Optimization modelling for analyzing fantasy sport games

ABSTRACT

In a fantasy sport game, participants act like a team manager building a team of real individual players of a professional sport. The real performances of these players (or their teams) are translated into points for their team managers. The managers’ aim is to collect as many points as possible, thereby defeating the fantasy teams of opponents. First, we discuss a number of common game rule characteristics of fantasy sport games. Based on these characteristics, we present a mixed-integer programming model to produce and analyze ex post results for a large variety of fantasy sport games. We discuss how these results create value for both the game organizer and the participants. Finally, we apply our system in practice to a fantasy cycling game.

KEYWORDS:

• Fantasy game
• optimization
• ex post
• game rules

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Peter Samoy and Mark Vanderwegen for their brilliant Gigabike game and for sharing their data with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. More precisely, it would be a multidimensional knapsack problem, given that there is still the constraint on the number of riders in the team.