Connecticut Fantasy Sports Daily
Despite not being technically permitted in the state, daily fantasy sports (DFS) have long been a favorite in Connecticut.
Despite this, Connecticut has never passed any legislation that expressly forbids fantasy sports. So many DFS providers still invite residents of the state to take part in their tournaments.
Legislation allowing fantasy sports was approved by MPs in 2017. The law was even included in that year’s budget plan, which was signed by Dannel Malloy, the state’s governor at the time. George Jepsen, the state’s attorney general at the time, had earlier stated his belief that revising the state’s gaming agreements with the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes would be necessary in order to approve DFS.
Since those compacts were never changed, DFS continued to operate in the state’s legal “gray area.”
But four years later, both legislators and the tribes collaborated to make Connecticut the first state to legalize sports betting. The procedure included officially legalizing fantasy sports. This time, lawmakers altered tribal-state compacts in addition to passing measures. In fact, the Manshantucket Pequot, which runs Foxwoods Resort Casino, collaborated with DFS juggernaut and sports betting provider DraftKings in anticipation of both DFS and sports betting becoming legal in the state.
Here is a summary of the state of daily fantasy sports in Connecticut, including a list of sites and games as well as information on the DFS industry’s past and future in the state.
Which daily fantasy sports are there?
In America, fantasy sports began as fan-driven, year-long competitions decades ago.
For instance, in Major League Baseball, participants would “select” players from various teams to create their own “fantasy” team immediately before the season began. The statistical performances of the players on each team would then be computed throughout the course of the season to produce a unique score for each fantasy squad. The fantasy league’s championship would go to the squad that finished the season with the greatest score.
The principle behind daily fantasy sports is similar. However, they compete every day rather than over the course of a lengthy season. Before a day’s worth of games are scheduled, participants assemble their starting lineups, which include players from several clubs. The competition is over when the final game of the day concludes, and the team with the highest score wins.
Fantasy competitions centered on MLB, NBA, and NHL games are actually “daily” in the sense that they often include every game that day. The NFL has contests that occasionally encompass every game in a given week (which spans multiple days), however they can also be daily (for example, “Sunday only”).
Season-long fantasy sports are still played, although DFS has grown significantly in popularity. Even when the entry fee is low, some DFS contests on popular websites can attract tens of thousands or even millions of participants, resulting in massive prize pools.
Although many DFS players participate in tournaments on smaller websites like Yahoo Fantasy Sports and FantasyDraft, DraftKings and FanDuel currently hold the majority of the DFS market.
Has daily fantasy sports been made legal in Connecticut?
Daily fantasy sports are not officially authorized in Connecticut. DFS isn’t technically illegal either, either. Because of this, DFS services welcome competitors from Connecticut in the same way they do from other jurisdictions where fantasy sports are neither officially authorized nor illegal.
A bipartisan budget package that includes provisions to legalize and regulate DFS in the state was passed by the then-Gov. Dannel Malloy in October 2017. These rules mandated operator registration fees, levied revenue taxes, and gave the Commissioner of Consumer Protection supervisory authority.
Additionally, the DFS-related clauses supported a statement made by the then-Attorney General George Jepsen that any legislation allowing fantasy sports would need to take into account the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot Tribal-State Gaming Compacts. The bill’s provisions exempted DFS from the definition of “gambling” in order to meet this demand. Other requirements were added by the legislation to prevent breaking the existing agreements.
Despite this, the state and its tribes still had to modify their agreements to reflect the new situation that permitted fantasy sports. But in reality, that never happened. Because of this, none of the laws to authorize and control DFS in Connecticut were ever implemented.
Legislators pushed for the legalization of sports betting in CT in 2021, and DFS was once more incorporated into the freshly proposed measures. This time, the tribal compacts were changed to allow both the tribes to provide DFS on their grounds and non-tribal operators to apply for licenses to provide DFS across the state, with regulations for fantasy sports to be released in the future.
Some worried that DFS firms like DraftKings, FanDuel, and others would have to leave Connecticut in the interim because the full passage and implementation of the new sports betting law would at least take the remainder of the year.
However, these worries are unwarranted, according to Connecticut Representative Maria Horn, who chairs the House Public Safety and Security Committee that deals with gaming-related problems. In the interim months, when DFS would “stay in hazy legal ground,” Horn argued, the sites would continue to provide services to Connecticut customers.
Who in Connecticut provides daily fantasy sports?
As previously said, Connecticut does not regulate fantasy sports. This indicates that no sites have operating licenses from state authorities.
Nevertheless, a number of DFS platforms, including DraftKings, FanDuel, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, and FantasyDraft, do allow participants from Connecticut.
Connecticut residents are invited to participate in the DFS tournaments hosted by industry titans DraftKings and FanDuel. Together, those two websites currently account for more than 90% of daily fantasy sports wagering. Given how heavily they both advertise and together control the market, many people do in fact just think of DraftKings and FanDuel when they think of fantasy sports.
But among Connecticut’s other DFS choices, Yahoo Fantasy Sports and FantasyDraft are both well-known.
In general, most fantasy sites follow the example of DraftKings and FanDuel for “gray area” states like Connecticut that have neither legalized nor disallowed DFS. In other words, additional websites will offer contests in the state if those two main websites do.
What distinguishes daily fantasy sports from sports betting?
Daily fantasy sports (DFS) now feel a lot more like traditional sports betting than they did when they were season-long fantasy competitions.
After all, you may choose your DFS lineup and place your wager immediately before the games begin, and you’ll find out whether you won or lost at the end of the evening. That experience is comparable to placing a single-game wager and finding out immediately after the game’s conclusion whether you won or lost.
However, there are important distinctions between DFS and traditional sports betting.
Traditional sports bets involve placing bets on a team to win either outright or by a certain point spread. As a result, whether the bet wins or loses depends directly on how the game turns out. For instance, the result of the game decides whether your bet is a winner or a loser if you place a money line betting on the New England Patriots to defeat the New York Jets.
Who wins and loses games doesn’t matter with DFS. Instead, how well you do is determined by the statistical performance of the players you’ve selected to fill your lineups.
Consider that you chose Nelson Agholor and Damien Harris from the Pats for your DFS squad, and New England defeats the Jets 35-3. That result is irrelevant. Instead, Harris and Agholor’s combined yardage and/or touchdown totals during the contest determine the winner.
DFS and proposition bets on specific players are comparable to each other in terms of traditional sports wagering. Prop bets, on the other hand, typically include betting on the performance of a single player, as opposed to a group of players as in DFS.
It is against the daily fantasy sports rules for competitors to only use players from one team in their lineup. In other words, you can’t create a DFS lineup made up solely of New England Patriots. To assemble your lineup, you must choose players from at least two different clubs. The word “fantasy” derives from the fact that the lineup you build is fictitious or created.
The key distinction between DFS and conventional sports betting is this: In traditional sports betting, bets are placed on actual teams, while in daily fantasy sports, bets are placed on fictional teams.
Connecticut hosts fantasy sports competitions
There are numerous varieties of DFS competitions, but they all need creating lineups with players from various teams. Additionally, all fantasy competitions, regardless of the kind, award points based on the statistical performance of the team’s individual players.
The majority of the time, players are given a value (expressed in US dollars) based on how well they are anticipated to perform. The DFS competitor is then given a “salary cap” and is required to put together a roster without exceeding it. Due to the salary cap, you are forced to be choosy and pair a few stars with lesser-known players rather than packing your team with the best players.
All team sports as well as a number of individual sports have DFS competitions. Entry costs can be as little as $0.25 for freerolls and as much as $10,000 for tournaments. Depending on the competition, different rules, structures, and awards apply.
DFS competitions that are well-liked in Connecticut and elsewhere include:
Secured Prize Pools (GPPs)
Contests with guaranteed prize pools provide a minimum reward pool regardless of the number of entries. The top 10–20% of competitors typically split the prize money. The payouts are frequently set up similarly to a poker tournament, with smaller “min-cashes” (typically no more than twice the entry fee) awarded early on and larger prizes awarded to the winners later on.
The awards in GPPs can occasionally be quite substantial, with a first-place prize reaching hundreds of times the buy-in, much like in poker tournaments.
Casino games
Cash games in DFS do not provide progressive rewards like GPPs do. Instead, the top finishers share a single prize. Additionally, cash games only function if they draw the necessary number of entries (e.g., a 50-entry cash game won’t function if there are only 35 entries), whereas GPPs are assured to run regardless of the number of participants.
Popular DFS cash game types include:
• 50/50 raffles: Top 50% gain.
• Head-to-Head: “Winner-take-all” competitions between two participants where those who win double what they contributed to the reward pool.
Showdown
Showdown competitions concentrate on a single game as opposed to a full schedule. In order to compete, competitors must still select players from various teams, in this situation, that means choosing at least one player from each of the two competing teams. Cash games or GPPs can be used to play showdowns.
Tiers
Tier-based competitions depart from the model of a salary cap. Instead, a small group of players are divided into tiers (such as “Tier 1,” “Tier 2,” etc.), and the contestants choose one player from each tier to make up their team. Tier-based competitions can also be played as cash games or GPPs.
There are several different DFS contest forms and sorts. Some have multiple entries, while others just have one. There are many larger competitions with satellites and qualifiers where participants can win admission into the bigger competitions. There are “steps” competitions that function similarly to satellites in that participants can advance through gradually larger competitions by winning each level. Even “in-game” DFS competitions have similarities to live betting.
Connecticut’s daily fantasy sports history
FanDuel debuted in 2009, and DraftKings followed in 2012. Despite the absence of any clear legislation approving fantasy sports in Connecticut, both sites welcomed players from the beginning. Later, other fantasy sports websites did the same.
Congressmen’s attention was drawn to a scam involving DFS site personnel participating in (and winning) competitions in October 2015. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, one of them, pleaded with the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to look into the websites for any potential fraud.
Although these concerns altered the way DFS sites operated, they did not stop them from continuing to do so in Connecticut and other areas where fantasy sports were legal.
The Connecticut House and Senate both sponsored legislation in 2016 that would specifically legalize fantasy sports there. But neither of these bills reached the voting stage. DFS legislation was revived in 2017. This time, it was approved by both chambers and incorporated into the state budget bill for that year, which Governor Dannel Malloy signed.
However, the state’s two federally recognized tribes, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan, also have to consent to allow fantasy sports to become legal. That required changing the gaming compacts between tribe and state governments. Since these revisions were never made, fantasy sports were never formally made lawful in the state.
A US Supreme Court decision in May 2018 removed the federal ban on states authorizing and regulating sports betting. By 2021, Connecticut had successfully renegotiated its compacts with the tribes and had passed legislation making it lawful. The state had started looking into the issue. The new law would also legalize fantasy sports, enabling tribes and other operators to apply for licenses to provide fantasy sports.