Study: There’s real skill in fantasy sports
If you’ve ever taken part in the armchair sport of fantasy football and found yourself at the top of your league’s standings at the end of the season, a new MIT study suggests your performance — however far removed from any actual playing field — was likely based on skill rather than luck. Those looking for ways to improve their fantasy game will have to look elsewhere: The study doesn’t identify any specific qualities that make one fantasy player more skilled over another. Instead, the researchers found, based on the win/loss records of thousands of fantasy players over multiple seasons, that the game of fantasy football is inherently a contest that rewards skill. “Some [fantasy] players may know more about statistics, rules of the game, which players are injured, effects of weather, and a host of other factors that make them better at picking players — that’s the skill in fantasy sports,”...