Fantasy Surfing Tips' 2016 retrospective

Lots of surprises and an amazing year for predictions

We are still a child :)

Fantasy Surfing Tips (FST) is a business based on surf fantasy games aimed to grow entertainment and bring attention to statistics on surf.

The World Surf League runs several surfing championships, all of them follow the design of a cup. The surfer can get off the competition by losing a single heat. Despite the high level of professional surfing, the athlete might also deal with mother nature. All those variables makes surfing a competition full of surprises and upsets. All those facts combined makes it more difficult to run predictions and forecast results based on athlete stats.

The love for the sport made us embrace the challenge to make predictions on surf. We chose to focus on the fantasy game held by WSL as a starting point of the project.

There was only one goal for 2016:

Follow the year making projections for the eleven events of the Men's Championship, creating one new prediction model for every event

We failed to achieve that goal, as we built only eight versions (far from the eleven planned). However, we have accomplished other goals that appeared on our path. You will love to hear this story:

On the end of the text you will find our season results. You can skip the text if you find it too technical.

February

Our fist tweet!

• We launched the website by the 25th of February and a twitter account
• It had only one page with the predictions for Gold Coast
• No one knew we existed, despite some friends
• Twitter helped us know the people that also worked on the field and, for sure, interact and support others
• We started a competition between a human and our model. The result is on the end of this article

March

starting Gold Coast and first version of Fantasy Simulator

• Two events were going to happen: Gold Coast and Bells Beach
• V1.1 was launched before Gold Coast and v1.2 before Bells Beach
• At this time we saw the importance of keeping track of our changes. V1.2 was crafted to improve v1.1, however, it lost the battle on the long run.
• Launched the Fantasy Simulator, for users to simulate teams based on Momentum, Past Position or Wave Performance
• Some more pages were launched as we started to write about picks, stats and our results.
• On every event, the best version should be picked to make predictions. Not the newest version, but the best based on past records.
• It was an intense month, we had no time between events

April

• The launch of v1.3. It should improve v1.1 and v1.2, the version won amongst the three first, but for a tiny difference of 5 points from v1.1.
• We had no time to plan, the Australian leg was intense. It was all about executing
• The Fantasy Simulator appeared to be our best page
• Twitter was starting to get some traction
• After Margaret River we started to plan for Rio. We got a local publishing partner on Brazil: Surfguru
• Another publishing partner showed interest, but only if we had women's projections: Longarina
• It was amazing, we were building great content reference to our website from great players in Brazil.

May

Launch of women's projection and interview at surfstats

• We didn't manage to launch v1.4 before Rio. There was a lot of work to bring awareness to the website
• Surfguru launched the first content based on Fantasy predictions
• We launched the women’s fantasy projection. It had exactly the same features as the Men’s
• By the end of the month Longarina also published content about women's fantasy
• The Surfstats website made an interview with us. We were really happy about it! First time we were being interviewed
• The sortable data from Surfstats was the key source to our models at this time. We had to wait the publication of the content to run our full calculation.

June

Better stat content and more calculation versions

• The month started with a brand new update. We now had a stat page for every surfer that showed on WSL from 2012 to 2016, both Men and Women main event. You can check JJF's and Tyler's page
• With this achievement we could rely on our own data. Our calculations could now run as soon as WSL posted the heat draw
• We had more content about the surfers, so we could share to the public even more consistent data and entertainment
• The pace was intense until Fiji
• We launched the version that changed all the game. V1.4 had a brand new strategy, this time we started to forecast great numbers
• V1.5 was launched right after, with some great improvements to v1.4

July

New landing and event stats page

• We launched a new landing page, it started to be as it is today
• We launched the event stats with past winners and perfomance numbers from surfers in the event
• The plan was to keep everything organized and as automated as possible. The stats page is already updated for 2017, it only misses the rookies data
• From now on, we planned to make no other big improvement, but focus on growing

August

• The versions were following the pace of the events. We could launch the v1.7 until Tahiti.
• At this time v1.5 appeared to be the best version. V1.6 was a fiasco, basing picks only on statistical projections led us to nowhere (even though we plan to relaunch this strategy in the future)
• V1.7 made us all surprised. It basically takes no data about momentum, a variable that always had a great importance for us. It drove us crazy as it had better results than all our last versions. It still doesn't get off our heads
• Even though a lot of progress was made, we still had no traction on page views

September

A great battle was going on between v1.5 and v1.7

• Was a month of surprise. Plans changed after Trestles
• A lot was happening on the model evolving. The focus was to find data bugs. Cleaning the input data from surfers improves all calculation versions
• Google had started to index our pages better. We really don't know why it took so long. The coin flipped. We went from 200 page views a day before an event to 1k page view a day.
• Now we started to look for a sponsor to our website for the last three events
• We closed our first deal with the local company SurfTeccel. The guys have helped us with contacts since the beginning and have now took another step. We are happy that they believed in our project

October

Staff got sick, seriously

• Three events were about to happen. The women's championship could be decided at France. Two events on the men's side
• We had less workforce and couldn't deliver much on October. It was all about keeping things going. No major news for this month.
• It made us lose track, from now we could not launch a new calculation version for every event. We stuck on v1.8

November

Content based on stats

• A resting month from competition. Great to get staff recovery
• We started to focus not only on the fantasy website, but also in making some writing content. We decided to seriously use the Medium platform as our blog
• We made three posts on November
• On this month we also gave an interview to the Surf Fantasy Podcast. That went live on December
• We tried to raise the awareness to our website, as we had no competition going on

December

• The most important month of the year for us! Now we have results!!
• Seven blog posts in our platform
• The interview with Fantasy Podcast went live. First time giving a speaking interview in english
• Getting organized led us to make one prediction before the Pipe invitational and another after the wildcards and winners have been decided
• The human lost the battle at the last event. It happened because the model got really great after the middle of the season. It actually won the last two events on a group we run with friends
• After pipe we packed the results and had some surprises
• The women's projection could have achieved the 7º spot on the leaderboard. There are more than 20k players
• The men's projection could have achieved the 6º spot. There are more than 60k players
• The "could have achieved" here is very important. Everything was fine tuned for the 2016 season, things will definitely change on 2017
• The version on second place on both men and women could get on top 50º. We still think it is a great win

Heads up to 2017!

We have great plans for next season

1. Start to make projections for the Fantasy Surfer from Surfer Magazine
2. Achieve a solid result with our two best versions on WSL. Getting on top 2kº would be a great win
3. Launch stat pages not only for the main events, but for all surfing events from WSL
4. A 2.0 version of our model. It will have a different prediction strategy
5. Deliver more and better articles about surfing statistics
6. Find an international partner to publish our predictions from Men's and Women's Fantasy

You want to get in contact? send us a tweet at fansurfingtips

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