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Main Authors: Sarkar, Sarthak, Das, Supratim, Saha, Purushottam, Mukherjee, Diganta, Mukherjee, Tridib
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22254
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author Sarkar, Sarthak
Das, Supratim
Saha, Purushottam
Mukherjee, Diganta
Mukherjee, Tridib
author_facet Sarkar, Sarthak
Das, Supratim
Saha, Purushottam
Mukherjee, Diganta
Mukherjee, Tridib
contents Online fantasy cricket has emerged as large-scale competitive systems in which participants construct virtual teams and compete based on real-world player performances. This massive growth has been accompanied by important questions about whether outcomes are primarily driven by skill or chance. We develop a statistical framework to assess the role of skill in determining success on these platforms. We construct and analyze a range of deterministic and stochastic team selection strategies, based on recent form, historical statistics, statistical optimization, and multi-criteria decision making. Strategy performance is evaluated based on points, ranks, and payoff under two contest structures Mega and 4x or Nothing. An extensive comparison between different strategies is made to find an optimal set of strategies. To capture adaptive behavior, we further introduce a dynamic tournament model in which agent populations evolve through a softmax reweighting mechanism proportional to positive payoff realizations. We demonstrate our work by running extensive numerical experiments on the IPL 2024 dataset. The results provide quantitative evidence in favor of the skill element present in online fantasy cricket platforms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22254
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing Skill Element in Online Fantasy Cricket
Sarkar, Sarthak
Das, Supratim
Saha, Purushottam
Mukherjee, Diganta
Mukherjee, Tridib
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Online fantasy cricket has emerged as large-scale competitive systems in which participants construct virtual teams and compete based on real-world player performances. This massive growth has been accompanied by important questions about whether outcomes are primarily driven by skill or chance. We develop a statistical framework to assess the role of skill in determining success on these platforms. We construct and analyze a range of deterministic and stochastic team selection strategies, based on recent form, historical statistics, statistical optimization, and multi-criteria decision making. Strategy performance is evaluated based on points, ranks, and payoff under two contest structures Mega and 4x or Nothing. An extensive comparison between different strategies is made to find an optimal set of strategies. To capture adaptive behavior, we further introduce a dynamic tournament model in which agent populations evolve through a softmax reweighting mechanism proportional to positive payoff realizations. We demonstrate our work by running extensive numerical experiments on the IPL 2024 dataset. The results provide quantitative evidence in favor of the skill element present in online fantasy cricket platforms.
title Analyzing Skill Element in Online Fantasy Cricket
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22254