Fantasy golf is a

game A game is a structured form of play (activity), play, usually undertaken for enjoyment, entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator s ...

in which the participants assemble virtual teams of professional

golfers The following lists of golfers are arranged by gender: *List of male golfers *List of female golfers Golfers who have won a major championship or Olympic medal * List of men's major championships winning golfers ** Chronological list of men's ma ...

. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a

draft Draft, The Draft, or Draught may refer to: Watercraft dimensions * Draft (hull), the distance from waterline to keel of a vessel * Draft (sail), degree of curvature in a sail * Air draft, distance from waterline to the highest point on a vessel ...

in which all relevant golfers are available, with games typically involving players in the US

PGA Tour The PGA Tour (stylized in all capital letters as PGA TOUR by its officials) is the organizer of professional golf tours in the United States and North America. It organizes most of the events on the flagship annual series of tournaments also k ...

and the

European Tour The European Tour (currently known as the DP World Tour for sponsorship reasons), legally the PGA European Tour is the leading men's professional golf tour in Europe. The organisation also operates the European Senior Tour (for players aged fift ...

. Fantasy points are awarded based on those golfers' real-life performance in tournaments; many formats exist both for scoring and player selection.

History

Fantasy golf was one of the first fantasy sports to utilize the concept of participants selecting real-life athletes and tracking their future performance in order to earn points. In the 1950s,

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

businessman Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach developed a fantasy golf game in which participants would select a roster of professional golfers and compare their scores at the end of a given tournament, with the lowest combined total of strokes winning. Winkenbach is also credited with developing an early version of

fantasy baseball Fantasy baseball is a game in which the participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual baseball teams. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant Major League Baseball (MLB) players are ava ...

and creating the first fantasy football league. A national newspaper fantasy golf game, Fairway Fantasy, was created by telecommunications company Phoneworks in 1991 following the success of other fantasy contests run by the company. In Fairway Fantasy, participants selected a roster of PGA Tour players participating in the upcoming tour event over the phone. The Phoneworks contests contributed to the widespread interconnectivity of fantasy sports that would soon encourage the development of fantasy sports over the Internet.

Daily fantasy sports Daily fantasy sports (DFS) are a subset of fantasy sport games. As with traditional fantasy sports games, players compete against others by building a team of professional athletes from a particular league or competition while remaining under a ...

firms, such as

DraftKings DraftKings is an American daily fantasy sports contest and sports betting company. The company allows users to enter daily and weekly fantasy sports–related contests and win money based on individual player performances in five major American ...

, began offering fantasy golf games in the 2010s. In 2015, DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish stated that golf was the fastest-growing sport on the site aside from

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

, and

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

. According to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, as of 2018, around 13% of fantasy sports players in the United States and Canada play fantasy golf.

League types

A fantasy golf league may be organized in a variety of ways. While some leagues award points based on player scores in tournament events, others rank the league's participants based upon the prize money earnings of their respective rosters. Leagues may compete across an entire year or a single tournament; under the "one-and-done" format, the league is contested across a full season, but each participant selects a single golfer to accrue points in each week's tournament, providing players the with opportunity to select a different golfer every week.

References

Golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

{{Golf-stub

History

League types

See also

References