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DraftOpt Fantasy Sports Optimization Software

About 27.1 million people in the United States compete in fantasy leagues for sports such as football, baseball, basketball, racing, and soccer. Just like their counterparts in professional-sports leagues, each fantasy-team owner faces difficult decisions regarding which players to draft and when to select them.
We have developed DraftOpt to provide an analytical edge for drafting a fantasy sports team. Due to the inherent uncertainty in athlete performance projections and in opposing teams’ selections, a sports-league draft poses a difficult problem for a team owner attempting to assemble the best collection of fantasy athletes. Academic research has shown that the methodologies used by DraftOpt produce better results than even the best fantasy players making draft selections on their own. We currently offer DraftOpt as an iPhone application for fantasy baseball and fantasy football with progression plans to roll out versions onto different computing platforms and for additional league types.
The “average” fantasy sport participant is a married 37-year-old male with children, at least a bachelor degree, owns their home, manages multiple fantasy teams across sports, and has relatively large amounts of disposable income. However, the growing popularity of fantasy leagues to promote camaraderie at the office or to maintain connections between networks of friends and family has expanded potential DraftOpt customers beyond the stereotypical “male sports fanatic” genre. In particular, women comprise a growing percentage of fantasy participants (up to 20 percent of total participants in some studies).
DraftOpt is suited for all types of fantasy-sport participants. The combination of an intuitive user interface with the sophisticated optimization algorithms “under the hood” makes DraftOpt an ideal draft-day companion for the novice participant and the seasoned fantasy veteran alike. There is significant growth potential and little competition for our product.

Submitted By:

• Michael Fry
• Jeff Ohlmann
• Matt Gibson