New: A change to our fantasy cricket scheduling

Hi cricket fans!

In news that we hope you'll agree is exciting, we're mixing things up slightly in terms of how we organise fantasy cricket on Superbru.

In previous years, we have covered Test Cricket as much as possible with a 'Test Cricket Fantasy' tournament that combined lots of series into a single tournament. However, since we have felt that there are several downsides to a format of that nature (and we've received plenty of welcome feedback from lots of you saying similar), we're now trialling something a bit different.

Some of you may have already spotted that a new 'India Tour of South Africa' tournament is now available on Superbru and this will be our first attempt at covering an individual tour as a fantasy cricket tournament.

Of course, we'll be able to do more than one of these at a time if things go well, and we believe this is a move that can greatly expand our cricket coverage since we'll be covering T20Is and ODIs outside of recognised tournaments such as World Cups for the first time.

Why is Test Cricket Fantasy no longer running?

As big Test cricket fans, we've always been keen to cover as many matches as we can but our previous tournaments therefore lacked structure, since we had to make fairly subjective calls about when one tournament should start and end based loosely on the Northern Hemisphere/Southern Hemisphere summers.

Though late starting pools are something you can create on Superbru, joining mid-tournament is often less enjoyable for many, meaning if you wanted to make picks for a series between Australia and New Zealand for example, you would have to play in a much larger tournament covering many other series that you might not be as interested in.

Since this meant the tournament was already very large covering numerous Test series, we also never had a chance to include white ball series between popular nations.

Tour-based tournaments: The positives

With this new approach, we'll be able to offer everyone the opportunity to pick and choose which cricket series they decide to play Superbru for, while those of you who enjoy making picks for every cricket match that we cover will of course still be able to do just that.

In fact, we regularly received messages from those of you playing Test Cricket Fantasy that you'd have preferred to make picks for individual Test matches separately even when they start on the same day, rather than them being grouped as a single round in our previous format.

By switching to individual tours, every fantasy cricket tournament we launch will have clear start and end dates and will cover multiple formats when necessary. For instance, the India Tour of South Africa begins on 10th December with the first of three T20 matches, and then moves into 3 ODIs and 2 Test matches, the last of which begins on January 3rd.

How will scoring work?

Those of you who have played previous fantasy cricket tournaments on Superbru will probably already be thinking that scoring systems differ between franchise T20 tournaments like the IPL, ODI tournaments such as the recent World Cup and our Test cricket offerings, but this will remain the case.

Though many of the scoring actions are the same across all three formats (e.g. wickets, catches, runs scored, sixes hit etc.), the points values for these various actions as well as the relevant ranges for economy and strike rates will vary depending on the format.

This means there are essentially three different scoring systems within a single tournament. One for each format (T20, ODI, Test).

The scoring page within our new India Tour of South Africa game has already been updated to show the scoring system for each individual format.

Which tours will you cover?

As previously mentioned, we're using the upcoming South Africa v India series as a trial initially, but we intend to run plenty of different tournaments covering various tours so that there's something for everyone if this new approach receives interest and a positive response.

Tours don't necessarily have to be multi-format, as white ball only tours could now be included as well as Test-only series, though the number of matches overall will of course be significant as very short tours consisting of only a couple of matches and therefore rounds will not make for a worthwhile Superbru tournament.

We hope that the majority of you will agree that this is a positive change and we'd love for you to have a go at the new South Africa vs. India tournament so that you can see what you think.

By joining that tournament, you'll hopefully be able to find all necessary information and understand how things will work in the new format, but feel free to pop any extra questions you might have in the comments section beneath this article.