DFS

What DFS is

DFS, short for daily fantasy sports, is a family of contests in which you pick real athletes and score from the statistics they produce in real games. Where a traditional fantasy league runs all season with the same roster, a daily fantasy contest is decided over a single day's slate or a single week, and a new contest starts with the next slate. The format arrived as a faster answer to season-long fantasy sports: the same research and the same player knowledge, settled in a night instead of a winter.

Daily fantasy comes in several shapes. Salary-cap contests give you a budget to spend on a lineup and rank you against the other entrants. Pick em asks you to call more or less on individual player projections. Best ball drafts a roster once and scores it automatically. Operators such as PrizePicks, Underdog, DraftKings and FanDuel run one or more of these formats.

An example

Take a hypothetical Sunday salary-cap contest. You get a fixed budget and fill a quarterback, two running backs, three receivers, a tight end, a flex spot and a defense, and every choice is a trade: pay up for the star receiver and you are shopping for a bargain at running back. Everything locks before kickoff. From then on you watch, and your score moves with every catch and every touchdown your players produce. By the end of the late games the ranking is settled and the top of the field is paid.

How Speed Survivor is different

Speed Survivor is not a daily fantasy product, though the audience overlaps. There is no roster and no player to draft. Instead of making every decision before kickoff, you make twelve during the game: yes-or-no live questions about what happens next, generated from what is happening on the field. You score for being right and score more for being fast, cuts remove the bottom of the field at set points, and the last players standing split a prize pool funded by the entries.

The research that makes a good DFS player, knowing which teams run on third and short and which quarterbacks throw deep, is useful here, but it is applied live and under a timer. How it works walks through a full game, and the compare pages set Speed Survivor beside the daily fantasy apps product by product.