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.