Tuesday, August 18th, 2009...7:56 am
Pennant Race Drive: The World’s First Fantasy Sports Twitter Game
A few months ago I thunk out a blog post that I titled “Fantwitsy Sports” . I wrote about the appeal of a twitter based fantasy sports game from both a product and a business standpoint. Besides the blog being sent out to the regulars (mia, klien, cuz Stacey, Evanter, etc), I also emailed the post to a few dozen people who I thought might be interested or able to provide feedback.
I received a comment and an email from a developer in NYC named Kevin Marshall. Kevin has been in the fantasy sports space for quite awhile and had a bunch of very similar ideas on how fantasy sports should leverage the twitter platform to create new types of games. A few lunches later (and the recruitment of a talented designer who designed the site and created a sick logo) and we agreed to go for it and see if we could do any damage.
This week we launched our first actual fantasy game called Pennant Race Drive. It is a baseball prediction game in which a player can tweet up to five predictions per day on which teams will win and which players will hit a Home Run that night. Obviously predicting who will hit the long ball is far more difficult than which teams will win and therefore the payoff is 10x greater.
Win/Loss = 1 point
Home Run = 10 points
I’d love to see all you fantasy sports + twitter heads to give the game a shot. If you want to predict team wins include up to five teams (full nickname), the hashtag #win, and the #gawkit hashtag, or http://gawk.it within the tweet. If you want to predict Home Runs then use players full names plus the #HR. Be sure to include #gawkit or http://gawk.it so that the tweet is picked up by the gawk.it scoring enginge.
Here are a few examples
Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada will all go yard tonite #HR #gawkit
The Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Red Sox will all #win http://gawk.it
Only one type of prediction will register for each tweet. Also, the last five predictions that you log each day will count. All predictions need to occur at least 10 minutes before the game starts.
You can check out all the rules and details for the game at http://gawk.it website. Be sure to join the Littyhoops group to compete against yours truly. The game will continue throughout the season and we’re giving away Amazon Gift cards to weekly winners ($25) as well as the overall winner ($100).
In addition, we’re also donating one penny per correct tweet to the DonorsChoose.org organization (a charity that I recently blogged about). The overall winner of Pennant Race Drive will determine which school projects we will donate too. I’m excited by this philanthropic angle. As the game grows in popularity so to will our contribution to a great cause.
We’re excited to have something up and running and see if it sticks. Twitter is an extremely viral platform so if you like the game please just send out a few tweets to your followers and help us spread the good word. You can easily just retweet this message.
The Gawk.It game engine is built upon the twitter platform (using twitter’s open API’s) and this allows us to easily create all different kinds of fantasy games for just about any sport or statistical category. We’re already thinking about what we should do for football season and beyond.
Hit me up if you want to chat some more about gawk.it or the Pennant Race Drive.
