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Chandramouli Venkat, a young mechanical engineer, never thought his passion for cricket would one day help him realise his dream of buying a vehicle.
Venkat is among the many next-gen players who have mastered the art of winning money ‘playfully’. Welcome to the world of fantasy games.
India may have lost the first T20 match against Australia in a nail-biter, but Venkat won a whopping ₹1 lakh on My11Circle, the online fantasy cricket game platform promoted by the largest online card game outfit RummyCircle.
A cricket buff, all that Venkat did before the match was to select his team from the list of 30 probable players from both sides and invested ₹50 in an initial participation
Selection of the team is also by a set of rules. There are restrictions on the number of foreign players and a cap on the number of bowlers and batsmen.
The first India-Australia match had 8,600 participants forming 11,350 teams on My11Circle. Each participant gains points as their players perform. The participant who collects the highest points gets the cash prize.
Cricket expertise
My11Circle paid ₹50,000 as second prize and distributed ₹3.5 lakh among 5,685 teams, the least amount being ₹50.
“My friends and I used to play matches on My11Circle without putting in any money and slowly gained confidence. We are now waiting for the Indian Premium League that starts next week,” says Venkat.
Bhavin Pandya, founder and Chief Executive Officer, Play Games24x7, said: “There is no scarcity of cricket experts in this country and every cricket lover is passionate about the game and holds a strong opinion about it.
We have just created a platform for them to express themselves. We already have over 10 million registered players on RummyCircle and we believe that a lot of them would want to try out My11Circle giving it a lot of traction very early on.”
Fantasy games started gaining traction with the recent Supreme Court ruling that monetary benefits gained by playing online sports is legal. The ₹4,380-crore online gaming industry in India is expected to touch ₹11,900 crore by 2023.
Last year, there were 250 gaming companies and 25 crore gamers, according to the latest industry survey.
Though there are fantasy games based on Indian Super League (football) and Pro Kabaddi League, cricket remains the biggest draw.
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