Fantasy Goalz

1. Fantasy sports and Psychology associated with it Fantasy sport has a lot to do with human psychology. It depends on a series of decisions taken by us. The quality of our choices only determines our ranking and our monetary incentives. There are various sites which provide us with advice that to a great extent affect our choices. There are various psychological ways which affect our approach towards fantasy sports. Firstly, cognitive bias, that systematically deviates us from rationality or norm. Our decisions are sometimes subjected to cognitive bias, which are illogical mental shortcuts taken in certain situations. Our emotional welfare, how good a decision makes us feel, sometimes plays a big role in our choices. For example, some Fantasy managers will captain a player from the final match of the gameweek. It is not because they believe this fixture can boost performance, but to avoid the trauma of an early captain failing. This is a cognitive bias in action. Secondly, here comes confirmation bias. This is the tendency to search or interpret in a way that supports our prior's beliefs. Often when we thoroughly look through previous statistics we ignore those not fitting us. Thus confirmation bias strengthens our conviction in decisions we were always going to make. Confirmation makes us dismiss any alternate options out of hand, which may cause problems. Thirdly, here comes the gambler's fallacy. It is also known as Monte Carlo fallacy is a belief that if an event occurs more frequently than normal in the past then it's unlikely to occur in future. We can understand this with a simple coin where after getting 4-5 heads there forms a belief that the next will be tails. This plays a good role in our choices in fantasy team selection. Here we tend to trust an under-performer and make choices. Fourthly, here comes the endowment effect. Here people are more likely retaining an object they own than acquire the same object that they do not own. This makes us place a higher value on something that we own. It prevents us from trading for something new and leads us to retain our possessions. It also makes us predict the success of our players and makes us recommend them to others. Lastly, there is the Omission bias. It is the tendency of favouring inaction over action. It prevents us from taking bigger risks and thus bringing down our chance of more points and a better rank. It is a fear of mistakes that makes one take decisions of limiting the number of choices. Taking various choices during team selection has various psychological approaches. It includes groupthink which is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which desire for harmony results in irrational decision-making. Group members reach a specific decision with discussion and minimize further dissenting views. The solution to it is to properly consider alternate views rather than blindly shooting down to a conclusion. Another common

2. psychological way is the bandwagon effect. It is a way where we acquire a particular style, behaviour because everyone else is doing it. Choosing a player because many others are choosing is like a slap in the face of individuality and may stop one to get marvellous wins of points and improve rank. This is a cognitive bias that has been used positively by the fantasy community. Another similar psychological approach is by recency bias. Recency bias is a cognitive bias where one favours recent events over historic ones giving greater importance to newer performance. Recency bias can often lead to "chasing points" as we focus on a player's latter performance than their overall prospects. These short predictions can even cost us badly without properly analysing and making choices. For a better team building, we need to tactfully analyse and shape our skills. So this teaches us that our way of approaching fantasy sports is much guided by various psychological concerns. There is also a psychological approach of pseudo certainty effect which makes us take fewer risks when we are confident and more risks when we are not. This can be seen in good rankers playing safe than the struggling rankers taking wild moves to catch up. Thus psychological approach matters in fantasy sports.