Fantasy sports are virtual games that are sometimes known by the name of rotisserie or roto. Within these sports players act as owners of the teams which they build. They compete against other such payers on the basis of statistical information that is generated from real games that these virtual sports are inspired from. All fantasy teams have got a manager who is in charge of compiling the points as per the roster which has been selected.
The Fantasy Sports Trading Association is in charge of hosting conferences for these sports and is also responsible for ensuring their continuous growth. This association includes almost 120 members ranging from the newer and smaller start-ups to the more established larger media corporations. The estimated age of fantasy sports players was twelve and above and extended to 29.9 million people in the year 2007.
Fantasy sports experienced a boom during the dot-com era with a variety of companies committing to this domain. But once this dot-com bubble burst, most of these companies went bankrupt. Some of the more established and long standing companies did manage to survive these turbulent times and remerged, some with new names such as RotoWire.com and some with new marketing strategies and business models such as sportfanatick.com Yahoo. Over time, notwithstanding the unstable economy, it had been noted that the average American fantasy players spent almost 8.4 hours of surveying the NFL each week as against watching the NFL on TV. NFL was able to recognize an opportunity that lay in fantasy sports and started to run ads for fantasy football featuring existing players. These people were probably the first to recognize that it was fantasy play that drives T.V. viewing.
Probably the most popular fantasy sport are fantasy baseball, fantasy basketball and fantasy football. The other games which have gained prominence over time are fantasy golf, fantasy cricket, fantasy auto racing, fantasy hockey and wrestling.
Fantasy baseball is considered as one of the oldest fantasy sports and is among the hardest and time-consuming sports. It follows the Major League Baseball season of 162 games. Fantasy basketball is said to generally be inspired from fantasy baseball. Ever since the 1990s fantasy basketball has been increasing in its popularity particularly with online exposure which it seems to have. NBA has gotten benefit of its immense popularity by launching a worldwide competition known as the Premier Fantasy Championships. This competition is regarded as being one of the largest and most exclusive fantasy sports competitions. NBA has also launched a program called Fantasy Hoops that offers fantasy sports players all the information and news that they need from the happenings within the world of fantasy basketball.
Fantasy football on the other hand has grown to be more popular then ever and has now taken over the mantle of popularity from fantasy baseball. This is mostly attributed to the complexities associated with fantasy baseball in terms of the players involvement for the number of days as well as the far too many number of matches which are played. Fantasy football, on the other hand, gives its players and managers considerably more flexibility particularly in time as the games take place just once every week as compared to daily in fantasy baseball.
Some of the most popular fantasy sports players and games news providers are Yahoo.com and ESPN Fantasy Sports. They gather all the news, reviews, statistics and players performance and bring it on the table for fantasy sports enthusiasts.