2025/12/24 by Sarthak Ranjan Sarkar, Supratim Das, Sarkar, Sarthak +7
Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Digital Games and Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Sports Analytics and Performance
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.22254
openalex publication_date 2025/12/24 · openalex created_date 2025/12/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.