"Racket Rally" to revolutionize fantasy tennis

Here at last, here at last, fantasy tennis is here at last!

Created by Ben Rothenberg and Jeff Sackmann, “Racket Rally” is a new fantasy tennis game that was announced to the public earlier this week.

It is not, to be sure, the first fantasy tennis game. Others have tried their hands at creating a successful concoction, but all have ended in a fashion reminiscent of the Hindenburg explosion. Enter Rothenberg and Sackmann, who identified the problem–and solved it.

When asked why there has been no sustainable form of fantasy tennis to date, Sackmann replied, “Partly because it’s an individual sport. In team sports, a big part of the appeal of fantasy sports is that you get to be a general manager. But in tennis, there’s no general manager to emulate. The length of the season (and the waxing and waning of interest that happens all year long) doesn’t help either, which is why we tried to create something that would reward players who stuck around for an entire season, but could also be fun to someone who shows up three days before Wimbledon and then forgets about it three days after.“

It will be the Racket Rally competitors who are in it for the long haul that will have the best chance to capture overall 2015 honors. Sackmann and Rothernberg, themselves, could be in the mix.

“I should probably get serious about my own portfolio,” Sackmann realized. “Mine is a bit random, since I used it for testing purposes. Ben will win as long as Camila Giorgi plays well.”

“To win Racket Rally, you’ll need a keen understanding of not only the top but also lower tiers of tennis,” Rothenberg added. “With his encyclopedic knowledge of women’s ITF events, I’d say the early frontrunner has to be Ricky Dimon.”

Such knowledge could be critical, because you can have up to 20 different players on your roster at a time. Additionally, every player ranked in the top 300 on either the ATP or WTA tours is eligible to be selected for the following week.

As the official website states, “you will choose the players who you think will perform best for your team, and purchase shares of those players, out of your total budget of $100,000. Like with stocks, you can purchase multiple shares of players (up to a maximum of 50 shares or a total of $40,000), and the number of points you earn from your players’ wins are multiplied by the number of shares you own.”

The number of fantasy points a player accumulates is the same as the number of ranking points he or she acquires. For example, if a player wins the Australian Open, he or she gets 2,000 ranking points–and you get 2,000 points if you have one share of that player.

“We spent a lot of time hammering out rules that would make the game accessible for casual fans, but also difficult to manipulate,” Sackmann explained. “Some of the early ideas we discussed would have made it easy for a knowledgeable fan to strategize their way to mega success, and that wouldn’t be as much fun as a game that works more like traditional fantasy sports.”

They–Rothenberg, to be exact–also spent a lot of time finding photos for every one of the current top 300 players on each tour. With help from approximately eight others, Rothenberg embarked on a project dubbed “Operation: Platypus” during Australian Open qualifying to accomplish the aforementioned feat.

“Operation: Platypus was a safari through the tennis wildlife, to spot those exotic species who rarely are caught on film,” Rothenberg said. “Part scavenger hunt, part quantum physics to scoreboard-watch and know where to be across up to 14 courts at a time.”

Aside from getting “sunburnt as shit,” the operation was a smashing success.

You can be sure Racket Rally will be just the same.

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