Billion Dollar Fantasy by Albert Chen;

Author:Albert Chen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Cory found himself virtually alone among the top sharks as someone who would speak critically of the companies. For starters, he thought it odd that there was no communication between the sites and the players—that the obvious expectation in the industry was that everyone needed to hush up and support the sites. All the players, it seemed, had lined up against Eric Schneiderman and the New York Times; everyone was attacking the Times for what the industry viewed as a hit piece on the daily fantasy sports industry instead of looking at the facts that it was reporting. Cory thought it odd that players were so eager to defend the sites without even knowing the total scope of what was going on in these companies. It felt to him almost like a smoke-filled-room type of conspiracy between players and sites, where it was in players’ best interests to protect the sites at all costs and, as a result, no other players were asking tough, probing questions.

After he wrote the op-ed, he got an email from one of the executives at a daily fantasy site, asking whether it was appropriate to be bringing up certain issues. The executive’s complaint was that Cory had mentioned pros taking on newer players—Cory had pointed out that that was a problem that needed to be addressed. “For starters,” he wrote, “no professional winning six figures at daily fantasy should be flooding $1 and $2 one-on-one contests against novices. Accordingly, Ray and I have opted out of playing daily fantasy contests that are below a $25 entry fee and with five or fewer participants on DraftKings and FanDuel. We have encouraged other high-stakes players to do the same. A fairer playing field should be the cornerstone of the industry. At minimum, the sites need to empower independent auditing and oversight of their operations—unless they want US congressmen to do it for them.”

Beyond the Ethan Haskell issue, which Cory agreed seemed flimsy at best, there were some truly troubling bits of information buried deeper in the stories. Cory had reached out to a casual daily fantasy player who was quoted in a New York Times story as having been challenged in head-to-head contests on FanDuel by a DraftKings executive. The player had believed that the executive was challenging him because he felt he wasn’t a very good player and thus would be easy to repeatedly win money from. Now, fresh off the Haskell headlines, the player also believed that the executive could have had access to inside information. Cory began to believe that this employee was looking up the losers on DraftKings and taking the email addresses from their account and challenging those email addresses to play them in games on FanDuel. He had no further info, but it was entirely possible to him that employees were using insider info regarding the relative ability of daily fantasy ­users and using that data to try to exploit them on DraftKings or FanDuel—attempting to prey on unsuspecting players while playing on the rival site.

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