At Fantom Odds, we allow the ability to propose selections to your fantasy football leaguemates, whether they’re straight picks (one selection) or parlays (multiple selections that all have to hit). But it may be difficult to find someone to back the other side of your 500/1 parlay that you want to sweat out with your imaginary tokens.
So we came up with the Fantom Bank, where we’ve created a league-wide competition to settle who is the top picker with our odds in your fantasy league—either for each week or for the entire season.
Each league member is awarded 1,000 Fantom tokens (an imaginary currency) that can be used on any Fantom Odds market. The smallest pick you can do is for one token, and you won’t be able to exceed your weekly balance. With your tokens, you can choose whatever you’d like, whether it’s on multiple longshot parlays or on the biggest favorite’s moneyline. If you use up all 1,000 tokens for the week, you’d have to wait until next week (the following Thursday morning) for another 1,000 tokens to be refilled.
But we’ve also created some safeguards to ensure fair play. You cannot make a pick on a market that involves a team having an incomplete starting lineup. If someone tries to create an advantageous line by putting in their bench players at the time of the pick, you can view the lineups while the pick was placed in each Fantom Bank pick slip. If the lineup at the time of the pick was completely different than the final starting lineup, you can dispute the pick and have your league vote to nullify it. But we obviously encourage all league members to use the honor system for Fantom Bank and don’t try to cheat, especially if everyone puts in money for a weekly pool.
There is also a timer for selected picks to be placed to make sure that the odds don’t drastically change, especially if you’re placing a pick while games are going on. We don’t want a situation where someone selects 10 picks and stays on the create selection page for an hour without odds updating. When there are zero games being played, the timer is set for 10 minutes after you’ve selected your picks. When there is at least one game being played or within one hour of kickoff, the timer goes down to four minutes.
So how can you catch suspicious activity? Fantom Odds will track the results (which will be final lineups, not lineups at the time of the pick) in three different ways—winnings, records and best finishes. From our scoreboard, you should be able to detect any outliers and potential suspicious picks activity.
Winnings: Winnings are calculated by subtracting your amount of tokens after all picks are decided from the original 1,000 tokens. So if you end up with 1,200 tokens after a week of picks with Fantom Bank, you will be scored at 200.00. If you finish with 700 tokens after a week of picks with Fantom Bank, you will be scored at -300.00.
Records: Records are straightforward; it will track each league member’s wins and losses throughout the week on every Fantom Bank pick placed. So if you won one straight pick at +100 odds using 980 tokens and lost 20 parlays for a token each, your winnings would show as 960.00 while your record would be 1-20. If you see someone finish with a 25-0 record or up 10000.00 tokens for a specific week, you’re able to view all their picks for the week (along with lineups at the time of the pick) to monitor suspicious activity.
Best Finishes: The third tab on the scoreboard is best finishes, where it produces numerical standings based on the net tokens won or lost for the week.
Not only does the scoreboard track winnings, records and best finishes each week, it also provides a rolling tally for each. So you can see every league member’s overall winnings, records and how many times they finished in first place if you wanted to turn Fantom Bank into a season-long competition (or just to track for fun).
Besides being able to see disputed picks, you’re able to view the most recent picks for your league’s Fantom Bank as well as the most popular picks for a given week. Popular picks can be the same selection either as a straight pick or as one of the legs in a parlay (like multiple league members picking on the same team’s moneyline or picking the over on the same player’s fantasy score).
If you have any further questions about Fantom Bank, please email us at support@fantomodds.com.