In case you are dragging on this Monday, like half of the population, you might want to check out this inspirational sports story. You have probably seen it before, but it cannot hurt to check it out again.

I still get goosebumps from it.

With the hype building in Australia at Tiger Woods playing the Australian Masters, now is your chance to get playing with the PGA Australia’s fantasy game.

While Tiger is guaranteed $3 million for just showing up to play the Australian Masters, you get the opportunity to compete for some lesser, but awesome prizes. Winning this free fantasy golf will net you a brand new set of Srixon clubs and golf bag. To play, select a roster of twelve golfers within a $6 million salary cap. The fantasy golf game is built around Australia’s summer of golf of November and December, which makes for a quick fantasy season.

If you have an itch for fantasy golf and cannot wait for the Sony Open, the traditional opening of the golf and fantasy golf season, you may want to check out this new fantasy golf game from the PGA. Entries are due Wednesday afternoon (Thursday morning if you are in Australia).

Here’s one for the “That’s really cool!” column: Washington Nationals interim manager Jim Riggleman met with the winners of the MASN (the network that airs the Nationals) fantasy baseball league. MASN’s Fantasy Baseball Winners lunched and talked shop with Riggleman.

I love prizes like these because they are intriguing and are much more valuable to the winners than the prize costs the sponsor. For someone like MASN, the Nationals manager is much more accessible. But, any site can do something like this. Perhaps its lunch with some of your top fantasy experts, or you happen to know someone of a minor celebrity. Tie them into your promotions. Anything that can make your site different, the better off you will be.

An interesting note about this story, the winners had to explain to Riggleman how fantasy baseball worked. Riggleman even mentioned St. Louis Cardinals executive Jeff Luhnow as someone who uses fantasy baseball analysis to help his team out.

The idea of a fantasy sportsbook is not a new idea as several sites such as Pickspal (and some epic failures such as NBX) are built around a similar premise. FanGamb is taking a fresh look at this concept and is differentiating itself by focusing on private leagues where the players know each other. Rather than competing with similar fantasy sportsbook concepts, FanGamb is positioning itself as an alternative form of fantasy football.

I was fortunate enough to alpha test FanGamb over the summer and play its game. Playing FanGamb follows the KISS Principle very well by making making selections painless with a four-step process, which is always a plus. From a game play perspective (screenshot below), FanGamb gives players countless strategy possibilities such as making lots of smaller bets or fewer larger bets. Most importantly, you are playing against people you know, so the competitiveness and conversation within the league increases, both pluses.

One of the things that I like about FanGamb is nothing that most customers would not notice. FanGamb is actually the first product launch from Three Screen Games (TSG). The founders of TSG have strong marketing and technical backgrounds, which I often find lacking in new fantasy companies. Co-founder Justin Goldman built and launched YNOT Advertising, while other co-founder Robert Shedd is a former IBM project manager. As long as FanGamb is able to build a strong and loyal customer base (I realize this is a big if), it has the tools and may have finally found a winning combination for fantasy sportsbooks.

Good luck to Justin and Robert as they build FanGamb.

It is a well-known fact that fantasy football players skew towards a male demographic that is between the ages of 30 and 50. If you are a motor oil company, this is a demographic that you need to target. Starting in September, Castrol sponsored the Sporting News’ Fantasy Football site, and got some great results. Traffic to Castrol’s website soared and even surpassed long-time rival Shell. As compete.com has pointed out with some great data, this increase in traffic for Castrol is no fantasy (head over there if you want to some pretty graphics).

Castrol’s sponsorship went well beyond just banner ads. The entire site was skinned with Castrol logos and its colors. Plus, it cleverly branded some of buttons and site features. The result was that the Sporting News was the number one referring site to Castrol (even more than Google, how many sites can say that?). For Castrol, clearly this was a very successful campaign.

It is great to see an example of advertising working in the fantasy sports industry. But, something to note is that Castrol’s presence was a persistent one. Frequent visitors associated the brand with the fantasy football game and eventually needed to check out Castrol’s site. If you just run banner ads, you do not get that kind of response. If you fully integrate with a site, you can still get some great results.

By the way, the site now appears to be sponsored by Prestone anti-freeze, another product that appeals to that mostly male demographic.

Kudos to Sporting News and Castrol for developing a relationship that worked for the both them.

I love reading data, which partly why I have always loved fantasy sports. Within the industry, getting data on international participation is always the hardest. When I read about fantasy gaining in India, it mentioned the growth of fantasy English Premier League (EPL) in India, I could not help but to get excited. Currently, over 38,000 Indians are playing in the official fantasy EPL site, while another 10,000 are playing in ESPN Fantasy EPL League, and another 6,000 are playing the Fantasy Champions League.

50,000 fantasy players is not exactly enough to say that fantasy sports has gone mainstream, but it is a very significant start. In a country with over 1.2B people and a burgeoning middle class, there is definitely a possibility that India may be the next big fantasy market.

The key to figuring out which fantasy sports will do well in international markets is figuring out which real sports do well in those markets. It is highly unlikely that football, baseball, and basketball will be the big fantasy sports. More than likely, soccer, cricket, and rugby will be the dominant fantasy sports overseas.

I told you previously about how FanDuel Launched Fast Head-To-Head Fantasy Football and Fantasy Baseball and how it scored with a twitter fantasy football game. Now, FanDuel expands its line of fast fantasy sports to include fantasy hockey and fantasy basketball.

In both of these new fantasy games, fantasy players build a roster of players within a predetermined salary cap. The fantasy team with the most points wins. FanDuel’s games are pay-to-play and offer fantasy fans the chance to draft a new team everyday and win prizes. One of the beauties of FanDuel’s game is that it only requires two people per league, so FanDuel can almost always ensure that its players play in a league, and FanDuel makes its profit off of that league. If FanDuel is able to get enough teams playing on regular basis, then it will mint money.

FanDuel is one of a number of sites that is focusing on the instant fantasy games market. There is a lot of potential for these fantasy games to grow as fantasy players tire of their under-performing teams during the season and do not want to wait until next season for a shot at drafting a winner.