A ‘slate’ refers to the set of games that make up a daily fantasy sports contest but it’s important to make the distinction between gameweek and slate. Anybody who has ever played in the official Fantasy Premier League fantasy football competition (often referred to as FPL) will be familiar with the concept of gameweek which refers to all Premier League fixtures scheduled within specified dates. Some teams will have an additional fixture scheduled, meaning that it may be advantageous for fantasy managers to choose players from these teams since they will have two chances to score points for their team. This is often referred to as a double gameweek. For daily fantasy football contests a gameweek will typically run from Saturday to Monday in the English Premier League (3 days) covering the full round of games (10 matches), Friday to Monday (4 days) in some European Leagues such as Serie A or Tuesday and Wednesday (2 days) for the Champions League, featuring games scheduled on those days.

However, since there are numerous formats for daily fantasy sports contests the term slate is commonly used to describe the featured fixtures as opposed to game round. To summarise contests may include any of the following:

• All matches from the same league played on the same day
• All matches from the same league spread over 2 to 4 days
• Selected fixtures from different leagues played on the same day
• Specified fixtures only from an individual league played on the same day, often excluding early or late kick-offs
• All games played on specific game week round days only, for example, Saturday and Sunday, but not Monday.

Fantasy Sports commentators or even managers themselves, will often use words in television broadcasts or on social media platforms to describe the severity of the fixtures. Terms such as ‘tough’ slate might be used to indicate that it might be difficult to include too many high valued players due to budget restrictions and so on.