Play Fantasy Cricket this IPL
The IPL will start soon and I recommend fantasy cricket to you. You should play it because it is a lot of fun. However, if you are the kind of person who doesn’t do things just because they are fun, I have other very good arguments for you.
Let’s start with the briefest of descriptions of fantasy cricket.
Fantasy cricket requires you to select 11 players from the two teams playing a match. When the players you have selected score runs and take wickets in the real match, you score in the fantasy game. It is as simple as that.
There are details but you can pick them up fairly quickly. For example, you have a ‘total purse’ which you can spend on buying your players and the good players are expensive. The game may require you to pick a minimum or maximum number of batsmen, bowlers, wicketkeepers and even overseas players. How much you score for a wicket or a catch depends on the game. You compete against everyone else and you can also create leagues of your friends and colleagues.
I got into fantasy cricket in the very first IPL. A bunch of us in my company started an office league and it was one of the most enjoyable things we did. Mind you, this is in an office where lunch time Table Tennis, intra office Tetris tournaments and frequent picnics were very common.
The prime mover of our office league was Deepak, one of our earliest employees. A perpetually boyish looking, slight man who dressed in clothes one size too big for him, Deepak had joined us as an office boy and quickly taken over many of the assorted tasks in a startup. Feeling sleepy in afternoon? Deepak could arrange for Tea. Client delaying sending cheque (very normal)? Deepak would visit their office and charm them. Office wall leaking in Mumbai Monsoons (One of our rooms was actually a converted garage)? Deepak will get it fixed. Deepak fixed our IPL office league in style. Most memorably, he instituted a system of Orange and Purple Cap for daily and overall winners, similar to IPL, and made sure that there was a daily ceremony to award the cap.
The enthusiastic participation in the league meant that we followed all matches. When ‘our player’ scored runs or took wickets, we felt extraordinary proud and joyful and flooded the text boxes of our competitors in the office league. We stopped caring for the performance of the actual teams and obsessed over the performance of the players in our teams. It did not matter to me if Chennai Super Kings or Mumbai Indians won as long as the players in Ironsmiths and Goldsmiths did well! (My teams names signifying alternate strategies. Comment below if you can make out the strategy from the names J)!
We spent a lot of time researching and selecting teams and then we spent more time talking about the results. Why did we do that? After all, there was plenty of work to go around in our startup. You guessed it — it was fun.
But maybe ‘fun’ is not good enough for you. Maybe you are the kind of person who ticks off cities and countries off a list when you travel. Maybe you need your movies to have a deeper message rather than being only entertaining. Maybe you never ever eat any food that is simply tasty — it has to be healthy too. In short, maybe you are a person who vaguely feels guilty for having ‘pure’ fun. Don’t worry, I have you covered — fantasy cricket can teach you a lot about investing and maybe even life.
Howard Marks, a famous investor, regularly writes memos on investing. In one such memo, Marks talked about games. He classified games by the relative importance of skill, hidden information and luck. Some games like Chess are all about skill. There is no information hidden from either player and there is no element of chance. Other games like Roulette are all about luck. You cannot develop skills that can let you win in this game over the long term. In the middle however, there are games that require you to make decisions with imperfect information and hence, have an element of luck. In these games, you make bets and as per Mark, these games teach you
“…what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.”
Fantasy Cricket is a game which requires both skill and luck to win. You need to know which players are in form and what kind of pitch they would be playing on. You need to figure out a good team based on the constraints imposed by the game. However, you could do all. this ‘right’ but would still need luck. For example, you may choose David Warner because he is a batsman with a terrific IPL record but he may get out on the first ball. Or you could choose Bumrah but in the particular match, his good bowling may lead to his teammates getting a lot of wickets. Or, as it happened to a friend of mine, you may choose Jos Butler and he may decide to skip a match because he wants to be with his wife who is delivering their baby. Luck could mess up your best laid plans.
In the same memo, Marks talks about the striking similarity between investing and games of skill and chance,
“For me, the thing that makes investing fascinating is the fact that there’s no action you can take that is sure to work, no strategy that’s always a winner.”
Or, again quoting Marks,
“..you can’t tell the quality of a decision from the outcome.”
Fantasy cricket has all these elements and may help you be more stoic about your investing. If you are playing with a bunch of friends, it is possible that the friend who knows least about cricket ends up doing best. Galling for the rest of you but then that is life.
Deepak was one of our sharpest employees. The consensus was that he was one of the most intelligent people in an office filled with nerdy programmers. In the three years that we played fantasy cricket, he was amongst the top three in every year. Most people agreed that if it were not for his start — he could not get a very good schooling — he would have had a very different career. Even with the start that he actually got, he did all right. Over the decade that he was with us, he taught himself accounting and the software Tally and managed to get a white-collar position in the accounting department.
Dear reader, you may be a younger person anxious about career and success in life. Or you could be an older person who is very satisfied with their life. Fantasy cricket may remind you to take both your successes and failures with humility.
Edit: If you are persuaded to play, I recommend the version of the game that goes on for the whole season and not the daily game. I think that the skill requirement in the daily game is much lower.
“The only thing worse than losing is not playing.” This is from Marks again.
I do not usually write on sports and investing. I do write on how simplistic thinking does not work for complex issues as I have done in this post. If you want to read some of my other writing, you could click on
- Why would your MP work on job creation?
- Automation and German underwear effect.
- The oddness of village culture.
You can follow me (@Uppi89) on twitter or me on LinkedIn
