While current systems allow players to easily track the current state of fantasy competition, we propose a suite of interactive visualizations that allows players to project future outcomes within their competition as well as to generate interesting “what-if” scenarios. Many players try to do this manually, only to be frustrated with the amazingly complex combinatorial nature of the problem. Providing access to this functionality would not only differentiate the services we offer and drastically improve the user experience (i.e. making it more fun), but also cause players to spend more time on site, hence increasing potential advertising revenue.

For example, with our system, a player could look at their projected odds of winning the fantasy competition given the other players’ picks. It is interesting to note that these odds are not equal even if you assume random outcomes of real world games and even if none of the games have yet been played. These odds will dynamically update themselves as games are played in the real world and more information is available. Alternatively, a player might want to know the scenarios that would need to happen in order for their chances of winning to be the highest (e.g. if Germany wins then you should root for Italy to win, else you’re better off if the United States wins, etc). Such systems could also be used to help with the picks in the first place.

Throughout the course of the tournament, players monitor the brackets to track progress and to compare predictions made by multiple players. This is often a complex sensemaking task. The classic bracket visualization was designed for use on paper and utilizes an incrementally additive system in which the winner of each match-up is rewritten in the next round as the tournament progresses. Unfortunately, this representation requires a significant amount of space and makes it relatively difficult to get a quick overview of the tournament state since competitors take arbitrary paths through the static bracket. AdaptiviTree is a novel visualization that adaptively deforms the representation of the tree and uses its shape to convey outcome information. AdaptiviTree not only provides a more compact and understandable representation, but also allows overlays that display predictions as well as other statistics.