Howzat’s PSL 2023 Fantasy Push: The Rs 13 Crore Prize Pool That Redefined Cricket Contests in India

The announcement that set the PSL fantasy tone for 2023

On 24 February 2023, a press release issued from New Delhi and carried by Times of India via the PR Newswire and PTI wires confirmed that Howzat, the multi-gaming app owned by Junglee Games, had opened a slate of fantasy cricket contests built around the eighth edition of the Pakistan Super League. The headline number was the prize pool: a combined Rs 13 crore across the contests. The spokesperson quoted on the record was Bharat Bhatia, Vice President of Marketing at Junglee Games, and the line the company chose to lead with was "Sabse Zyada Winners".

For the Indian fantasy market, the announcement mattered less because of the brand and more because of the league it sat behind. PSL 2023 was the first edition played entirely in Pakistan with home crowds back in the stadiums after several years of neutral-venue cricket. For fantasy operators, that combination of a full home circuit, returning crowds, and a compressed window of high-intensity matches was the trigger to put real money behind the property. Howzat’s Rs 13 crore figure was the clearest public marker that the PSL had crossed into the same commercial bracket as the IPL in the minds of Indian contest teams.

What the Rs 13 crore line-up actually covered

The press release framed the contests as a "range" rather than a single product, which is the typical structure Indian platforms use when they want to capture both casual and high-volume fantasy players from the same tournament. In practice that meant multiple entry tiers, free-to-play qualifiers feeding into paid leaderboards, and prize pools attached both to individual fixtures and to the tournament outright. The combined figure of Rs 13 crore was presented as the total value across those contests rather than as a single winner-take-all pool.

For fantasy players, that structure had a practical consequence. A multi-tier contest line-up meant a Rs 1 or Rs 10 entry could still feed into the same leaderboard as a Rs 500 entry on most major Indian platforms in 2023, with payouts scaled by entry tier. Howzat’s 2023 line-up pushed harder on the volume end, but the underlying mechanic was the same one Come Sports uses today: small entries, large fields, and a top-heavy payout that rewards consistent captain-pick logic over a six-week tournament rather than a single hot night.

How Junglee Games positioned Howzat around PSL 2023

Howzat entered PSL 2023 with a user base that the parent company, Junglee Games, was already quoting in public communications as more than 25 million active players. The same communications noted that the app sits on both Android and iOS and that it bundles rummy, poker and carrom alongside fantasy cricket. That bundle mattered for the PSL push because it let the company cross-sell from one skill vertical into another inside a single app session, which is a structural advantage that single-vertical fantasy operators do not have.

The "Sabse Zyada Winners" line that Bhatia used in the announcement was aimed at exactly that conversion problem. Indian fantasy players in 2023 were already sceptical of platforms that promised life-changing prize pools but delivered sparse, winner-light results. A tagline that anchors the brand to the number of paying winners is a deliberate counter to the perception that fantasy contests pay out only at the very top of the leaderboard. Come Sports has run a similar angle with its Rs 1 contest tier, where the volume of small payouts is the explicit selling point rather than a single mega prize.

Why the PSL became a frontline property for Indian fantasy in 2023

The eighth edition of the Pakistan Super League began on 13 February 2023, with all matches staged inside Pakistan and home supporters returning to the stadiums for the first time in several seasons. For Indian fantasy operators that detail was decisive: a tournament played in front of full, partisan home crowds tends to produce more decisive results in the powerplay and middle overs, which translates into cleaner fantasy scoring signals than the diluted sample sizes that neutral-venue editions produced.

That data quality matters because fantasy points systems reward specific events. A boundary off the first ball of the innings scores the same whether the ground is half empty or packed, but the frequency of attacking shots and the willingness of captains to declare early both rise when home conditions are in play. PSL 2023's return to a home circuit therefore rewarded fantasy operators who had built captain-pick logic around aggressive top orders and seam-bowling dominance in the powerplay. The Rs 13 crore prize pool that Howzat put behind the property was a bet that those scoring signals would hold up across the tournament.

What the platform push meant for Indian contest players

For Indian fantasy players, the 2023 PSL season was the first time the tournament felt properly priced on domestic apps. Until that point the PSL had typically been a secondary cricket property on most Indian platforms: smaller contest fields, lower prize pools, and a narrower range of contest formats than the IPL. Howzat’s Rs 13 crore announcement, and the response it drew from competitors in the same window, changed that balance. By the end of PSL 2023, most major Indian fantasy platforms were running PSL contests at prize-pool levels that were competitive with their IPL leaderboards.

That shift had two durable effects. First, it normalised PSL fantasy as a routine contest option rather than a novelty, which is why Come Sports treats PSL scheduling as part of its standard cricket calendar alongside the IPL, the Big Bash League, and the English county season. Second, it put real pressure on platforms to differentiate on contest structure rather than on raw prize size. The Rs 1 entry tier that Come Sports has built around the IPL was, in effect, an answer to the same pressure: a contest line-up that competes on accessibility and the volume of small winners rather than on a single headline number.

The spokesperson, the tagline, and the marketing frame

Bharat Bhatia's quote in the announcement leaned hard on the volume-of-winners angle that the Howzat brand had already chosen as its commercial identity. "Sabse Zyada Winners" was a deliberate positioning line rather than a slogan, and the Rs 13 crore prize pool was the number the company wanted Indian fantasy players to associate with that positioning. Read together, the announcement was less about how much the platform stood to pay out and more about how many distinct users it expected to walk away with a winning ticket.

That framing set the template that several Indian fantasy operators have used since. The shift from a single mega prize to a high count of smaller, distributed payouts is now standard across the segment, and the Rs 1 contest tier that Come Sports runs on the IPL is the most compressed version of the same idea: a low enough entry fee that the contest pool is large enough to support hundreds or thousands of paying winners per match, rather than a handful of headline payouts.

What PSL 2023 changed for the broader Indian contest market

The longer-term legacy of the Howzat PSL 2023 announcement is structural rather than celebratory. By committing Rs 13 crore to a non-IPL cricket property in February 2023, Junglee Games publicly committed to the view that Indian fantasy players wanted year-round contest options rather than a single six-week IPL window. That view has since become the operating assumption across the Indian fantasy market, and it is the reason that today's contest calendar includes dedicated windows for the PSL, the Big Bash, the Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League, and the English county season alongside the IPL.

For Come Sports, the practical takeaway from the February 2023 announcement is that contest pricing and contest volume both matter. A prize pool of Rs 13 crore on a single cricket property was a 2023 marketing moment, but the durable shift was toward platforms that could sustain large contest fields at small entry fees across the calendar. That is the model the Rs 1 contest tier on Come Sports is built around, and it is the same model that the broader Indian fantasy market has moved toward since the Howzat announcement landed.

Reading the announcement three years on

Read in 2026, the February 2023 announcement reads more clearly as a market signal than as a marketing campaign. The Rs 13 crore headline number was the visible surface; the underlying message was that Junglee Games expected PSL fantasy to behave like a primary cricket product rather than a side bet. The competitive response from other Indian platforms in the same window confirmed that read. PSL 2023 was the moment the property crossed into the frontline tier of Indian fantasy cricket, and the contest formats that followed were built around that assumption.

For fantasy players looking back at the PSL 2023 window, the practical lessons are still relevant. Captain picks on PSL fantasy contests in 2023 rewarded aggressive top orders and powerplay wickets, contest volumes were wide enough to support distributed payouts rather than a single mega prize, and platforms that bundled multiple skill verticals into a single app had a structural advantage in cross-selling into the PSL contest window. Those same conditions held through PSL 2024 and PSL 2025, and they remain the operating assumptions that Indian fantasy platforms carry into the next edition of the tournament.