Daily Fantasy Football vs the Bookie

Fantasy Sports have become a major force in the world. Companies like DraftCzars and FanThunderdome are changing the face of Fantasy Sports with what they call “Daily Fantasy Football” games. How is betting $3-$500 on the outcome of your match up different from joining one of those online gambling sites that let you bet on football games?

To answer this, we have to go back to 2006 when Congress “did something” and passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. This did two things;
a.) outlawed online gambling by placing a simple means test of what is and isn’t gambling
b.) marked the first time Congress passed a law where the Acronym was not something stupid and generic in hopes to help aid people to vote for it.
The law stated that you can bet on “Games of Skill” and not on “Games of Chance” and defined games of skill as following these simple guidelines

(I) Is not dependent solely on the outcome of any single sporting event or nonparticipants singular individual performance in any single sporting event;

(II)All prizes and awards are established and made known before the start of the contest;

(III) Has an outcome that reflects the relative knowledge of the participants, or their skill at physical reaction or physical manipulation (but not chance), and, in the case of a fantasy or simulation sports game, has an outcome that is determined predominantly by accumulated statistical results of sporting events, including any nonparticipants individual performances in such sports events.

See this law was designed to allow your office pool or your college buddies 12 league 10 yr long keeper league to keep on running. Kind of like how laws allow you to hold a Texas Hold’em tournament in your parlor or car hold as long as the “house” does not pull a fee.

Fantasy Football is based on how well a person plays and not if that player wins or loses the game. You can still benefit from Adrian Peterson rushing for 2,000 yards and 35 touchdowns in a season while the Vikings go 0-16.

Fun Fact: The NFL spent most of its time distancing itself from Fantasy Football. I remember back in 1994 having an AOL league where we just emailed into each other who we wanted, and some guy kept score.

(TANGENT: Does anyone remember back in the day of AOL/Yahoo of having “Fantasy Leagues” where you were the GM of a team got to build your own team and the commissioner would either make the teams in Madden or a coded program to simulate games? Or am I the only one who did that?)

Then in 2005 Fantasy Sports became a billion dollar industry and the NFL decided it could make money off of it and so they did. The NFL, like the MLB before them, started charging licensing fees to fantasy sites. All of the sudden people were clamoring for more and more information creating magazines to talk about it where the NFL could either charge a fee to or print on their own. TV shows started popping up about it creating ad revenue that increased the licensing fees. Viewership in all games started increasing and ad revenue from the games increased. Then BOOM UIGEA started to threaten the NFL cash grab, and they responded by actually lobbying hard against the inclusion of fantasy sports while lobbying for stricter regulation of on-line betting on games.

Now why don’t Fantasy Sports violate PASPA (or Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act)? Good question. PASPA makes all betting on sporting events illegal with a few exceptions. Here is the kicker because of the language in PASPA, UIGEA isn’t sanctioning Fantasy Football it is only defining it as a game of skill. Therefore, you can bet …. er I mean play it safely.

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Martin

I can’t quite imagine how, but this deserves the FJM treatment

https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/dumb-football-with-mike-tunison-week-1

theeWeeBabySeamus

What is this “Daily Fantasy Sports” you speak of?
Those guys really should do some advertising and get the word out.

Doktor Zymm

So my just now hatched idea of a high stakes Go website is totally legit?

Moose -The End Is Well Nigh

Seems legit.

blaxabbath

Well I, for one, am just glad they found something to fill all that airspace that became available when the NFL decided to drop the No More campaign.

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

You just gave me an idea for a parody of those ads.

Basically just use the old footage of players silently “thinking about how to start the conversation”.

Then at the end instead of “domestic violence is hard to talk about…” change the text to “having a hard time deciding who to start in your DFS league?”

Close out with “The NFL. We totally still care about domestic violence.”

Marc Trestmans Windowless Van

Those fights were like every one against the Patriots. “We are against this. Betting is wrong!” And then he sits in the Fanduel box game one

Horatio Cornblower

I feel like I learned something here. Where am I?

packman_jon

Probably Canada

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

“I’m jealous. With the guys I coach it always seems like it’s in one ear, out the other.”

– Romeo Crennel

Moose -The End Is Well Nigh

Are you, indeed, saying that this is a cool story, bro?

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

Obviously not Ohio State.

trollsoharduniversity

Somehow horse racing has remained legal to bet on forever. They have the best lobbyists.

Marc Trestmans Windowless Van

Probably this guy. Huge fan of horses. Not a fan of the human lawn jockeys that ride them though

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g246/sey115/tumblr_mv0aonff3t1slgwnjo1_400_zpsb11a3b35.gif

Bloody Lethal

Considering the government is firmly entrenched in the industry and collects a good amount of revenue from it, I can see why.

Horatio Cornblower

Also because without betting no one would pay any attention to jai alai and the industry would die.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what happened to jai alai with betting.

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

Isn’t that similar to how horse racing pays out?

Brick Meathook

I was in one of those leagues where one guy kept score with rocks and dried beans. At the end of the season the winner was awarded pelts and extra women, and also got to kill the loser and eat all of his oxen.

Lothar of the Hill People

When I first started commenting on Uproxxxxxx, I tried to stay in-character as Lothar of the Hill People, and thus most of my posts sounded something like this one.

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

Does it vex you that someone has made off with your schitck?

Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

I remember doing one my freshman year of college (my team was the Oxtoby-Nachtrieb Longshots, named after my chemistry textbook) where the guy did stats by hand and posted on his whiteboard.

Marc Trestmans Windowless Van

I was in one of those leagues at one point that was doing everything on paper and with one guy doing it online through something, in person draft, etc. I remember I picked way too many Bears players. It was the year the Bears went to the Super Bowl, still picking Bears players is always stupid when you are a fan.

/ Drafted Forte this year

::edit:: Came back a half hour later to add that comma, it was bugging me.

...

First rule of fantasy: Your team fandom will fuck you over.

Bloody Lethal

This is so nuts. I was talking about this today, after hearing 10,000 draft kings commercials last night alone. It is ridiculous that the NFL gets to play both sides of the coin on this. For the record, I am 100% for legalized gambling for several reasons. But I’d rather bet on the game than watch Draft Kings take half the pool money for a 2 million dollar payout.

Bloody Lethal

Draftduelfankings is like buying a goddamn lottery ticket. There is no skill involved but having the ability to click a few buttons on your mouse. Odds are atrocious for hitting a big payout on there. They just rake in the fees. People buying $5-$10 tickets. Yet the government is classifying this as a skill, while they would have you think blackjack is a game of chance. Pretty much: they mix up the words skill and chance in almost every instance.

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/537e0722e4b0c3338dfc5521/t/53dd4a9ae4b01c361c9810b4/1407011496490/question-31842991.jpeg

Bloody Lethal

Did it compare sports betting in there at all?

sunrisesunrise

Drafting a team of all players from one team is still not betting on the outcome of the games those players play. Just the statistics that they accrue. I think that would be the distinction there.

Bloody Lethal

Right but then why are prop bets illegal? I can bet on a halftime score or who wins the coin flip legally by the same logic.

Edit: the answer of course being who stands to win. Right now the NFL is int he comfortable position of being anti-sports gambling and pretty much directly taking in revenue from sports gambling. They enjoy the viewership, ad dollars, etc. and still get to act high and mighty about the dangers of gambling so that fringe fans will continue to watch instead of pick up their torches. It’s cut from the same cloth as “player safety”. So they don’t have to take a stance one way or another (they hate that) and we get subjected to a macro version of an office pool run by a crook who takes half the pool money.

sunrisesunrise

Goes back to being classified as a “Game of Chance” or “Game of Skill” and I’d wager that Prop Bets are definitely Games of Chance.

packman_jon

I’m just posting to see how narrow the comments can get

Big Black Richard

I’m just posting so I won’t get fined.