing in history before fantasy football, fantasy baseball is another of the large fantasy games with a huge online player base. Fantasy baseball is especially common as it offers a wide variety of leagues with games played throughout the year.
- Fantasy Hockey – Fantasy hockey is another of the original games to be played in the fantasy format with the first fantasy league being formed in 1976. While the fan base of hockey is slightly smaller than that of football or baseball, there are still a lot of dedicated participants who make the game not only fun but challenging at the same time.
- Fantasy Basketball – While a great choice for any basketball fan. Fantasy basketball tends to lack behind the others in sheer number of players. This is believed to be because of the short seasons and not that many games at a professional level. If you are a large basketball fan, there is much action to be had at a collage level which would increase the length of your season considerably.