I have never really liked following regular sports. For a while I would occasionally tune into the NBA playoffs, and I will watch the Super Bowl with my wife, but I have always been more interested in following esports. Recently I fell back into playing mahjong more regularly, and so I decided to check in with the M League this year. For my original favorite team, Phoenix, unfortunately the playoffs were not in the cards. Please forgive me Phoenix, let's be friends in the fall. So I followed the drama behind Team Raiden finally making the final climb. What a great postseason! And we're still in the throes of the seismic shift between the 2022-2033 season and the upcoming one. A new team? Plenty of drama around contract renewal? The M Tournament on the horizon? Following the news cycle, it definitely turned me from the "tune into the playoffs" sort of guy into a M League superfan!

But at this same time, as an American, I knew that I had crossed a threshold that certain weirdos like myself cross when they become a super fan of a sport:

"I want to play fantasy sports next season!"

When I went to go check if it existed, I couldn't find anything. As a matter of fact, there isn't even a wikipedia article in Japanese for fantasy sports. Now, if I am actually reinventing the wheel here, and this already exists somewhere, I hope everyone will yell at me for being so bad at research but I couldn't really find anything. I have never played fantasy sports before, because I don't really follow sports. It's Memorial Day Weekend and I've got some extra time, so I thought it would be fun to think up some rules to play after researching how other fantasy sports work. But first, an explanation and a caveat.

What is Fantasy Sports? 

Fantasy sports is a game that is played with the statistics of a live sporting event, turning the player into a manager who drafts their own team of players and competes with other manager's teams. During the season, you may make trades with other players, or with the reserve pool of players that were not initially drafted. It seems fantasy sports is usually played between a pool of 7-11 players over here, but the rules I came up with scale from 4 to 8. It can be a fun new way to watch sports with a group of friends, celebrating victories and defeats. Before explaining it any farther though, I need to state that Fantasy Sports can be really annoying, and unregulated, it really straddles a grey area in our country. We have incredibly annoying companies that have essentially turned fantasy sports into sports betting, which is not something I condone. While trying to research, I came across this great article. Even though it is old, I think it accurately explains what is BAD about fantasy sports.

If this article makes you feel uncomfortable, then it's perfectly OK to say you don't need to look any further. However, if there is a group of fans who understand that just because it's no rate it doesn't mean it's not interesting, it's mahjong fans!

I'll try to explain what I feel is the appeal:

• It increases the viewership of regular season games: You want to tune in if there's a chance your fantasy player could be stepping up to the tee. At the very least, it makes you interested in the result of that game. Maybe you'll watch a replay?

• It creates more incentive to cheer for more than your own team: When approaching the M league simply, from the outside, it can be easy to just cheer for your favorite team like any other sport in the world. But once you really start to appreciate the effort that every player has made to get to the stage. This is a way to unofficially root for your favorites, regardless of the team they're on.

• It rewards spectators that understand the sport, but does not require it: This means fans that have a high level of knowledge for the strength of pros will do well, but fans that just pick their favorites can play, and win!

• It creates a greater focus on performance statistics, and potentially invents new ones: I'm really not a big sports fan, but what I do know is that people that are follow a lot of statistics. The more statistics there are, the more people focus on performance innately. There is always a performance aspect of mahjong that I think resonates completely separate from the statistics, so lets just remember that many of our favorites are more than just their statistics.

• Even if a player doesn't want to play fantasy sports anymore, it doesn't really make anyone's experience worse: If someone decides they don't want to follow the league anymore, it doesn't really hurt anyone else's experience. It's possible, if you're a time traveler, to simply draft the best team from the start and never interact with your roster again.

Perry Style M League Fantasy Rules

First, you need to find a group of friends or people online to play with. Maybe you've been watching together, maybe it's the water cooler talk at the office (I hope y'all do that, I'll never be able to casually talk about the M league at my work) or maybe some of those people that have been dishing out that trash talk. What you will all do is agree on someone to take care of tracking the statistics. There are usually websites for this, but for now, it will take a dedicated person, or perhaps you will all rotate responsibilities. If you cannot find 4 people, just randomly select rosters for dummy players until you get to 4. You will all decide on a day, after all the players for the upcoming season are announced, to have your OWN M League draft! The player pool is EVERY M League pro! You will determine who will start the draft, and then every player picks a pro for their team. The last player who picks will instead pick two pros, and the order will reverse ("serpentine draft"). Depending on how many players are in your League, you will draft a different amount of pros (this was tested on a League of 9 teams and 36 draftable pros).

• 4 Players: 6 pros

• 5 players: 5 pros

• 6-8 players: 4 pros

If you are playing with only 4 players, you have a pretty good chance of getting most of your favorite pros, recreating your canon team, or easily winning a League if you know who the strong pros are. When you start to play with more players, the strongest pros are more evenly distributed, and you must seek out pros you believe will grow during the season.
After your team is set, the first week of the season begins. Every player in your League will be assigned a matchup. Your goal for the week is to score more Fantasy Points than your opponent. Before the first game of the week, you can try and trade players with the other managers, or trade players with the pool of players that had not been picked, but once the first game starts, your roster is locked until Thursday, when the last game of the week ends. 

If a player on your team is called up to play, you're in for the day! If more than one of your Fantasy team plays that day, you just score more points! More of your Pros playing may dazzle the stage and win you a lot of points, but they could just as well work against each other and neutralize your point gain that day.

Once the game starts, you'll be tracking certain events that happen during the game. Most of it is stuff that the in game stats already track, I think the only new thing to look out for that isn't covered by the score or the stats they put on the screen are ryukyoku tenpais.

After the League Organizer collects all the stats for the day's hanchans, everyone who has those players on their respective rosters will receive the fantasy points they won or lost. If a player is not on anyone's roster, then their points don't apply anywhere. This happens for the 3 other days of regular play, until the last game of the week is tallied. If you have more fantasy points than your opponent for the season, then you win the week! Your fantasy points are reset, and your roster becomes unlocked for trading. The goal is to win the most weeks!

I simulated a mock draft and I have to say, maybe I'm playing a little pygmalion here but I really enjoyed watching my draft team! When one of the Pros on my team ronned off a Pro from my rival's team, I imagine it's almost like ronning them in real life as well! I know this formula i made up is probably not perfect, but it's simple fun, just a little fun game design over the holiday that I would like to share with everyone. Here's a link to the google spreadsheet I made to keep track of a simulation of the first week of the 2022-2023 season.

Other ways to Fantasy

Really the big appeal of fantasy sports from my perspective outside of it is being there for the draft and having fun with that group of people throughout the whole season. That's a long time to dedicate any amount of time to the same group of people! Through a common fan activity, people can really express their love for mahjong in a new way.
After you make the draft, you can play in really any way you imagine. If you want something that's a little more wild, you could instead make a shuugi league, where the only thing that's tracked is essentially how lucky the players are, or even just simply keep track of points scored for your team. Mahjong players are used to multiple rulesets!

Who says that M League is the only thing you can track with fantasy either? If one of the pro leagues is doing a season with 13 players, that could create a pool of 4-5 drafting 2 each, or 3 drafting 3. Fantasy can turn any individual league into a team league! 

I am not some statistician wizard. I haven't even played american fantasy sports. I cannot guarantee that this will be fun, but I'm eager to give it a go. Mahjong just gets people thinking up all kinds of fun ways to interact with it, I hope that at the very least, you got an entertaining read out of it, and you can just throw blame at my feet if it ends up being terrible! Sorry about that!

Take care everyone!