Hey Friends,

It’s that time of the year again. IPL is amidst us, which means many of you will be donning on the selectorial hat and vying for the top spots in fantasy cricket. But first, you need to decide where are you going to ply your trade. The options are plentiful but I’d suggest you choose Fandromeda for the clean interface, interesting rules and a scoring system that is probably the best out there. Of course, a good fantasy player, like a good batsman, will modify his game based on where he is playing. My opinions are based on the Fandromeda Fantasy Cricket.

Substitutes

Only 80 substitutes are allowed for the 56 league matches. It means you have 1.42 subs per game. That’s not a lot, is it ? But that is what makes the game so much fun to play. It means you can’t pack your team with Kohli, ABD, Gayle and Watson for every single match. You have to pick and choose – which is what any good Fantasy Game is all about. Another thing you must keep in mind is not to use all your subs too early in the tournament. The team compositions are a big black box in the IPL and you could easily end up selecting players who either don’t play or are used in such a manner that their fantasy potential is severely restricted. Save your subs for a assault deep into the tournament.

Team Composition

At Fandromeda, you need to have 6 bowling options and 7 batting options in your playing eleven. Which means all-rounders are absolute gold. At any given time, you can not have more than 5 ‘pure’ batsmen in your team. So, you need to concentrate on the players who are termed as all-rounders in the roaster but bat in the top 3 or consistently bowl their full quota of overs while batting in top 6. Ben Stokes and Suresh Raina stand out and they will lend great balance to your side. A slightly left handed pick would be Krunal Pandya; he is priced extremely cheap and with a batting promotion could earn huge points.

Schedule 

Schedule is your friend. Sometimes teams play their matches relatively quickly while other times they have a huge time gap between their matches. You would do well to pick players from teams who belong to the former. The reasoning is simple; it gives you the best bang for your bucks. If a player is scheduled to play two matches quickly, you don’t need to sub him out ! You’d save on subs while accumulating points from two matches. For example, Pune plays two games in three days at the start of the IPL, so if you have Rahane in your team he will get you points for both these matches as opposed to a player from, say, Mumbai who gets only one opportunity in the same time-span.

Batting and Bowling Stars

Unlike the traditional fantasy games where you select one player as a captain who scores double points for you, Fandromeda has introduced the concept of Batting and Bowling Stars. For each match, you have to select a batting and a bowling star (both can be the same player). Which essentially means that you need to have a batsman and a bowler (or an all-rounder) playing every match. If you only have batsmen playing in a match, you’ll lose out on the double bowling points and vice-versa. Also, don’t forget to change your stars for every game, especially when there are two games in a day.

Free Sub

Each game you get a free sub. You lose it if you don’t use it. Therefore, don’t forget to bring in the free sub every game. This can be particularly useful when you do not have any player playing a game. Bring in an all-rounder as your free sub and appoint him both your batting and bowling star.

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This is our Starting XI – What is yours ?