BuzzDraft Tackles Fantasy Sports

If you know someone in a fantasy football league, you know the obsessive look they get in their eyes as they begin talking about their trades, their victories and the agony they suffer in defeat. They can spend hours a day following stats and checking lineups.

BuzzDraft.com, a NH-based online betting company is taking fantasy sports to a whole new level. It runs dozens of daily fantasy sports games where players can bet up to several hundred dollars. The site offers one free game daily to entice players into the paid games. The online games take place as the actual games are occurring on TV, as opposed to fantasy sports leagues that occur over the length of the season and require almost daily updating of team rosters.

Most people use it as they are watching the game on TV. It really adds a layer of interaction between the people and the sports they are watching, says CEO Bryan Pellegrino, who played online poker professionally before the three largest online poker sites were shut down in April 2011 by the U.S. Department of Justice due to fraud charges. He also founded Coder Den, a software development firm in Dover. Up until this site, I never played fantasy. The reason was it was so time consuming, he says.

BuzzDraft has more than 2,000 user accounts nationwide. Pellegrino says the most active users are a group of about 250 that play 20 times a month. The $1 and $5 games are most popular. He anticipates the site will reach 8,000 to 10,000 users by August. That sounds like a lot, but the potential is huge, with the Fantasy Sports Trade Association estimating a market of 35 million adults.

The business was funded by an initial $350,000 from angel investors and was named one of six winning companies at Disruptive 2012, a conference organized by the NH Innovation Commercialization Center in Durham to highlight innovations that will change business models.

In addition to daily games, the site also offers a VIP-tiered platform where frequent players can gain points to use toward betting, sports T-shirts and other prizes, even Super Bowl tickets. The site also hosts Play with the Pros, where players compete against pro players in fantasy sports. The winners of those games receive an autographed item of some sort from the pros. So far, Jonathan Stewart of the Carolina Panthers and Ronnie Brewer of the Chicago Bulls have hosted games. For more information, visit www.buzzdraft.com.