If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve played Fantasy MMA with Kountermove. It’s basically “a fantasy sport game, members (you) act as owners to build a team of individual players that competes against other fantasy members teams based on the statistics generated by the real individual athlete in a game/fight” per their website. Kountermove President Christie Sullivan caught up with MMAOddsBreaker on an Extra edition of The Parting Shot Podcast this week and discussed a variety of topics. Her involvement in MMA “I did see UFC 1 on a replay and all that, but I started watching MMA in 2005. I’m not as OG as some people but that’s a pretty long time. It’s about a year or two before I started training jiu-jitsu. When BJ Penn was in his prime and he was killing everyone. My jiu-jitsu teachers had all trained with BJ, because he was a blue belt under Ralph Gracie, his whole jiu-jitsu linage is the same as ours was. So I started paying attention to him and ever since then I haven’t missed a PPV. I just love the sport, I didn’t grow up training any sports. I got into it in college; I was 20 years old at the time. I had no background in it, went into it strictly pure jiu-jitsu school. My life totally changed from that moment, I’ve been training daily since. A couple years ago I was competing every single of month, Top 10 in the world in my division. Now I compete often, but not back in the day when my priority was to be a competitor.” Joining Kountermove “I heard Kountermove was starting a few years ago and I was one of the first people to join the crew. I started out training with [Brian Knapp] over the years and [Aaron Ard] we all know each other from training. At the time I was considering pursuing my law degree. I was ultimately trying to work professionally in MMA. Brian had mentioned to me Kountermove was really starting to kick off. They had done the full hard launch in 2012. It was just really starting to get going. I said jokingly ‘If I don’t go to law school and I don’t end up working for the UFC, maybe I’ll be employee number one.’ Then that actually happened two months later. I was just sitting there and I just thought I could go to law school and be successful [at it]. But working professionally in MMA is what I want to do, it’s ultimately it’s the end goal. There is no better way to do it then these people that I already have a lot of respect for on and off the mat, so let’s do it. That was a couple of years ago; I started just doing a lot of the marketing and the company. Whether it was the emails or social media, all the marketing end.” Challenges Kountermove has faced “There’s not a lot of overlap with MMA fans and the other stick and ball sports. MMA fans they take a lot of pride that this is their sport. What we’re seeing is when we started this fantasy site, we really had to be the ones to educate MMA fans on what fantasy is. Whereas the average person might know what American football is, and then hear about fantasy football just because it’s so many people following that sport and it’s so much a part of football these days. One of the difficulties is we know MMA and know this community, but teaching them how to play daily fantasy. What does that mean? What does it mean to pick five fighters [as opposed to] the outcome of a bout.” Becoming the President of Kountermove “Over time I just put more and more hats on. Then with the promotion [to President], Brian and Aaron [said basically] you had been coming in as the face of the company for a while, you really are doing a lot of facets of the brand so here you go, go for it. So now it’s even busier. The daily fantasy space has really taken off and MMA is still growing itself, so it’s a very fun time right now. You have two very fast growing industries and I couldn’t be more excited about what Kountermove saw what was happening in terms of gaming and wagering off sports. We finally come to a place where we have to explain a little less and people know that we’re doing now and it’s been fun.” How does Kountermove work? “When you play fantasy [at Kountermove.com], you’re going to pick a team of five picks. When you look at your team of five picks, you’re not going to pick somebody solely on who you think is going to win. Perfect example, love the guy, he’s a local guy Jake Shields. He has a very strong MMA record but he’s not exactly someone [who has] a high statistical output. If you look at Fight Metric, they’re tallying every strike, every takedown. When you pick your team of five, you want someone less like Jake Shields and more like Ronda Rousey. Someone who [ends] fight early and a finish a fight. You want fighters that are going to put a lot points on the board from their dominant offensive performance. What we do is get a near live API feed from Fight Metric, it tally’s all the offensive positions from the fighters. Then you get a score based off at that. So what you see at the end of an event, if you have a team of five fighters than won their fights early and they put a lot of points on the board, that’s a winning team. It’s looking at the performance of a team of fighters as opposed to a win or loss aspect of a fight.” Fighter prices “We set the prices. Just like Vegas would have an expert bookie and they closely correlate the odds, because the fact of the matter is there is a favorite and an underdog. The only difference is there is going to be some slight variance; we need to see there isn’t a lot of ties. What second layer skill is involved in fantasy sports is not only do you want to pick an athlete who has a dominant performance but you also want to build a team where you can configure it to pick all the favourites. Almost every card an underdog wins, it’s being able to have the foresight to identify that. Perfect example Jeremy Stephens [at UFC 189] was such an underdog pick, but he ended up doing extremely well. The more you know the sport, the more you can identify someone who is not only an underdog that’s going to be cheap to put on your team, but also someone that you have a really strong feeling is going to win.” Best way to start playing Kountermove “We have “Freerolls”; it’s an old Poker Term. Basically Kountermove will put up the prize pool for [a game]. We always have these at the top on pay per view events, it’s free to play but it’s a cash prize pool. But if you start to get really good, you can hop into some of the large tournaments that are tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the event. You can sign up for free; you can play for free, every event. We have tons of people who play for free games every event, they do it religiously. Then we have people who do only cash ones every time. You can literally sign up and just hop into a game right away and then go from there. As you get confident and how the scoring works. If you really want to learn Tommy Toe Hold makes some pretty funny videos. He does them for every pay per view and he really breaks down which fighters are good and which ones not to put on your team. Types of Kountermove games and future plans “We do five different sports, eight different organizations right now. We do UFC, Bellator, WSOF, Invicta FC, Glory Kickboxing, Boxing, WWE (which is free games only, it’s just for the play factor). We also do pro jiu-jitsu as well. We’re checking out Titan FC, I think that’s awesome going to UFC Fight Pass. That’s the best for us is if something is consistent. Then we’re doing the Eddie Bravo Invitational. We started with MMA and continued to build it out to as many MMA organizations as we can. Playing fantasy as a hardcore fan is just that much more fun. You’re like getting in the Fight Metric stats live. It gets your awareness on another level and makes you study them on a deeper level.” Kountermove App “I do have good news our App is actually being tested and its’ going to be out next month. I keep trying to put teasers up on Twitter. We do lots of tests on it so it will be really good when it comes out.” Draft Kings getting involved in MMA this year “We’re really honored that they liked our game so much and that they’re coming into MMA. Doing this with us, it’s only been good for our business. What you see is you have people on our site checking out Draft Kings, and then we’ve had people playing Draft Kings on other sports. Once they introduced MMA, they learn about MMA and they’ll inherently go out and lookout the best product which is us. Definitely in fantasy people play on more than one site. We’re happy to have them offering games, it’s only better. Especially because of things we’re good at I think started to show even more when they come in. Now they have some comparison, people have been playing with us like our product even more. I think it’s a good thing; it’s definitely not hurt us and only helped.” You can follow Chrisite on Twitter @ChristieSully and @Kountermove. You can start playing Kountermove by going to Kountermove.com. You can listen to the full audio version of this interview below on an Extra edition of The Parting Shot Podcast (1 minute in)
