If you didn’t already know, Fan­ta­sy sports is a big deal. Fan­ta­sy E‑sports is small­er but it is grow­ing vora­cious­ly in pop­u­lar­i­ty. When you fuse togeth­er the excit­ing idea of man­ag­ing a fan­ta­sy sports line­up and the chance to win hard cold cash watch­ing foot­ball, base­ball and all the oth­er major league sports becomes even more stim­u­lat­ing. With this said, we’ve now got two start-ups bring­ing the mon­ey mak­ing fan­ta­sy to E‑sports. If you’ve nev­er played fan­ta­sy foot­ball or any oth­er vari­a­tion of this type of online com­pe­ti­tion, it’s not rock­et science.

AlphaDraft and Vul­cun have released simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the new sea­son of Riot Games’ League of Leg­ends Cham­pi­onship Series (LCS), offer­ing fans the chance to win real mon­ey by cre­at­ing fan­ta­sy League of Leg­ends teams com­prised of actu­al pro­fes­sion­al LOL play­ers. The two com­pa­nies offer free and paid play options. Don’t you wor­ry your pret­ty lit­tle heads because Fan­ta­sy sports bet­ting is legal in the Unit­ed States, accord­ing to the Fan­ta­sy Sports Trade Asso­ci­a­tion, they’re con­sid­ered games of skill, and not “gam­bling.” The orga­ni­za­tion explains that fan­ta­sy sports man­agers must take into account a myr­i­ad of sta­tis­tics, facts and game the­o­ry in order to be com­pet­i­tive. Not so much with online pok­er, there­fore its ille­gal status.

E‑sports have sur­prised every­one recent­ly; sta­tis­tics from video game research firm New­zoo, said there were over 89 mil­lion e‑sports “enthu­si­asts” last year watch­ing livestreams of pros play­ing – and even prac­tic­ing – games like League of Leg­ends, Dota 2, Call of Duty and Street Fight­er IV. An addi­tion­al 117 mil­lion “fans” fol­lowed e‑sports at a more casu­al lev­el. This has the poten­tial to get a more engaged audi­ence, but draw atten­tion from the com­plete­ly unini­ti­at­ed as well as grow­ing the fan base.

CEO of AlphaDraft, Todd Peter­son believes this will grow to have the strength of brand­ing that fan­ta­sy sports leagues had for the majors like the NBA, NFL, and MLB. His rea­son­ing is fan­ta­sy sports play­ers con­sume twice as much con­tent as non-fan­ta­sy sports play­ers due to their fan­ta­sy play­ers par­tic­i­pat­ing in games across teams, rather than just root­ing for a favorite home­town team. His com­pa­ny is offer­ing prizes of $500 to $1,000 each week to its play­ers and is cur­rent­ly seek­ing addi­tion­al invest­ments to raise those stakes.

A fan­ta­sy team man­ag­er must know a whole heck of a lot more than sim­ple depth charts and sta­tis­tics to win; they also must to take into account injuries, coach­ing styles, weath­er pat­terns, prospects, and more in order to be a suc­cess­ful. That said, the addic­tive nature of video games com­bined with the lure of real cash is not some­thing for kids. Both e‑sports fan­ta­sy com­pa­nies are tak­ing safe­guards by using third-par­ty age ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vices to ensure only legal fans can compete.

This sea­son could turn out to be the most suc­cess­ful ever, some­thing that would like­ly have hap­pened any­way giv­en the upward swing of e‑sports’ pop­u­lar­i­ty. Vul­cun has already raised 1.4 mil­lion in fund­ing and has recent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in a $12 mil­lion Series A round of cap­i­tal for the com­pa­ny. The com­pa­ny is putting almost all of its mon­ey back into the prize pool, Vul­cun cur­rent­ly has a $4 mil­lion 2015 guar­an­teed prize pool, of which it has paid out more than $750,000 in the past 10 weeks, accord­ing to its website.

Vul­cun takes a 15 per­cent com­mis­sion of wagered funds between groups of fan­ta­sy play­ers. If this con­tin­ues E‑sports will rock the nation. Per­haps you should be con­sid­ered upping your own wages and see if a com­pa­ny like AlphaDraft or Vul­cun could be look­ing for some­one with your skills, check Riot Games while you’re at it.