The Daily Fantasy Sports Industry’s Trick on Fans
Complete disclosure: I’m a 36-year-old guy who gets bored easily, enjoys I.P.A.s, and likes to dress in sports-related T-shirts, particularly those with worn-out, nostalgic logos that allude to happier times. I had a gambling problem in my early 20s, which I’ve since learned to manage by playing a variety of low-stakes games like Scrabble, pitch and putt golf, and my ETrade stock profile. I spend six to twenty hours a week watching basketball. I make an effort to stay on top of the usual cultural fare, such as documentaries about the South Sudanese conflict, Netflix binge shows, and memes, but whenever I wake up in the early morning hours without any emails to check or news to follow, I turn to SportsCenter, scan the N.B.A. box scores from the previous night to keep track of Porzingis, or read a paper on Johnny Cueto’s peculiar ability to hold runners at first base. It’s not the most exciting thing I could be doing with my time, but what can I do? At its most aimless, my mind is constantly looking up sports news. In other words, I fit the profile of the daily fantasy sports market’s target consumer.
I have lost about $1,900 playing daily fantasy sports on DraftKings and FanDuel since the start of the NFL season (D.F.S.). I perform almost every night. In order to do this, I must choose a team of players from among those who have each been given a monetary value, whether they play in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, or soccer, and fit them all inside a salary cap. These lineups are based on relatively educated guesses, such as: I’ll start Indiana Pacers point guard George Hill tonight since the New Orleans Pelicans have been a defensive disaster this year, especially on the perimeter. Hill’s backcourt partner Monta Ellis is also resting, thus a greater portion of the usage duty should fall to Hill. I’ll occasionally sit down on a park bench and verify that at least some of those things are true, generally when walking the dog. I place wagers ranging from $3 to $100. Both the financial hardship and the rate at which my D.F.S losses are occurring are not alarming. But regardless of the size of the issue, every gambler wants to believe that there is some prospect of success.
I’ll admit that the commercials are what hooked me. In the first 10 months of 2015, DraftKings and FanDuel spent more than $200 million on advertising together. This increase peaked at the beginning of the football season, when a DraftKings commercial appeared on television every few minutes. In addition to the advertisements, many of which featured everyday people like me who had won “a shipload of money,” as described by DraftKings, there were DraftKings lounges in N.F.L. stadiums, FanDuel sidelines in N.B.A. arenas, and daily fantasy advice segments in the sports sections of newspapers as well as on ESPN, which felt like it had been transformed into a nonstop publicity machine for DraftKings during the first few weeks of the N.F. Both businesses had billion-dollar values as of August and advertised weekly competitions with enormous rewards and quick withdrawals.
Initial impressions of D.F.S. were favorable; on Sunday mornings, I would challenge a few of my Californian friends to head-to-head contests for $50 and enter a few $20 entries into the $1 million fantasy football competition. Then, on Sunday, September 27, Ethan Haskell, a worker at DraftKings, unintentionally leaked information that could have given him a competitive advantage. Haskell earned $350,000 in prizes on FanDuel that day. (DraftKings later came to the conclusion that Haskell couldn’t have made money off the information because it was acquired after the deadline for entering his lineup for the competition, according to an internal investigation by a former US attorney.) As a result of Haskell’s unintentional disclosure and following jackpot, various media publications, including The Times, became interested. This sparked a flurry of articles and columns that closely examined how daily fantasy sports are run.
DraftKings and FanDuel have been in a tailspin over the past three months since Haskell’s posting. In October, Nevada was added to the list of states where DraftKings and FanDuel are not available for play, along with Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, and Washington. On November 10, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent cease-and-desist letters to the two businesses before commencing legal action. As a result, a judge ruled that they had to stop taking bets within the state. (The judge’s ruling has now been suspended, and both businesses are still operating in New York. Schneiderman requested last week that a judge compel DraftKings and FanDuel to pay back the money that residents of New York State had lost on the website.) The state of Illinois’ attorney general, Lisa Madigan, stated in a statement on December 23 that daily fantasy sports “certainly constitutes gambling.” (The two businesses contend that D.F.S. is a skill-based game.) The D.F.S. sector is feeling the chill. Prize pools have been rapidly dropping, and D.F.S. has come to be associated with online poker or offshore sports gambling in the eyes of the general public and a large portion of the media, a sector that is neither deserving of protection nor pity.
Since the incident became public, I have visited DFS events, logged countless hours on DraftKings and FanDuel, and spoken with players and representatives from the media. The bro culture that had developed around D.F.S. initially caught my attention because it, from a distance, reminded me of the sweaty, sardonic camaraderie you normally see at high-stakes poker games. The fight against D.F.S. seemed a bit out of hand at the time since, despite the fact that DraftKings and FanDuel seemed like apparent gambling websites, the game itself reminded me of homework. You investigate players. Create a spreadsheet. You enter a team and project details. You see how the team performs in relation to your expectations. You restart the following day. There simply wasn’t the ruinous rush associated with other sorts of gambling, such as sports betting, blackjack, or poker.
Instead, I discovered a different kind of issue: a predatory ecosystem where high-volume gamblers repeatedly take advantage of new players who, after viewing an advertisement, deposit some money on DraftKings and FanDuel and start betting. These players are frequently assisted by computer scripts and optimization software that allow players to submit hundreds or even thousands of lineups at a time. Most of the time, both businesses ignored each other. Additionally, DraftKings and FanDuel implemented policies that, in the end, are more likely to protect the high-volume players than control them after proof of the competitive advantages enjoyed by these high-volume players became too overwhelming for the companies to ignore. Anyhow, a more stringent prohibition of computer programming would have been practically impossible given that, as a FanDuel spokesman informed me, D.F.S. businesses are unable to consistently detect it on their websites.
Each business took advantage of provisions in a federal legislation that gave them access to two sizable, overlapping populations—gamblers and fantasy sports participants. Each business was successful in obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding and sponsorships. This pressure to grow user bases resulted in a flood of advertising this past fall. To establish a trustworthy betting market, years of testing, legislation, and external control are required. But it took just one N.F.L. regular season for DraftKings and FanDuel to become well-known, and they already appear to have lost their way.
The new betting economy is extremely unreliable and dishonest. Gabriel Harber, a well-known D.F.S. podcaster and author who has been involved in the field from its start and goes by the pen name CrazyGabey, was one of the critics I spoke with. He has spoken out about the pervasive exploitation in D.F.S.’s betting industry.
It is false, according to Harber, that these websites exist so that average guys can profit significantly from playing daily fantasy sports. “FanDuel and DraftKings are designed for power players to repeatedly rape and plunder regular players,”
The daily fantasy sports industry emerged from the ashes of online poker, which, like D.F.S., provided simple sign-up procedures, enormous profits, and the glamour of a 9-to-5 job. Congress then approved the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006. (U.I.G.E.A.). Even while it was still allowed to play online poker, the entire business had been pushed to the edge of legality as a result of a number of major online poker sites, most notably Party Poker, closing their American operations. Nobody was particularly shocked when the US attorney’s office effectively banned Internet poker on April 15, 2011, a day known in the gaming industry as Black Friday. Everyone believed that online poker was doomed. Curiously, the measure contained an exception for fantasy sports.
A professional poker player named Chris Fargis posted an explanation of his new company, Instant Fantasy Sports, on his personal blog around a year or two after the U.I.G.E.A. was passed. The plan, according to Fargis, was to “reduce the season-long fantasy sports leagues’ time span. Because of how similar the website’s layout is to an online poker site, many of you who read this blog will recognize it right away.
The next natural query is, “Is this site legal?,” given the situation of online gambling today. Fargis went on. “Happily, I can inform you that the U.I.G.E.A. expressly protects fantasy sports games (the same law that has given online poker so much trouble in the U.S.A.). The United States and Canada both have complete legalization of instant fantasy sports.
These poker roots are closely linked to the D.F.S. industry. Players discuss “tilting” as a result of “variance,” particularly when a “fish” enters a “donkey” lineup that eventually goes bonkers. (In standard American English, this approximately translates to “I’m pretty pissed off that some moron punched in some random lineup and ended up beating me.”) And it’s not only ex-poker players who use this language; when I initially met with Nigel Eccles, the CEO and founder of FanDuel, he called the various D.F.S. game denominations “tables,” much like a casino pit boss might direct you to the $10 blackjack or the $25 baccarat tables. Cal Spears, a former poker player from Tennessee who ran the online forum for poker strategy known as PocketFives, played a part in the founding of Rotogrinders, by far the largest website for D.F.S. discussion, criticism, and material. The director of V.I.P. services at DraftKings, Jonathan Aguiar, was once known online as FatalError. Fargis is now employed by DraftKings as well.
Numerous additional video game entrepreneurs launched their own daily fantasy businesses during the following few years. DraftDay, DraftStreet, and pretty much every other combination of “draft,” “fan,” and “fantasy” existed. The websites didn’t try to hide their association with poker. They weren’t significant enough for law enforcement or authorities to pay them any attention. Many of the participants were professional players who were acquainted with one another through the poker community. Rarely did prize pools go much higher than $10,000. The businesses failed for all the obvious reasons that gambling-related businesses frequently fail.
Then, in March 2009, Northern Irish entrepreneur Nigel Eccles, a wiry, young graduate of the management consulting company McKinsey, launched FanDuel. He had no prior experience with fantasy sports. Eccles, who has a doctorate in statistics, founded a business called Hubdub in Britain that offered prediction markets for breaking news stories. After finishing an article on something like Hillary Clinton’s chances in the New Hampshire primary, readers might then wager on it using virtual money. Eccles asserts that Hubdub’s failure was caused by the fact that it “lacked a business model.”
Eccles, though, saw a fully legal way to earn a ton of money in the booming D.F.S. sector. His investors weren’t quite confident at first. They thought D.F.S. was a specialty item that would only interest die-hard customers. Eccles, however, discovered that the investors were mistaken when the qualifying players gathered in Las Vegas for FanDuel’s first live final in December 2010. Not all of the players who had qualified were eccentric gamblers and quants. They were all common sports aficionados, according to Eccles. “At that time, I realized that this was not a niche market. We can probably convert millions of players if we can convert a few hundred or even a few thousand players. These athletes are identical to the tens of millions of fantasy sports aficionados worldwide.
Eccles frequently discusses the sense of community that FanDuel fosters among its users. What he claims has some basis in reality. D.F.S., like Words with Buddies or any card game, can be a fun, low-cost excuse to speak smack with your friends. I used it that way to connect with individuals who live far away. But overall, Fargis got it right in his blog post introduction: D.F.S. is the misbegotten offspring of online poker, boasting absurd prize pools, rapid-fire play, and—possibly most significantly—the fantasy of a simple existence. The main distinction is that poker is connected to casinos and dark underground games despite its glitzy sleaze. Contrarily, fantasy sports conjures images of dads cheering on their favorite athletes while hanging out with their college mates in basements.
Only the poker websites with the largest prize pools were able to survive while the horde of D.F.S. start-ups clawed their way out of the muck of online poker. A novice player would obviously choose the larger figure if given the option to choose between a site offering a first prize of $500,000 and one offering $100,000. The first $1 million prize was awarded by FanDuel in December 2013, and the company used to offer the highest payouts in the market. In an effort to surpass FanDuel, DraftKings, which debuted in 2012, increased the value of its rewards.
This is how it goes: Suppose you are the owner of D.F.S. Site A, and D.F.S Site B has recently announced a weekly megacontest with a $1 million grand prize. Now you need to figure out how to hold a similar competition, or else all of your consumers will migrate to Site B in search of that seven-figure jackpot. The issue is that you only have 25,000 users and can only charge them $20 for each game (anything higher is prohibitively expensive). And if the first prize is worth $1 million, you’ll need $2 million or perhaps $3 million in the prize pool (remember, you still have to pay second place, third place and beyond). Therefore, you must find a way to multiply the entries by four. Yet how? You’ve already placed your brand on every bus, garbage can, and ESPN screaming-heads program out there, and you’re already paying hefty cost-per-acquisition fees to websites like RotoGrinders, who, according to Harber, charge anywhere between $100 and $200 for person they recommend to your site. To add some flavor to the mix, you’ve also contributed some of your own money (known as “overlay”).
The answer is straightforward: You permit each contender to enter numerous times. Even with this freedom, though, most people will only enter a limited number of times, which will be helpful but probably won’t bring you everything you need. The path to the $1 million first prize, though, becomes much more feasible if you can draw in a few big rollers who are willing to book several hundred or even several thousand entries each. You can continue advertising the $1 million first prize in your commercials as long as you can ensure that those participants continue to submit their thousands of submissions. Any firm has set limits on the amount of entries each player may submit, although more resourceful high rollers have discovered ways to get around these restrictions.
But now you have a much bigger issue: The high roller needs you more than you need him. His entry fees and the roughly 10% service charge he pays on the hundreds of thousands of dollars he wagers on the website are both necessary to fuel your reward pools. High rollers have been known to haggle over rules with the casino in large casinos. When a casino is struggling, especially if a whale from China requests a game of blackjack where the dealer must hit on a soft 17, adjustments may be made to accommodate the whale.
The D.F.S. elite have similar demands, and because there isn’t a strong regulatory body in play, DraftKings and FanDuel have largely been free to set the rules of play, which has turned out to be close to anarchy. High rollers desire the ability to employ third-party computer scripts that will enable them to simultaneously enter hundreds of lineups, which is impossible for the average player to perform. High rollers have access to D.F.S.’s inner circle, where they can text executives and staff at DraftKings and FanDuel on a first-name basis. If other players protest that the high roller has been utilizing methods that undermine competitive balance, he would expect the sites to defend him. This allows them to operate under the guise of plausible deniability.
The D.F.S. high roller is obviously different from the blackjack whale in that the whale is attempting to steal millions from a large casino organization rather than the honeymooners from Fresno who are happily wagering at the $5 tables.
The term “bumhunting” originates from the poker community. It entails searching out a player with little experience and ruthlessly taking advantage of him. Bumhunters are despised because they reduce a game that can be intellectually stimulating and competitive into its most cynical form, discouraging new players from returning. However, poker has defenses against widespread bumhunting built in. For example, novice players often play at lower limits, which makes it more difficult for bumhunters to generate large profits. The ultimate poker fantasy for a bumhunter is to compete against an endless stream of young, inexperienced players in thousands of games every day. He can play numerous tables at once, but he can’t totally automate his bumhunting, thus he falls short of that ambitious aim because he needs to actively bet, raise, or fold his hands.
Sharks, on the other hand, are free to flood the market with thousands of entries each day in the game lobby of DraftKings and FanDuel, luring inexperienced, subpar players into contests where they are significantly outmatched. Since September of last year, when Bloomberg Businessweek released an exposé on the tendencies of high-volume players, the uneven winnings in D.F.S. have been an open secret. The statistics are indicting. The New York State attorney general’s office got data from DraftKings showing that between 2013 and 2014, 89.3 percent of players had a poor return on investment. According to a recent McKinsey analysis, only 1.3% of players received 91 percent of the award money during the first half of the 2015 Major League Baseball season.
These statistics have been used by DraftKings and FanDuel to support their claims that daily fantasy sports (D.F.S.) is a game of skill rather than chance in their ongoing legal disputes: How could a competition where the same players win almost exclusively not be the ultimate test of skill? Both DraftKings and FanDuel have made an effort to show that selecting a lineup and forecasting player performance require more thought and skill than, say, playing a hand of poker. Lawyers said that D.F.S. tournaments are “like chess, Scrabble, or crossword-puzzle tournaments in that they do not evaluate athletic aptitude, but instead mental prowess” in documents filed on December 24 in Illinois, the most recent state to dispute the constitutionality of D.F.S. They said, “A contest’s success is not a matter of luck any more than was the achievement of the architects of the 1985 Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl victory.”
While statistical modeling, general sports knowledge, and due diligence are all necessary skills to succeed in DraftKings and FanDuel, it is also true that bumhunting is practically necessary to generate a net positive return on investment. To avoid the “rake,” another poker term for the roughly 10% service fee DraftKings and FanDuel deduct from each wager, you need to win roughly 53% of your bets. Playing against as many weak opposition as you can is the most effective strategy to reach that number.
I played D.F.S for 17 weeks, and every week, whether I paid $5 or $100, I played against the best players. But I never would have realized that I was being constantly bumhunted by high-volume players unless I looked at win rates and investigated the strengths and weaknesses of my competitors.
For instance, on December 16 I participated in three $20 N.B.A. head-to-head tournaments on DraftKings. Gunz4hire, Dinkpiece, and Nadia4Fashion were my rivals. Afterward, Gunz4hire, who is regarded as one of the best players in the world, was ranked 47th on Rotogrinders’ list of players. Drew Dinkmeyer, a former stock trader whose successes in D.F.S. have been so widely reported that he has his own Wall Street Journal stipple drawing, goes by the moniker Dinkpiece and was ranked 20th on that same list.
I purchased entries into 17 head-to-head competitions on DraftKings for amounts ranging from $1 to $20 on Christmas, the biggest day in the NBA’s regular season. Once more, Dinkpiece and gunz4hire were my opponents, along with a few more experts.
I participated in three additional $20 N.B.A. events the next day. I was fortunate to dodge Dinkpiece and gunz4hire, but I was forced to play Birdwings, who was ranked second on Rotogrinders, in a $20 head-to-head match.
I battled three of the top D.F.S. players in the world over the course of three days.
I went to San Diego in December to attend the FanDuel World Fantasy Football Championships. The event featured a football-throwing obstacle course where Joe Montana and Dan Marino threw footballs at the qualifiers, as well as a very inebriated couple wearing Patriots jerseys (that would be Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, of course) who kept shouting, “We’re [expletive] rich!” I questioned Eccles about the egregious winning disparity described in the McKinsey report as the championships continued. He claimed that baseball was a poor barometer for how the website operated. Due to their enormous numbers and the inherent variation in fantasy football, the money is distributed more fairly because the bulk of D.F.S. newcomers simply join to play football. He acknowledged that it was incredibly challenging for the typical participant to win the Sunday Million, FanDuel’s most anticipated N.F.L. tournament. Instead, he advised new players to sign up for beginner leagues, which are only open to players who have participated in a handful of tournaments, 50/50s, in which a large number of players—possibly thousands—pool their money and award prizes to the players who place in the top half, and head-to-head matches, where the winner takes all.
I followed Eccles’ advice on Sunday, December 27 and signed up for 20 different N.F.L. head-to-head competitions with buy-ins ranging from $2 to $20. This time, I drew David Potts, the 2014 FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Champion, Mtom347, a high-volume player ranked 42 on the Rotogrinders leader board, and TwoSHAE, one of the top 25 daily fantasy football players in the globe.
I spoke over the phone with Justine Sacco, FanDuel’s head of communications, on December 28. She explained to me that I must have misunderstood Eccles and that he was likely only referring to 50-50 match-ups, in which a sizable number of participants enter a pool and roughly the top half wins the bottom half’s money, rather than head-to-head matches, which were admittedly challenging to win. The following day, I paid $20 to enter an NBA 50-50.
The 50-50 received 3,638 submissions in total on that day. These were contributed by players who appeared in several lineups by about two thirds. A sample of those players, along with the number of lineups they appeared in, are as follows:
100 lineups for Maxdalury, generally regarded as the best player in the world.
22 lineups for Birdwings, who is ranked No. 2 on RotoGrinders.
Cory Albertson, a former poker pro, goes by the screen moniker rayofhope, which is recognized as one of the best: 40 lineups.
100 lineups for Kobe4MVP, the online alias of Eytan Jankowitz, one of the top players in the world.
Youdacao, who is ranked No. 6 overall by RotoGrinders, is listed in 100 lineups.
Notorious is a consistent Rotogrinders performer and is ranked as the No. 24 player in their 40 lineups rankings.
Dinkpiece, my adversary from the last two encounters: 5 lineups
If we’re going to discuss skill-based games and the legal protection they merit, we should admit that a lot of D.F.S. talent comes from bumhunting. In a $20 50/50 competition with me, maxdalury and Birdwings are slumming it because of this. The top competitors do it to guarantee their financial success. Similar to poker, turning a sucker into an A.T.M. is the quickest method to make money in D.F.S.
From Columbus, Ohio, Gabe Harber is a vivacious basketball enthusiast with a full beard. He began penning fantasy sports advice essays in 2010, not long after FanDuel was founded. His career developed alongside the D.F.S. sector, which at the time of writing has dozens of popular websites that continuously produce new content. Like so many other D.F.S. specialists, Harber eventually ended up at Rotogrinders, the ESPN of D.F.S., where he established himself as a mainstay by hosting a consistent podcast and a daily livestream show. Nearly every well-known player in the small and close-knit D.F.S. community has a “content site” that offers D.F.S. guidance and analytics, or they contribute to websites like Rotogrinders. DraftKings and FanDuel typically have cost-per-acquisition agreements with those websites. Power players, broadcasters, content suppliers and DraftKings and FanDuel workers all intersect — and for the last five years, Harber has been close to the core of it all.
Over the course of extended phone conversations and letters this fall and winter, Harber stated that he had begun to turn against DraftKings and FanDuel when the firms were indifferent to complaints from the D.F.S. community about the prevalence of scripting. Last March, when maxdalury, a player named Saahil Sud, utilized a script that enabled him to modify most of his 400 lineups in less than an hour, the community took note. Sud was responding to the breaking news that Channing Frye, typically an Orlando Magic reserve forward, would be taking Nikola Vucevic’s place in the starting lineup due to an injury. That evening, Sud finished first, third, fourth, and seventh in a major DraftKings competition, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many people in the D.F.S. community objected to how quickly he made the revisions. If one of the players was using a tool that allowed him to both flood the field with entrants and avoid the time and inconvenience of manually changing his lineups to reflect recent developments, how could they possibly be expected to compete? Even worse, according to DraftKing’s terms of service, these scripts were not supposed to be employed.
After months of consideration, both DraftKings and FanDuel stated in July that they would alter their regulations to allow some scripting, as opposed to outright forbidding it as the D.F.S. community had requested. It was decided to “enhance and improve the experience for a couple of users, who I think were having a really bad usability of the site,” according to DraftKings founder Matt Kalish, who declined to speak for this post. In other words, DraftKings has made the decision to allow users who wanted to customize the website to do so. For its part, FanDuel reiterated its stance on the practice and requested that participants submit their scripts for “approval.” This is a game with varied rules by definition.
Harber described the moment when he lost all patience with DraftKings and FanDuel. In one of two emails she sent to me, Harber said, “People may wonder why I’m coming forward now, and it’s a legitimate question.” “For the past four years, my main focus as a broadcaster in this field has been acting as an ambassador to the community. For a while now, FanDuel and DraftKings have been the subject of very valid concerns from the daily fantasy community. On multiple instances, I have publicly presented straightforward written inquiries to both organizations, and both have utterly disregarded the community’s worries regarding the usage of automated processes, sniping, multi-accounting, and their own terms of service.
Harber noted, “Your typical Joe sees a daily fantasy sports commercial, signs up, plays, and loses. He is unaware that expert power users with access to automated procedures and optimization tools are sniping his games. He is unaware that the large-field competition he is participating in includes hundreds of different lineups created by power players that have all been optimized using third-party software. Actually, D.F.S. is more like the stock market, only with athletes as the commodities rather than goods. Without significant training, there is no chance for success for a novice stock trader.
“I think the major sites are fully aware of these competition challenges, but they continue to do nothing about them because of the significant rake the power users are generating for them,” Harber continued. The power users will gobble up the new players incredibly quickly by utilizing their competitive advantages as long as they can afford to invest advertising money to bring fresh meat to the table. No one is suggesting that stronger players shouldn’t profit from worse players, but it shouldn’t happen so frequently or with deceptive marketing that preys on customer confidence. No one is playing on an even playing field, and no one has an equal opportunity.
The main daily fantasy sites do not want attention focused on these issues of competition because they are concerned that it would raise the probability that they will face unfavorable legal repercussions. Their justification is that the various attorneys general and prosecutors would be considerably more inclined to outright outlaw daily fantasy if they were aware of these competitive difficulties.
Rules have been implemented by DraftKings and FanDuel to address some of these issues. Both websites feature areas for new participants, and FanDuel, at the very least, states that all scripts must be approved by the firm. (DraftKings’ terms of service encourage customers to email them for more information and allow “restricted use of scripts”). However, those controls only shield gamers from the greatest abuses of bumhunting conduct.
I questioned Justine Sacco as to why FanDuel even permitted scripting. She told me: “You want to allow users on the site to make their experience measurably better. Thus, it seems a little Orwellian that major players can’t introduce features to enhance their performance.
Sacco emphasized that the company had previously caught and banned players for using scripts and that any script that was deemed “anticompetitive” would be done so right away, but she would not name any particular individuals. She also calculated that FanDuel had authorized around 30 scripts overall, some of which were helpful tools added voluntarily by websites like Rotogrinders to keep tabs on their players’ victories. Sacco replied, “You do have to take that into account — if someone is playing hundreds of thousands of dollars and comes and says, “I have some ideas that would help me keep doing what I’m doing,” only a bad business would not take that into consideration.” Sacco was asked if part of FanDuel’s decision to allow scripts was based on a desire to prevent players from taking more of their business to DraftKings.
Sacco added that the fact that FanDuel was unable to entirely eradicate scripting was one of the reasons the firm permitted some of it. This supports the claims made by a large portion of the D.F.S. community that DraftKings and FanDuel do not regulate scripts because they are so complex that neither company is able to identify or stop them all. (DraftKings stated that these “assumptions” were “inaccurate” in response to a request for feedback.) When I questioned Justin Park, maxdalury’s business partner at RotoQL, a website that offers third-party tools, such as a scripting software that plugs directly into the DraftKings interface, if he had contacted DraftKings for authorization to change their website, he replied that he didn’t know. He later remembered an email exchange with DraftKings. DraftKings was unable to verify this.
This results in gaming anarchy because no one can predict what the next player will do and because those who should be making judgments to maintain fairness are scared to discipline powerful players for their wrongdoings. No gambling establishment in the United States, even those in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, or on a riverboat on the Mississippi, could operate a game like DraftKings or FanDuel without running afoul of the state gaming commission.
The video game D.F.S. itself is not biased. The majority of the advantages lauded by its devotees — the simplicity of play, the fandom solidarity, and the challenge of unraveling what essentially amounts to a math puzzle — are real. Parsing game footage, closely monitoring the news, and deciphering the countless bits of sports information produced every night do require skill. If a problem gambler at the poker rooms I frequent in New York City were to hire a programmer and flood the D.F.S. market with his lineups, he would almost certainly hemorrhage money.
There is a point where rampant bumhunting transforms a gambling economy into a predatory market. FanDuel reports that 95 percent of its contestants are male. Sports knowledge will always be the primary determining factor for the types of dudes who play games like D.F.S. There is certainly nothing wrong — especially morally wrong — with putting some money on it.
There is a D.F.S. variant that might, in theory, function. All that is necessary is a transparent market where a player can expect to enter a head-to-head, 50-50, or even one of the high stakes tournaments without having to compete against hundreds of lineups created by professional gamblers who have been waiting for him.
My D.F.S. match-ups for the evening would frequently come up during the many conversations I had with Harber. We would invariably start talking about DeMarcus Cousins and his miserable six seasons in the NBA, Gerald Green’s shot volume, or whether we could still rely on Tony Parker to produce fantasy points because of his age. The best members of the D.F.S. community, in my opinion, want to foster these kind of situations since fantasy sports is essentially a means to transform the typical sports disagreements into a game.
At the outset of the N.B.A. season, a handful of friends and I created a friendly league on DraftKings. Every night, we draft teams, watch the points accumulate and make fun of one another for our picks. On the first of each month, we pay one another what we owe. One of these friends develops models for NBA player performance. They assist him in getting away from the sour expectations of his work as a corporate lawyer. I have owed him $350 so far.
Actions against DraftKings and FanDuel were incorrectly mentioned in an earlier version of this article. The order from the judge instructing the businesses to stop taking bets was what was appealed, not the order from the New York attorney general.