Every hobby has its jargon, and fantasy cricket is no exception. New players open an app and meet a wall of unfamiliar words: captain, vice-captain, differential, grand league, credits, selection percentage. Guides assume you know them, contest pages assume you know them, and nobody stops to explain them. This glossary fixes that. It covers the team-building terms, the contest terms and the match terms you will actually meet, in plain words, so you can stop guessing and start playing with understanding.

Your captain is the player whose points are doubled, so he is the most important pick on your team. Your vice-captain earns 1.5 times his points, and if your captain does not play, the vice-captain takes over the double-points role. Pick your captain for certainty first: a player who will definitely bat high or bowl his full overs. A differential is a low-ownership player, someone picked by only a small percentage of users, who can shoot you up the rankings if he performs, because few of your rivals have him.

Credit points are your budget. Every player costs a number of credits based on his form and reputation, and your whole team must fit within 100 credits. Selection percentage tells you how many other players picked the same man, which is useful for spotting differentials and for avoiding the crowd. Points per match is a player's average fantasy score over recent games, and it is one of the best single numbers for comparing two players in the same role. Finally, the playing eleven is the confirmed list of eleven players actually taking the field, announced at the toss, and any player you picked who is not in it scores zero.

A grand league is a huge contest with thousands or millions of entries and a large prize pool at the top. It is exciting but hard to win, and it is where most beginners lose their money. A small league has far fewer entries, often 10 to 100 players, and is a much fairer fight for a new player. A head-to-head contest is the smallest of all: you against one other team, winner takes the prize. A mega contest is the biggest grand league of the day, usually for a major match, with the largest advertised prize.

Entry fee is what you pay to join a contest, and the prize pool is the total amount shared among the winners. Some apps also run practice contests, which are free and pay no prizes, and are the best place to learn. A private contest is one you create yourself and share with friends by code, so you compete only against people you know. The deadline is the moment team selection locks, usually at the scheduled start of the match, after which you cannot change your team.

The toss is the coin flip before the match that decides who bats or bowls first, and it changes fantasy picks, because teams chasing often pick differently from teams setting a target. The powerplay is the first six overs of a T20 innings, when fielding restrictions favour the batters. Death overs are the final overs of an innings, when batters attack and bowlers who specialise in that phase take wickets. A strike rate measures how fast a batter scores, calculated as runs per 100 balls, while economy rate measures how many runs a bowler concedes per over.

An all-rounder is a player who contributes with both bat and ball, and is usually the best value pick in fantasy cricket. A finisher is a batter who comes in late and scores quickly, which can be valuable but is risky, because he may face very few balls. A differential, mentioned above, is worth repeating, because it is the term that decides grand leagues. And a clean sheet has nothing to do with fantasy cricket at all, which is exactly the kind of confusion this glossary is here to prevent.

Learn these terms once and every fantasy guide becomes readable. Captain and vice-captain decide your ceiling, credits decide your budget, and grand league versus small league decides your odds. Keep this glossary open during your first ten matches.