The Yanks Lost? Sell! Sell! Sell!

James Yang for The Wall Street Journal

A new online game combines fantasy sports and investment strategy, letting you build a portfolio of teams as you would stocks

Playing the stock market and being a sports fan are similar beasts—and not just because they're the biggest reasons you keep checking your phone for updates. The overlap is at the heart of a new online game called SportsGunner (sportsgunner.com), which is slated to launch this weekend. In a hybrid of fantasy sports and stock market strategizing, players use their sports acumen to predict the movement of teams in a virtual marketplace. As teams win and lose, their SportsGunner values rise and fall. Your job, just as it is in a real market, is to correctly predict which way they'll go.

I've been playing with a beta version of SportsGunner for a few weeks now. It's best on a computer, but the website works nicely on mobile browsers as well. (An app is in the works.) Although it's similar to the fantasy gaming experience in that it might make you spend your entire weekend watching games you couldn't possibly care about otherwise, there are a few key differences.

First off, you don't have to lock yourself into one sport. You can move back and forth across a variety of sports leagues, including Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL and NCAA football and basketball. Think of it as a sports betting room in Las Vegas, but with fewer shady characters.

And instead of accumulating a roster of players as you do in traditional fantasy sports, you make what the game calls "plays" based on how you think a team will perform. Other SportsGunner players are free to make the same prediction. As the website points out, "In fantasy, only one owner gets each player. SportsGunners own as many teams as they like (or dislike)."

That "dislike" part represents another key departure from typical fantasy sports. You're not just banking on the success of teams. You can actually get ahead by predicting failure. Winners are hard to pick. Losers, on the other hand, can be much easier to spot. It's like betting against the market, but with much less dire consequences for the economy. And your own wallet.

Here's how it works: Players start off with 10,000 credits to buy shares in teams. The SportsGunner board displays the standings/power rankings of every club that's currently playing, along with the price in shares it costs to invest in them. First, you pick a team that you like, or don't like, and decide whether you think they're on the way up or down.

Secondly, you decide how confident you are in that position, and purchase shares accordingly. In the standard free game, the available buy-in rates are: high-confidence play (30 shares), medium (20) and low (10). In the upgraded version (which is also free for the time being), there is no limit on the amount you can invest, as long as you haven't squandered your available credit line.

The basic idea is to cash out while the share price is high, thereby accumulating more points. In the upgraded game there are more complex options where you can double or triple the value of an existing play, add or reduce your position by any amount or even reverse it if you feel like the tide has really changed, automatically converting your shares to the opposite direction. The reverse is handy when, say, a team's slugger goes on the disabled list when you've invested heavily in their future success. Alternatively, if he unexpectedly comes off the DL, you might want to double down. Choose poorly and the well starts to run dry pretty quickly.

So how are the team rankings determined? Just like in the real market, well-performing stocks cost more per share. A share in the Tampa Bay Rays, the No. 2 MLB team in the game's rankings at the moment, costs 24 credits. Shares for the Washington Nationals, the No. 25 team, are priced at 1 credit.

That can mean it's tempting to bet against your favorite team from time to time. SportsGunner lets you spread out the risk and reward, both emotionally as a fan, and financially as a market-minded analyst. In the real world, I'd like to see the Yankees lose every day—in the game I can behave more logically, and consider their coming schedule before I invest. Perhaps they have a series against the woeful Orioles. In that case I'd make a "high" play for the Yankees going up in the standings. That play then goes into my portfolio with my other plays, like when I bought 30 shares for .25 points each in the Houston Astros thinking they'd go up in rank just before a recent winning streak. They did and I cashed them out at 5 points a share. Profit? 142.50 points. Ka-ching!

A heartier sort might have let the shares in the Astros ride, hoping that they'd rise even higher. An even better player might start looking at the injury reports, pitching lineups or trends against other teams to bolster hunches about upcoming performance. It's the same forward-thinking strategy you'd use when looking to invest in a company.

Yes, it's a lot of work for what is just a game, but as seasoned fantasy addicts know, it's never just a game—it's a business. Isn't that why you're called an "owner" of a fantasy team?

For a lot of players watching their numbers rise among the ranks will be the part that keeps them coming back. Those SportsGunner points are the measure of your profit over time and how you gain in-game badges, trophies and victories over other players.

It's a good thing this isn't real money, though. I burned through the majority of my credits after a week of banking on the Red Sox. (You can buy more credits; 5,000 of them cost $5.) As in real life, counting on your favorite team to go up in value every single day, just like investing too heavily in a friend's company out of loyalty, might not be the savviest of strategies.

Unlike real life, watching your pals crumble in defeat is encouraged in fantasy sports. Winning is why we play, after all. Your SportsGunner portfolio is basically a measure of your sports prowess, or to put it another way, a mathematical calculation of just how much trash talk you can dish out that week.

What will make or break SportsGunner is whether or not it can offer the same highs and lows (mostly lows, if we're being honest) that people are accustomed to from fantasy sports. But from what I've experienced, I'd bet high, with confidence. 

Five Websites That Will Turn You Into a Fantasy-Sports Phenom

Watching SportsCenter isn't enough. Bookmark these sites and get a competitive edge against your friends.

Football Outsiders
The site that brought baseball's sabermetrics-style empirical number-crunching to football regularly combs the data for new and revolutionary statistics. footballoutsiders.com

Baseball Prospectus
This is the offshoot of the best annual sabermetric book of the same name, featuring a computer system that projects statistics using proprietary formulas. Remarkably reliable at not only analyzing past stats, but also predicting future outcomes. baseballprospectus.com

Cold Hard Football
Facts Just what the name says, this site, regularly lauded for having some of the best football writing in the business, shines the harsh glow of reality on statistics without clouding them with fandom or typical sport-pundit emotion. coldhardfootballfacts.com

Covers
Another good way to take the temperature of the fantasy world is by checking in on betting sites. On Covers you can get a sense of which way the money is going in the betting world at large, take a glance at matchup histories and injuries and adjust your SportsGunner action accordingly. covers.com

College Football Geek
College football may be as popular as ever, but it's just gaining a toehold in the world of fantasy. This site covers everything you need to know about college players both established, and on the way up. collegefootballgeek.com

WSJ