The Pros And Cons Of Fantasy Sports

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The concept of selecting professional athletes and organizing contests based on actual performance has been around since the early 1950’s. Wilfred Winkenbach formulated a version of today’s “fantasy golf”, in which team captains or coaches were to select a team of professional golfers and the person with the lowest combined total of strokes at the end of the match would win. Later, In the 1960s a Harvard University Sociologist, William Gamson developed a similar practice with professional baseball players, this time tracking statistical performances as a measure of success. The breakthrough in fantasy sports becoming a national phenomenon was in 1980, when a sports writer named Daniel Okrent created the very first season long fantasy sports league while having dinner with friends at an upscale Manhattan restaurant called “La Rotisserie Francaise”. The friends drafted a collection of players into teams then tracked and recorded statistical performances utilizing the “Sporting News” magazine by hand. At the time, because of the name, the league was referred to as “Rotisserie Baseball”. By 1984 the fantasy sports concept was gaining popularity and in 1988, USA Today reported that an estimated …show more content…

A study was conducted by the FSTA in 2016 which reported approximately 57.4 million people in the U.S. participated in some form of fantasy sport entertainment. In 2015, DraftKings, a Boston based technology company, introduced the concept of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS). Historically, fantasy sports take place over the course of several months during the season, requiring significant time and commitment. The DFS platform disrupted the industry by allowing participants to enter sporting contests lasting only one day. Since the introduction of DFS, as depicted by the 2016 FSTA study, sports gambling has become a widely-accepted practice using mobile web application and short term

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