Predict Daily Fantasy Football Leaders on SportsCast

By Ben Golden on November 16, 2015

One use of prediction markets I've been really excited about is forecasting individual players' performances in major sports. These predictions are incredibly useful when playing fantasy sports--both daily fantasy and season-long leagues--and the forecasts that currently exist tend to be, in my experience, pretty mediocre. Prediction markets present an opportunity for the wisdom of the crowds to intervene, and will likely lead to more accurate forecasts.

Eventually we'd like to run prediction markets for almost every player's statistics in each game in each sport, but we're starting out by consolidating forecasts into a few questions. For the remainder of the NFL season, we'll create questions asking who will be the top performers amongst different tiers at each position. For example, this question asked about the top five tight ends in week 10, while this one asks about the next five tight ends.

There are two ways to interact with these questions. First, if you play fantasy football, you can use the existing predictions to guide your lineup decisions, by knowing who top performers in each category are most likely to be. Second, if you think the existing predictions are unreasonable, you can adjust them by making a forecast. Your forecasts are tracked and scored by the prediction market, increasing or decreasing your points based on their accuracy.

I'll be watching these markets closely each week, and if they're popular, we'll add additional fantasy sports questions. You'll also find questions that are closely related to fantasy performance, like these two. 

Check out SportsCast to make forecasts on the above questions and many others. If you liked this post, follow us on Twitter at @cultivatelabs, and sign up for our monthly newsletter.

prediction markets crowdsourced forecasting