written by Brian Litvack

This week Gawk.It launched its first actual fantasy game called Pennant Race Drive. It is a baseball prediction game in which a player can tweet up to five predictions per day on which teams will win and which players will hit a Home Run that night. Obviously predicting who will hit the long ball is far more difficult than which teams will win and therefore the payoff is 10x greater.

Win/Loss = 1 point
Home Run = 10 points

If you want to predict team wins include up to five teams (full nickname), the hashtag #win, and the #gawkit hashtag, or http://gawk.it within the tweet. If you want to predict Home Runs then use players full names plus the #HR. Be sure to include #gawkit or http://gawk.it so that the tweet is picked up by the gawk.it scoring enginge.

Here are a few examples
Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada will all go yard tonite #HR #gawkit

The Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Red Sox will all #win http://gawk.it

Only one type of prediction will register for each tweet. Also, the last five predictions that you log each day will count. All predictions need to occur at least 10 minutes before the game starts.

The game will continue throughout the season and we're giving away Amazon Gift cards to weekly winners ($25) as well as the overall winner ($100).

In addition, we're also donating one penny per correct tweet to the DonorsChoose.org organization (a charity that I recently blogged about). The overall winner of Pennant Race Drive will determine which school projects we will donate too. I'm excited by this philanthropic angle. As the game grows in popularity so to will our contribution to a great cause.

We're excited to have something up and running and hope this is the start of many cool new fantasy games to come. Twitter is an extremely viral platform so if you like the game please just send out a few tweets to your followers and help us spread the good word. You can easily just retweet this message.

The Gawk.It engine allows us to easily create all different kinds of fantasy games for just about any sport or statistical category. We're already thinking about what we should do for football season and beyond. Hit us up if you have any cool ideas. We'd love to hear from you.

written by Brian Litvack

If you're anything like us, then you love fantasy sports WAY too much. In fact, we fantasize about it. Most of the time we're just trying to figure out if we should start Tim Hightower as our flex or pick up Ross Ohlendorf off of waivers (it's been tempting me all season!)

Now you have to understand that we're not just fantasy nerds we're also digital geeks. Kev has been tinkering with developing fantasy games and runs a proprietary sports stat service business. I pride myself as the mastermind behind the first major college fantasy football game which I created when I was working at CSTV (now CBS College Sports) in 2005. Pat...well Pat is a hockey junkie that just draws and designs really, really cool stuff (including the Gawk.It Hawk logo).

So it didn't take us long to figure out that while Twitter is swell, it would be way cooler if you could figure out how to tie in fantasy sports. The way we look at it, twitter unlocks a few fantasy-friendly fascinating behaviors.

1. Twitter is mobile. It goes where you go. That means that you have the ability to play fantasy games whenever and wherever you are - in front of your television, in the stadium or at the bar.


2. Twitter is instant. Why be limited to making a "move" before a game starts? Why not make trades, manage players and predict the game as it unfolds in real time.


3. Twitter is easy. Yeah, live drafts, full-featured leagues are great fun...until your team is eliminated from playoffs before the all-star break. We want to make fantasy sports so convenient a cave man can do it. So play today, this week, or this month. You don't even need to sign up for anything.

One decently thought out blog post later and I got a note from Kev basically saying "I'm thinking exactly what you're thinking". One lunch later we had a plan. One month later...we'll your on the site and reading this and that's just about as far as we've gone so far.

Check back soon (very soon) as we're building some cool new twitter-based fantasy games for you to enjoy. So get ready, because this is going to be a game changer!