DraftKings Daily Fantasy Tennis Launched

Daily fantasy tennis has finally arrived at DraftKings. On Friday, DraftKings announced it will begin hosting daily fantasy tennis contests just in time for this year’s Wimbledon tournament in London. The DraftKings lobby is now hosting fantasy tennis contests with buyins ranging from $0.25 all the way up to $5300 that should appeal to players of all bankrolls.

The new tennis contests go live on July 2nd with a host of Wimbledon 2018 contests on offer. The biggest of these is the $100K Fantasy Tennis Slam with $100,000 in guaranteed prizes and $20,000 reserved for the first-place finisher.

You can buy in today for $8, pick your players and watch your fantasy team rack up points.

Tennis will be operating along a similar rationale at DraftKings DFS. As a major tennis tournament approaches, you can join a contest and then draft a team of tennis players for that round’s matches. Each round opens up a new slate of matches, and you can draft a new lineup across every round of play until the tournament comes to an end.

In daily fantasy tennis contests, you’ll be given a $50,000 salary to draft a six-person team consisting of men, women or both. Your players accumulate fantasy points based on stats accrued over the course of their match. For example, you’ll earn points for every game won, every match won, for aces, breaks, wins by retirement and so on.

One key point to note is that all tennis matches are played to the best of three sets except for men’s Grand Slam events, which are played to the best of five sets. DraftKings accounts for this by awarding slightly more points for stats accrued during 3-set matches in order to keep things on a fair playing field whether your player is participating in a 3-set or a 5-set match.

Here’s how the scoring system looks according to the DraftKings tennis scoring rules page:

StatBest of 3 Sets MatchBest of 5 Sets Match
Games Won+2.5 points+2 points
Games Lost-2 points-1.6 points
Sets Won+6 points+5 points
Sets Lost-3 points-2.5 points
Match Won+6 points+5 points
Aces+0.4 points+0.25 points
Double Faults-1 point-1 point
Breaks+0.75 points+0.5 points
Match Played+30 points+30 points
Clean Set Bonus+4 points+2.5 points
Straight Set Bonus+6 points+5 points
10+ Aces Bonus+2 pointsN/A
15+ Aces BonusN/A+2 points
Win by Retirement (Set 1)+20 points+20 points
Win by Retirement (Set 2)+15 points+16 points
Win by Retirement (Set 3)+10 points+12 points
Win by Retirement (Set 4)N/A+8 points
Win by Retirement (Set 5)N/A+8 points

The major DFS sites have avoided tennis until now due to tennis competition taking the form of tournaments rather than individual games between opposing teams of players. In the earlier years of online fantasy, the major DFS sites took a conservative approach to making sure they were meeting the legal definition of “fantasy sports,” which requires contests to involve multiple, separate sporting events.

When it comes to sports such as football and basketball, DFS providers have had no issue meeting the exact legal requirements of multiple, real-world sporting events. They simply host contests covering a full day’s or weekend’s worth of games to meet the “multiple sporting events” requirement.

DraftKings and FanDuel eventually decided to push the line a bit by introducing fantasy golf, which is also based on tournament-style competition. A golf tournament could, under some interpretations of the law, be considered just one sporting event and therefore ineligible as a form of daily fantasy.

However, DFS operators justify golf (and now tennis) by considering each round of competition a separate sporting event. Some fantasy golf contests are sometimes hosted across just the final two rounds of a tournament. In 2018, DraftKings decided to push the envelope even further by hosting competitions across just a single round of a golf tournament.

It appears with tennis that DraftKings considers every match within a round to be an individual matchup. As the DraftKings playbook explained in a post published Saturday, Monday’s Wimbledon opening round will consist of 64 unique head-to-head matchups to give players plenty of choices when it comes to drafting their fantasy teams.

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