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Jeb Lund, at Rolling Stone:
Perhaps you have heard of DraftKings and FanDuel, the two daily fantasy sports sites that now occupy every bit of digital advertising real estate not currently squatted by Flash ads for FACEBOOK OF SEX or SHOOT THE BENGHAZI TO WIN A FREE iPAD WITH HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAILS. And they’ve spread to TV…
If this alone were the shittiest thing about DraftDuel, dayenu, but of course it’s not, because this is America, where billion-dollar arbitrage contests outfitted with a media wing can always become structurally predatory and awful. On Monday, the New York Times reported that a DraftKings employee won $350,000 using his site’s proprietary information to make more informed plays on FanDuel. A FanDuel employee with access to insider data has also played on DraftKings, and both companies allowed employees to participate in daily fantasy while also working in it. We did it, folks: we found a way to gild that turd.
Daily fantasy would have been fine sucking on the merits. Despite assertions that it’s a game of skill, it sure seems like organized gambling, in the sense that the exact margin between making it entertaining for you and wildly profitable for the house has already been determined. Like any casino game, it sits in the sweet spot between systemic extraction and sporadic dopamine rushes. You’re screwed, because you’re supposed to be – unless you’re one of the skillful, lucky or sainted few to beat the odds, and if you didn’t know you were one of them already, you’re not going to become one…
Also, political content! Since there’s money to be illicitly siphoned, apparently the creation of this form of “daily fantasy” would involve both Republican lawmakers and Roger Goodell, as explained by Diana Moskovitz at Deadspin — “The Daily Fantasy Nightmare Is Here Because The NFL Made It So“:
… If daily fantasy has, up to now, enjoyed a sort of marginal respectability, that’s largely because the NFL has embraced it as the NFL gambling option of choice, all while consistently pointing to the obviously absurd yet Congressionally-approved claim that daily fantasy isn’t gambling, but rather a game of skill. The NFL makes huge money off of daily fantasy, all without contradicting its ridiculous anti-gambling stance. And when it comes to it, the league—like any supplier at the top of the chain—knows to offer the best defense: We can’t help it if there’s so much demand for our product.
This is true enough, but leaves out an important piece of history. Daily fantasy enjoys its present place in the sports landscape because the NFL helped make it that way—directly.
It was the NFL that supported the little-discussed legislation that outlawed gambling companies from accepting payments via the Internet related to illegal bets or wagers (a roundabout way of banning Internet gambling) that also conveniently excluded fantasy sports. It was an NFL lobbyist who briefly joined George W. Bush’s White House, where he specifically worked on the rules governing how a new Internet gambling law would be enforced, solidifying daily fantasy’s bizarre position as a “game of skill.” And it’s the NFL—most of whose teams have agreements with DraftKings or FanDuel—that spends millions lobbying Congress…
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