FAQ for daily fantasy sports
Daily fantasy sports, commonly referred to as DFS, are a relatively recent innovation in both the worlds of fantasy sports and online gambling. However, they have already shown to be quite well-liked. Although they are played all over the world, this is particularly true in the United States.
Due to their popularity, daily fantasy sports are frequently questioned by players. Our guide to daily fantasy sports, a very helpful resource on the topic, tries to provide the best possible answers to all of these queries. But the focus of this page is on answering the queries that are submitted most frequently.
Answers to the Daily Fantasy Sports FAQ
Which daily fantasy sports are there?
Daily fantasy sports competitions share many essential similarities with classic fantasy sports. They entail selecting actual players from a draft to assemble “fantasy teams,” just like the conventional competitions. Then points are awarded based on how well those players perform in actual matches.
Suitable Reading
We recommend reading our essay on the fundamentals of fantasy sports if you have no prior knowledge of daily or conventional fantasy sports. This provides a helpful overview of the process and the issues involved.
There are a few, including one very significant one, distinctions between daily fantasy sports and conventional fantasy sports. Daily competitions are much speedier than traditional leagues, which take place over the course of several months as the respective sport’s season progresses.
Daily competitions allow you to join a league, create a squad, and learn your results in 24 hours. You could have to wait up to four days in the case of football, where games are spread out over multiple days, but even then, it’s still much less time than it would take to complete a traditional season-long league.
Another distinction is that when you pick, some of your opponents’ players may be the same as your own. In fact, their rosters might be identical. Drafts must occur rapidly due to the nature of this particular fantasy sports format. To remove players from the draft pool when they are selected is therefore unfeasible. The majority of people don’t want to spend a lot of time preparing their roster for a DFS battle.
Daily fantasy sports are they legal?
The dubious legality of their pastime has been one of the difficulties that many poker players and other online gamblers have faced over the last ten years. For citizens of the US, this is particularly valid. Therefore, before participating, it only makes sense to inquire about legality.
The good news is that fantasy sports are particularly protected from the provisions of The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), the primary federal statute controlling online gambling. Since an estimated 37 million fantasy football players are registered to vote, Congress didn’t want to alienate them. This created a huge opening for this brand-new, more focused kind of fantasy sports. In most other countries throughout the world, it is also legal.
The stance that organizations like PayPal and Visa have adopted regarding these transactions is the most compelling proof of the security and legality of daily fantasy sports. Despite the fact that PayPal is typically hostile to any type of gambling-related transaction, they have no trouble at all processing payments to and from daily fantasy sports providers. You’re rare to hear of anyone having an issue using a credit card to pay their fantasy sports account, even though major credit cards, like Visa and MasterCard, have historically been a little ambiguous regarding online gambling transactions.
What types of DFS competitions are available?
The two main categories of daily fantasy sports competitions are cash games and tournaments.
Cash games are low variance competitions where, assuming both you and your opponent are typical players, you may expect to win money 50% of the time. Tournaments with a 50/50 split and head-to-head competitions are two examples of cash games.
You and your opponent are the only players in a small league when you go head-to-head. Each of you putting $20 on the line is a standard entry fee/prize payout structure for a head-to-head competition. The victor receives $36 while the loser receives nothing. The $4 that is missing represents the cut that the website receives in return for running the competition.
Similar competitions have more participants, such as 50/50 ones. Players who finished in the top 50% of the field received payouts, while those who finished in the bottom 50% were penalized. Even though you’re playing in a league with other players, you might risk $20 in order to earn $36 in this game.
On the other hand, a tournament features many players and a prize fund that is restricted to the top 10% or 20% of competitors.
Prize pools are frequently guaranteed in tournaments. For instance, you might participate in a competition where the entrance fee is $20 but the first-place reward is $2,000, the second-place prize is $1,000, and there are several lower prizes as you travel down the leaderboard of scores.
Additional Information
The fundamentals of the primary DFS contest categories have been covered here, but you might wish to learn more. In that case, we advise reading our article on the various categories of daily fantasy competitions. This provides a lot more information.
A salary cap entails what?
The majority of fantasy sports leagues for the entire season have no salary cap. One player is selected at a time, and once selected, that player is not available to the other managers. This restriction is not present in daily fantasy sports, but a salary cap is added to make the games more difficult.
An analogous in-game budget is called a salary cap, and it is used to “purchase” the players on your roster. The pay of players are determined by their past achievements and anticipated future achievements. The precise calculations differ a little bit from site to site, but the pay for certain players—as a proportion of the salary cap in use—tend to be comparable.
You could be given a wage cap of $50,000 to use while selecting your fantasy football team. You will have an advantage over competitors who select players who are poor values compared to their salaries by selecting players who are good values.
Where do I begin?
It’s simple to start. Open an account on the daily fantasy sports website of your choice after making that decision. This entails completing a registration form with the standard data, including your name, address, phone number, and email address. Additionally, you’ll need to add funds to your account. Most websites allow you to make deposits using PayPal, Visa, or MasterCard. Other options for deposits are available in some regions.
Super Tip
The majority of daily fantasy sports sites offer positive user experiences, but there are few that stand out as being especially exceptional. These are the ones that we advise applying. Please review our list of the best fantasy sports sites before making your selection.
You’ll typically get a signup bonus after creating an account and depositing funds into it. You can use this extra cash to enter more competitions. These welcome gifts serve as a persuasion tactic for prospective players to test the hobby at a specific website. The bonus sums are disbursed when you take part in competitions.
The user-friendly lobbies of the major websites make it simple to filter whatever sports and types of competitions you’re interested in. These competitions can also be sorted according to how much they cost to enter. When you enter a contest, you are directed to a page where you can select the members of your team. This article offers lists of players in each position along with the salary they each cost. Everything from this point is usually fairly intuitive.
What happens in the event of a tie?
On most sites, if there’s a tie between numerous players, they normally share the prize money equally. This doesn’t result in a push situation as it does in a blackjack game, though, because of the commission. Here’s an example.
Example:
You sign up for a head-to-head contest for $10. The prize is $18. Your opponent winds up with the same score you have. The prize pool of $18 is split, which means you each get $9 back. Having spent $10 to enter, you actually lost a dollar.
In a larger tournament, you might encounter a situation where a tie is still profitable. Here’s an example of how this might happen.
Example:
You enter a larger tournament with an entry fee of $20. First place is worth $2000 to the winner. You tie with three other players for first place. You each get $500, which is a significant amount of profit on a $20 buy-in.
How do referral bonuses work?
Most daily fantasy sports sites encourage their players to refer new players to their site. As an incentive for these referrals, the sites share a percentage of the revenue generated by these referred players. These incentives vary by site, but here’s how a typical referral bonus might work.
Example:
You refer your best friend to a site. This site offers 20% of the rake generated as a referral bonus to the referrer. Your friend signs up and plays in a contest for $10. 10% of that $10 is kept by the site as a commission. That’s a dollar. The site pays you 20 cents of that dollar.
It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but when you get players participating in dozens of contests every day or week, it can add up quickly. If your referral plays in larger buy-in contests, the site’s commission and your referral bonus increase accordingly.
How do the VIP programs work?
Most daily fantasy sports websites offer frequent player points to players for participating in contests. The amounts awarded for various activities on the site vary by site, but they all work in a similar manner. You can cash your frequent player points in for stuff in the site’s frequent player store. Usually you’ll use those points to buy merchandise like apparel.
Sites usually include shipping and sales tax in the frequent player points cost of each item. So when you send off for your baseball cap or whatever, you don’t wind up paying some unexpected amount to cover shipping or sales tax.
Some sites also allow you to cash these points in for entries to freerolls. A freeroll is a tournament that a site holds which has cash prizes, but you don’t have to pay to enter the contest. In the case of a freeroll entry resulting from frequent player points, it’s just an incentive to keep you playing on the site.
VIP programs are just a fun way to get rewarded for doing what you’d be doing anyway – participating in your daily fantasy sports hobby. Serious players might try to take into account the dollar value of these VIP programs when deciding how profitable a certain site might be, but recreational players don’t worry about it too much.