After a long wait, the biggest meet up of Bangladesh Fantasy Community was held Sunday, at ERC, Engineers Institute of Bangladesh, Dhaka.
Arifin Satej, the administrator of PlayFantasy365, organized the whole program while Ehsan Tuhin, one of the founding members of Bangladesh Fantasy Community, was alongside him as a main organizer.
Many other popular faces of Bangladesh Sports Community participated in this meet up.
Indigo and Mad Chef were the partners of the program.
Two fan favorite footballers of Bangladesh national team, Tariq Kazi and Topu Barman were the special guests.
Tariq stated that he's an Arsenal fan and plays fantasy regularly while Topu admitted that he didn’t know much about this subject, but expressed his desire to know more.
The whole floor was well decorated with various fantasy instruments.
Current players like Mohamed Salah and Son Heung-min were displayed in 3D images and old legends like Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Sergio Aguero were drawn in rickshaw paint to give a vintage look with a flavor of Bangladeshi culture.
Arifin, the chairperson of the program gave the opening speech where he talked about his long journey with fantasy and this community.
He also expressed his dreams in this section and future plans - to make this community bigger and stronger and spread it to every door of the country.
He announced that they'll launch their own app which will cover the upcoming football and cricket World Cup.
And from next year, they'll host BPL football and cricket fantasy to give our local players a limelight and increase this community.
Their mission is to reach two lakhs users in the upcoming two years.
After his statement, many other popular faces gave their speeches.
Some legendary fantasy players like Belal Ahmed, Ehsan and Shayekh Zubayer talked about fantasy.
Basically, fantasy football or cricket is an online game in which players collect points based on how real-life players perform each week or match.
Simply, you choose a virtual team of players from a specific league or tournament, and if their real-life counterparts do well, you get points.
Fantasy started around three decades ago in England, then got huge popularity and started spreading from the UK to whole of Europe and later all across the world.
Currently it has a market of $160bn.
In Bangladesh, Ehsan, Zahid Hasan, Arifin and a few others were key figures of the initial fantasy journey before it started getting popularity.
They then created PlayFantasy365, which is still working as the focal point of all fantasy games in Bangladesh.
It has two sub-sectors, "Fantasy Football Players of Bangladesh - FFPB" for football and "Fantasy Cricket Players of Bangladesh - FCPB" for cricket.
These groups are still the biggest Fantasy Community in Bangladesh.
PlayFantasy365 represents the whole Bangladeshi Fantasy community.
Fantasy games in Bangladesh started getting huge popularity since around 2012 before this community got bigger and bigger.
Currently around 43,000 users regularly discuss and technically analyze fantasy games in those two groups.
Around 1.3 lakh users are engaged with PlayFantasy365 official page.