TheSix takes aim at Latin America with its DFS football platform

By Paul Nicholson

March 31 – The Daily Fantasy Sports market is growing rapidly with one of its newer entrants saying that there is a big demand in the south and central American markets, not just in the already recognised European and north American regions.

TheSix is a DFS platform operator which in little under a year has already reached more than 1 million – mainly European based – player registrations.

Driven by football games played predominantly on the big European leagues, TheSix does not require a deposit to begin, prides itself on the easiness to set up your team and updates fans with real time statistics. TheSix offers games with real cash payouts to winners on a daily basis.

Having grown to date around games played on England’s Premier League, the Champions League, Spain’s La Liga and Germany’s Bundesliga, TheSix will soon be adding Mexico’s Liga MX and a number South American leagues.  The games can be played in local languages including English, Spanish and Portuguese currently, with other languages soon to be added.

Hungarian owned, and with its headquarters in Budapest, TheSix is blazing a trail into the South American markets following a “fast growth in our Brazilian players. We reached 250,000 players really quickly”, said one of the co-founders Tamas Varga. Offering the games in the Portuguese language was crucial to acceptance and TheSix is now establishing a local company to participate deeper in the local market.

TheSix adopts a ‘freemium’ model where players can sign up and play for free and, if their IP address is recognised as being in a market where they can play cash games for cash prizes, then offering the opportunity to play for money.

The company’s interest in South America is also in part due to what it believes is a prohibitive marketing cost of entry into more established gaming markets like the UK which require marketing costs of up to $2 million to start and even then there is still no guarantee of standing out.

Currently games can be played for cash in the US with dollar payouts only. This will change in coming weeks as foreign exchange requirements are worked out..

TheSix is a member of the US-based Fantasy Sports trade association and Vargas says that it is their opinon that regulation is good for the sector.

“Regulation is better than non-regulation. It is better for the player because they can have more trust in the company they are playing with. It gives protection to the player,” says Vargas.

But he is quick to dismiss any questions over fixing of games. “Fixing a real match is much easier than fixing a fantasy sports game,” he says.

Looking ahead Vargas sees challenges but plenty of opportunity for their brand of fantasy sports. But first he says that they will be changing the name TheSix in certain markets.

“We hired a big New York agency to come up with a good name for the US and out of more than 100 names considered this was felt to be the best. Most of the terms in English football don’t work in the US…All good things happen inside the 6-yard box where there is the best chance to score, so we have TheSix. Everyone knows what this means in the US,” said Vargas.

But the company does own thefantasyfootball.com domain name which it will roll out in other markets. http://playthesix.com/

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