  With an exploding global market and the recent introduction of online cash
prize tournaments, fantasy sports contests are quickly becoming a central part
of the social gaming and sports industries. For sports fans and online media
companies, fantasy sports contests are an opportunity for large financial
gains. However, they present a host of technical challenges that arise from the
complexities involved in running a web-scale, prize driven fantasy sports
platform.
  We initiate the study of these challenges by examining one concrete problem
in particular: how to algorithmically generate contest payout structures that
are 1) economically motivating and appealing to contestants and 2) reasonably
structured and succinctly representable. We formalize this problem and present
a general two-staged approach for producing satisfying payout structures given
constraints on contest size, entry fee, prize bucketing, etc.
  We then propose and evaluate several potential algorithms for solving the
payout problem efficiently, including methods based on dynamic programming,
integer programming, and heuristic techniques. Experimental results show that a
carefully designed heuristic scales very well, even to contests with over
100,000 prize winners.
  Our approach extends beyond fantasy sports -- it is suitable for generating
engaging payout structures for any contest with a large number of entrants and
a large number of prize winners, including other massive online games, poker
tournaments, and real-life sports tournaments.
