You should all be familiar with fantasy football, and even if you’re not, you most definitely have heard the names Draftkings and FanDuel, the two largest online conglomerates for fantasy football. Draftkings is valued at around $1 billion and FanDuel is of comparable size. Over the past few years, the popularity and profits of large fantasy football leagues have shot up. These trends pose a marked change in the way fantasy football is played: contestants in smaller fantasy leagues have to wait out the football season to see how they do and what monetary rewards they may or may not receive. What sites such as Draftkings is for the expediting of this process. Draftkings offers daily cash pools for, say, picking a winning draft team based only on stats from a single match. It also allows a much larger body of players to play together, which generates thousands of dollars in cash prizes. Some weekly contests can pay up to a million dollars in prize money.
Companies such as Draftkings capitalize on the appeal of being able to collect such a large cash prize while taking away from the pursuit of the game. These companies also skim a hefty 10 percent off the top of the gambling pools as their payment. The recent controversy over this practice concerns whether or not all this should be considered gambling.
Online Fantasy Football is declared federally legal by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The act generally outlaws gambling that deals with online bank transfers, but makes an allowance for fantasy sports, deeming them “a game of skill and not chance.” As it stands, regular-old fantasy football, whether online or not, is not defined as gambling. What the Attorney Generals of Nevada and New York have very recently determined, however, is that fantasy football websites such as FanDuel and Draftkings do constitute online gambling and are illegal in their respective states. This may come in part from the recent scandal in which a former Draftkings employee won $350,000 on FanDuel, which has been blamed on possession of insider knowledge or perhaps because of a class action suit against the two companies for their apparent violation of multiple state laws. Either way, these rulings have seemingly set a state precedent of establishing fantasy online sports as gambling.
Now FanDuel and Draftkings have fired back, suing New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, but the question remains. There is no real way to measure the amount of chance and skill involved in fantasy football, or really any game. Can one really determine whether counting cards and the luck of the draw in blackjack is analogous to the statistical calculations and field play of a fantasy football team? I’m not sure where I would draw the line, but it will certainly be interesting to watch as the story unfolds. Sports gambling has been entrenched in America even before Arnold Rothstein rigged the World Series in 1919, and it will continue to stay that way.