How Close is Fantasy Football to Gambling in 2020?

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It"s all about strategy

It’s true that fantasy sports require a good deal of strategy. The NFL is especially difficult to make money from with a fantasy team, due to the amount of knowledge it takes to expertly manage the team. Whether you take your team to the top of your league will depend on how well you devise and implement your strategy. Here are a couple of things that determine success in a league and make fantasy sports more a game of skill and less a game of luck.

Depth of the team

A team should have strength and depth if it’s to succeed. This is within the fantasy sport manager’s grasp, because they decide who starts and who doesn’t. If you follow the sport regularly, you know who is prone to injury and who is consistent in their game. If your number one player goes down with an injury, your team should have the strength and depth to perform just as well without them. The injury should be a hiccup and not a major turning point in the team’s fortunes.

Knowledge and schedule

When you follow a sports league closely, you learn who’s a strong performer, who gets weaker as the league goes on and many more things about teams or individual players. You learn statistics, understand the effects of the weather, and grasp the effect of other factors on the game. You can draft the right players, study schedules and apply this knowledge so that you’re putting out the strongest team at the optimal time constantly and able to build up the points week after week.

Fantasy football vs traditional gambling

Fantasy sports are legal in the US, rather than viewed as a form of gambling. The fact that leagues such as the NFL condone fantasy football (which it only did fairly recently), not condemn them, is also an argument in favor of them. Sports leagues are wary of links to betting activities, fearing they could lead to match-fixing, whereas they feel fantasy sports are safe from activities that could throw the results of games.

Not only all this, but there’s no bookmaker to beat. It’s just the player versus all the other players in the league, who may be just like yourself, although some may be skilled at the more mathematical side of things. Bookmakers, on the other hand, are experts. They have lots of access to data so they can make the analysis. Fantasy football places you on a slightly more even footing.

Elements of luck

Similar to gambling games, fantasy sports are in part a game of luck.

In roulette, you can apply a variety of strategies, such as betting more when you’re winning and less when you’re losing (and vice versa); betting more on high numbers; doubling your bet after each spin (known as the Martingale), just to name a few. However, once the ball starts rolling, your fate on the table is in the hands of the wheel and where the roulette balls is down to luck. Some argue that casino games also involve strategy, which places fantasy football closer to gambling than it first appears. Clearly, whether skill or luck is the dominant element in fantasy sports is open for discussion.

Fantasy football players can check out the odds of one of their players scoring a touchdown, adding to the argument that there is an elements of gambling, similar to how roulette players can check out the odds of their number coming up. However, as you dig deeper, these can get quite complex. Thankfully, gambling pro and world famous gambling author Frank Scoblete, who has written over 35 books on various games, has written a really insightful guide on roulette, it explains the odds of winning at European roulette and American roulette, the different payouts, the different house edges, and much more, enabling players to get a perfect understanding of roulette odds.

Some say fantasy sports are like roulette and other casino games because they involve a strategic element just like they do and that fantasy sports rely on a strong element of luck. They believe you can strategise as much you want, but, ultimately, the results are unpredictable. Even the most consistent players or teams can suffer a misfortune, one which you’d never have foreseen in a million years and which can have major consequences for a player, team, game or season. No one can control what happens on or off the pitch except the people involved in the circumstances themselves. That goes for aspects such as the players’ behavior on or off the pitch and the weather and how it will affect the game.

Not only this, but teams don’t play each other as much as they do in other sports and the scoring isn’t as high in some games. This means fantasy players should expect more random results in the league.

Some in the luck camp also suggest that the games naturally incorporate elements of chance they’re so accessible. This helps fantasy sports draw players from all walks of life to it, not just major sports enthusiasts.

Fantasy sports are a chance to get involved in the action even if you don’t get to step onto the pitch or sit on the coach’s bench itself. Is it a game of skill? Is it a game of chance? That’s all open to debate, with plenty of arguments to make the case for either. The one thing that is clear, however, is that a lot of people in the US are enjoying taking part in them.