We're about to head into Round 8 of Scorum's private ICC Cricket World Cup fantasy league over at Dream 11. Set up by @Tales, it's been a fun game to get involved with. My only wish is that we could have hosted one right here on the Scorum platform. Perhaps then we'd have had more than 9 people playing along.

Nevertheless, I was excited to sign up for the league and pick my team. I love cricket but it's fair to say that I don't really keep up to date with much of what's going on outside of the England national team. Therefore, it was quite difficult to pick a team to compete because I knew from the start that I'd be mainly choosing well known names that a lot of other players also had in their team.

From my experience of fantasy football leagues over the years, I have learned that the people who go on to do well are generally those who pick slightly obscure players for their team. That's not to say that you have to pick dreadful players, but by choosing talented players that aren't going to be on everyone's team, you can accumulate a lot of points over your competition if they do well.

That leads me on to the main point of this post. Today, I am going to provide fantasy league beginners with some tips that may help to keep them in the running for a while longer. I'd note here that I've learned these along the way so I've missed out big time on some early points that have kept me in 6th place for most of the competition. I am by no means an expert!

#1. Pick Outsiders

As mentioned above, it can be tempting to pick a team full of the world's most popular players. The issue with this is that, while they may accumulate plenty of points, everyone else also has them in their team so you don't really gain an advantage.

By choosing a mixture of well known talent and promising fringe players, you can smash past your competition if your selections do well. The only problem here is that you can also choose some real dud players who will cost you a lot of ground if you're not careful. Pick wisely.

#2. Check Fixtures

Something that hurt me early on was that I didn't check what fixtures were coming up. I'd wrongly assumed that all teams would play games in each round and this was not the case at the start of the tournament.

As such, my team contained players that weren't even going to be taking part in a match. By the time I'd realised, it was too late to make trades and I'd wasted spots in my team with players who would score 0 points. A costly error.

#3. Fitness Updates

Another issue I've had in this competition is my lack of awareness about return dates for injured players. I had Jason Roy in my team because I'd read earlier in the week that he was set to return for the game against Australia.

What I should have done is rechecked this information just before the trade period had ended because he was once again ruled out and I'd wasted yet another spot in my team while others in the league were gaining points.

#4. Use Free Hits

Free hits can make or break your chances of winning your league. You're given 3 free hits per round to assign to games of your choice. These include Star Skipper that boosts your chosen captain's points x3, Super Fours which boosts bonus points for 4s x6, and Bowling Machine which boosts wickets taken by x2.

All of these free hits can provide you with some serious bonus points that can help you to pull away from the competition. I didn't really use them in the early rounds and it cost me quite a lot of points.

#5. Team Planning

Once I'd figured out how to use the free hits I continued to use them ineffectively. I had a lot of English players in my team and had selected one of them as my captain. I then decided to use the Star Skipper free hit for England's next game.

Although this boosted the points accumulated by my captain, I'd not noticed that it would have been more effective to use the Super Fours free hit which would cover many more players. I could have then selected a player of a different team as my captain and doubled down on my points bonus.

By way of example, I corrected this issue in the current round of fixtures. With 6 England players and 3 Australian players in my team, I selected the Super Fours free hit and this provided me with a tasty 70 bonus points I'd have missed out on.

I then selected Bangladesh's Hassan as my captain but stupidly forgot to choose the Star Skipper free hit for his game, missing out on roughly an extra 100 points.

So there you have it. Some tips from a relatively inexperienced player. I have a lot to learn still to catch up with the big boys, but I feel that I'll have a better chance going into any future fantasy leagues now that I've learned the hard way.